When it comes to business, your brand is your lifeblood. It represents everything you make, everything do and everything you stand for. A well thought out, relevant and brilliantly designed brand can mean the difference between standing out for all the right reasons or blending into the sea of others trying to gain the attention of your target audience.
But with so much competition out there and many of them already having established and professionally designed brands, how can you make your brand stand out from the rest?
In this article we take a look at how you can build a successful animated brand identity. Although far from new, animation is an underutilized tool for creating a fun, relevant and edgy brand that is going to stand out from the rest.
House Rules
As with all elements of your brand, to maintain consistency, you must lay out exactly how all elements of the brand fit together and fit into the outside world. For example many brands will not let their logos be boxed out or be placed within a certain distance of other logos or object. This ensures that every time the logo is used it is consistently placed.
Similar to this, when animating your brand you should consider how exactly those animations take place within the rest of your marketing. For example, where should animation be used, what colours should be used, what should it represent, is it funny or serious or informative.
Deciding and communicating these elements to your animation studio will go some way to ensuring that your brand remains consistent, wherever it is used by anyone in your business. By cooperating with an animation studio, building on your brand with animation is both possible and potentially lucrative form of brand development.
Get with the Times
Your logo is the crowning jewel in you brand. But long gone are the days of your logo only being visible on your website and office wall. Now your logo represents your brand across multiple social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Many of these platforms including options for video such as in stream videos on Facebook, stories and in stream on Instagram and a full platform dedicated to videos with YouTube. One way to enhance your brand identity on these platforms is to use animation to develop your logo in a moving and engaging short animation that can be included at the beginning and/or end of the video.
Tell Stories
In the modern market, brands with a story to tell find it much easier to connect with their customers by sharing their values and touching on issues important to them, rather than simply selling them a product that may or may not solve a requirement.
This gives brands a good opportunity to use animation as a way to tell their brand story. This works particularly well with animated adverts that take the watcher through a journey that ends in them realizing the importance of a specific brand value. This has been used to great results in recent years with Christmas adverts from the big supermarkets and chain stores in the UK.
Personality Test
Creating a cool, fun and exciting brand can be easy when you make and sell something really cool. But what about the majority of business, where although you may me massively passionate, may not be the easiest thing to make sound exciting?
Creating an animated video is relatively fast can add an additional element of personality to your brand. By nature animation is humorous and can be used to make people smile and notice you, even when you actually have something fairly ordinary to say. Take for instance the relatively ‘boring’ example of banking or car insurance. Both have recently called upon the fun nature of animation to make their services a lot funnier/interesting.
Lend an Animated Hand
A huge part of branding is customer service. Although it is commonly accepted that the best method for customer service is always going to be human to human, an effective tool for quickly answering common questions is a FAQ page. Although these often have a search function, creating an animated assistant is a useful and engaging tool to have on your website. Animated promotional video or explainer video are only some of the options.
As we can see there are many ways we can use animation to build and enhance a brand. Whether that is animating a logo to add depth or an animated video to tell your brand’s story. One of the most important elements of using animation for branding is that is also allows you to remain completely consistently without the potential of human error.