Visual Communication
7 Visual Techniques To Boost Your Brand Image Authenticity
By Laura Box - 5 min read
Authentic visuals that avoid traditional advertising and marketing clichés can help your brand captivate and connect with audiences.
There are countless visual techniques you can employ to show how your brand positively and authentically impacts on the world. Join us as we run through our top seven authenticity tips to boost your brand’s image.
1. Keep It Real
Rather than hiring actors or models for campaigns, consumers are likely to feel associated with a product if they see real people who reflect themselves using it. One famous example is the Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty”, which was judged as “groundbreaking, brave, bold and authentic” by Advertising Age’s Top ad campaigns of the 21st century. More recently, dating app Bumble’s #FindThemOnBumble campaign shone the spotlight on inspiring users of the app. Real people in your visuals are a sure-fire way to communicate your brand’s authenticity and attract like-minded customers to your brand.
2. Elevate Your Employees
When companies put their staff first, everyone benefits. Positive staff commendations can help recruitment and staff retention, whilst seeing a positive workplace atmosphere can help grow customer’s confidence in your product. Domino’s “Handmade by Domino’s” campaign successfully elevated their staff by displaying their employee’s skills and passions outside the workplace and breaking down the stereotypes that all their employees are apathetic teens with no other interests. Putting employees centre stage in your visuals can help drive a powerful and authentic story with great emotional impact, even without a big budget.
3. Create Interactive Campaigns
If done right, developing interactive campaigns is a fun way to create the most engaging visuals, without it feeling like explicit advertising. The Photoshop Live street retouching prank demonstrates the potential of what can be achieved quickly when you harness the power of Photoshop, while also keeping audiences engaged and entertained. Win-win! Fantastic Delites “Delite-o-matic” campaign also successfully engaged audiences with its shock-factor, by showing just how far people will go to try their snacks and consequently proving how delicious they are.
4. Send Your Products To Real People
YouTube and Instagram influencers have managed to gain extensive popularity because of their honesty. Influencers and YouTubers will generally give honest reviews of products, meaning it’s one of the most powerful forms of advertising for products that receive positive evaluations. Unbox Therapy is one of YouTube’s most successful technology reviewers, and this channel – which racks up millions of views on most videos within days – can make or break a product. If your product receives a positive review from an influencer, consumers are more likely to trust it.
5. Reflect Your Audience
Whether your audience’s demographics vary in gender, race or age, you need to make sure your visuals represent this. Dollar Shave Club – the razor company that went viral from its “Our Blades Are F###ing Great” campaign – hit the nail on the head with diversity in their fun “Get Ready” campaign, featuring an eclectic cast and a heart-warming story. It’s pretty likely that there’s a variety of people using your product, so no-one is going to buy it (quite literally) if you use just one type of person in your campaigns. Diversity in your visuals will often create the most relatable – and most genuine – content for your audience.
6. Contribute to Society
The necessity for brands and corporations to have a sense of social responsibility is more important to communicate authenticity in 2019 than ever before. From environmental ethics to labour practices, your brand’s social influence can significantly influence its image in the eyes of consumers. By visibly enacting change, as brands like Johnson & Johnson have been doing for decades, you’ll build audience’s trust in your brand.
7. Demonstrate Genuine Benefits
Creating visuals that show how your consumers have benefited from your product, authentically, can go a long way to increasing positive perception of your brand. Take Nescafe’s instant connections campaign. Nescafe dispensed free coffees in distinctive red cups to people around Berlin. The strangers in the campaign would laugh and smile when they saw anyone with the same cup, some starting conversations with each other. As a viewer, you can’t help but smile while you watch the small connections happen and this positive reaction is bound to link Nescafe to happiness in countless viewers’ minds – a successfully authentic visual strategy.
Summary
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