Enacting expression: Bringing the brand experience to life

This article is part 3 of a 3-part series on Brand Expression. View the full series here. 

A brand’s expression goes far beyond what can be seen and heard: it is the very embodiment of its personality, values, and purpose. It cultivates the way the organization communicates to the world exactly what it has to offer, shaping every customer interaction, memory, and overall perception. It’s the bridge that connects your brand’s identity with the hearts and minds of your customers, creating a powerful emotional bond that transcends mere recognition.

However, the brand guidelines, regardless of how compelling and cohesive they may be, mean nothing if they are not executed precisely and deliberately across all channels and interactions. This process involves a strategic, customer-centric approach that aligns the brand’s personality with its expression assets, creates a cohesive visual ecosystem, and ensures that every touchpoint reinforces the brand’s core identity and values.

Your brand expression in action

Follow these five best practices to establish and implement your brand expression:

1. Align brand personality with expression

All internal and external branding needs to align with your organization’s personality, values, and culture. Choose visual elements that resonate with your brand traits. For instance, a playful brand might opt for vibrant colors and whimsical fonts, while a more formal brand might lean towards subdued colors and classic fonts. Utilize imagery and graphics that mirror your brand’s unique narrative, and infuse your brand expression with the emotions and sentiments you want to evoke in your audience.

For example, when New Orleans-based health system LCMC Health asked Monigle to help unify its family of hospitals and employees under a new brand experience, we tapped into their extraordinary culture of people willing to go above and beyond to form the new brand expression. We introduced a bright, warm color palette alongside bold and confident imagery of people’s faces to convey the distinctive energy of the team, and their warmth and commitment to their customers. LCMC’s refreshed brand expression captures the unique, upbeat energy of their New Orleans locale without relying on cliches like Bourbon Street or Mardi Gras.

2. Work your verbal and visual identities in tandem

While your design components create your visual narrative, your verbal identity adds the context to complete the story. Leverage your verbal identity to support your brand expression, and vice versa. When the way you look and the way you speak match, your brand will come across as more authentic, reliable, and prepared.

Brand personality values, such as trustworthiness and transparency, are important, but not necessarily unique. They can also mean different things for different companies. For example, being dependable means something very different for a financial institution than it would for a SaaS company.

Companies may share the same tonalities, but they should always be expressed through the lens of the brand experience, which encompasses both visual and verbal elements. For a financial institution, trustworthiness may be conveyed verbally and visually through assets showcasing how the brand handles and protects customers’ dollars, while for a SaaS company trustworthiness may be communicated through promises of a more connected future.

3. Unite brand experience under a visual ecosystem

While it’s true that visual consistency will help consumers identify your brand, it won’t be enough to influence how they experience it. To create a unified brand experience, you must delve into your customer journey. Identify the problems your customers are trying to solve by engaging with your brand, and pinpoint the touchpoints they interact with along the way. By understanding your customers’ needs and expectations at each stage of their journey, you can strategically design visual cues that guide them towards a solution while reinforcing your brand’s unique value proposition.

Take the time to really dig into your customer journey. What problems are they trying to solve by engaging with your brand, and which touchpoints (and when), do they engage with to do so? For example, Warby Parker customers are likely trying to find a fashionable and affordable solution for a health necessity. You can see how the visual cues on their website, social media, and storefront are designed to help their customers navigate style and price, all while communicating the brand’s commitment to convenience, social responsibility, and not wasting their customers’ time.

4. Codify and communicate your expression

Unless you’re a solopreneur, you likely have a plethora of employees from different disciplines, teams, and departments who are responsible for representing your brand to your customers day in and day out.

Codify your brand expression in your guidelines to create frameworks and parameters that allow your team to disseminate your brand in the work that they do. Without consistent representation, your brand experience is rendered effectively useless. That said, elements of your brand guidelines should be adapted and evolved regularly by skilled brand practitioners to ensure that brand expression continues to connect on a human level. With the right employee commitment and advocacy, your expression will solidify in the hearts and minds of your audience.

5. Ensure flexibility

Evolution is baked into the very nature of brands and business. Employee turnover, the emergence of new trends, changing customer preferences, and mergers and acquisitions require flexibility within the brand so the organization can adapt to a constantly evolving landscape.

To infuse flexibility into your visual ID, create variations of your assets that can be used in different sizes and orientations, ensuring it remains recognizable wherever it’s displayed. Additionally, develop a set of design guidelines that outline how your visual elements can be adjusted while still staying true to the brand’s essence. By crafting a balanced blend of consistency and adaptability, your brand will effectively resonate with diverse audiences and adapt to ever-changing market landscapes.

From identification to experience

Your brand’s experience is important when establishing trust and loyalty among both internal and external stakeholders. Today, your expression can no longer pass as a collection of touchpoints. Instead, it needs to both identify your brand and move your audience to action through experiences only you can provide.

Your ecosystem of visual cues, representative of your brand values and personality, needs to communicate to your customer that you understand the problem they came to you to solve, while simultaneously conveying the confidence that you have the tools and resources to solve it.

A brand expression should not be viewed as a piecemeal task but instead considered a critical piece of a whole; where every element supports and bolsters the others. It’s one of the best tools you have to proudly display who you are as a brand to the world while creating meaningful moments of connection with your customers.

Ready to unleash the full potential of your brand expression? Let’s connect and explore how we can build a visual and verbal ecosystem that brings your brand to life and creates meaningful, memorable experiences for your customers.