Branding Trends Businesses Need To Follow in 2024

Businesses often the young ones, often mistaken their logos as the only branding requirement. But branding is a lot more than what it seems to be on the forefront. An attention-grabbing website and a sleek logo won’t be enough to get recognition your business deserves.

Don’t get me wrong such elements are important but they are not going to build your emotional bond or a meaningful relationship with the customers. Numerous market studies have shown that customers choose brands that denote trust, quality and performance.

Branding expert Melanie Spring in an interview with Entrepreneur says the concept of branding has changed over the last two decades.

She informs, “It used to be more identity focused. It was about building a logo and all the pieces around it. It didn’t really talk about values or how the company worked. Now we talk about branding in terms of how it makes you feel. It isn’t always something tangible.”

It doesn’t matter whether you are a startup, an established business or a non-profit how your brand is perceived will affect the success of your business.

But like advertising, publishing and marketing, branding is also evolving at a rattling speed and it is extremely hard to catch up. What was a valid branding technique last year may not make an impact this year. You have to grow with the changing trends to keep your brand relevant.

Here are the branding trends that need to implement in your marketing strategy.

 

Experiential Branding

Not a new concept, experiential branding has been a very powerful tool in the marketing arsenal of global brands for many years.

When customers experience or observe your brand then it provides you with the opportunity to involve with them. The whole concept of this branding form is to move beyond the convention customer engagement and add a touch-and-feel experience option for the customers.

The result-driven storytelling has worked wonders for global brands and it is a trend that you need to implement.

If you wondering how experiential branding works, then here are some cool examples.

 

Illustrations

Let’s face it, your customers are already struggling with the information overload, interestingly most of it just cursory without offering any value. Your brand voice has to cut through all that noise and give a relief to already inundated customers. One way to build a trusting relationship with the customers is to offer useful content.

But you cannot expect your quality content to stand out if there is no nuanced advantage to it. This is why custom branded illustrations are such a huge game-changer. Such content shows customers that you are committed and gives you a competitive edge.

According to Canadian e-commerce powerhouse Shopify-

“Illustration is a communication tool with three superpowers. It can add clarity to a complex idea. It can link concepts to the words we’ve assigned them within our respective products (aka on-boarding). And, it can capture the values and traits of a brand in a single voice, shift the tone depending on the situation, and speak directly to the user.”

If you use custom illustrations, you have much higher potential to get your idea delivered to the target audience.

 

Mobile First

Google made its stance on mobile-friendly sites clear. On its official webmaster blog, Google announced this March that it will be releasing the mobile-first indexing for all sites. Responsive and interactive experience is a must for every web asset related to your brand. With the boom in the use of handheld devices, it is important to give preference to mobile web design.

According to SEOEaze.com, the focus of mobile first designing is to reduce the visual hierarchy and reduce the unnecessary content to a bare minimum. This will heighten the functionality of your mobile site.

If most of your visitors are mobile-based it’s important that you make ideally adopt mobile-first designing so that the creativity quotient of your website is augmented without compromised functionality.

 

Content Modularity

Modularity has opened a whole new dimension to content designing improving the user interface designs multifold. Splitting your content into modules allows you to easier add extra functionality like the seamless integration of images and videos.

With modular and intuitive design process you can convert your content into a visual powerhouse that not only improves the legibility of the content but also facilitates the process of conversion from digital to print and vice-versa.

A modular approach to content design helps you create a wonderful browsing experience for your readers both on mobile and desktop.

 

Aesthetic functionality

According to legendary typographer Stefan Sagmeister, most branding campaigns can promote themselves entirely based on their look and feel.

For some of you, this approach might feel like in total contradiction of the principles of design. How can beauty take preference over an idea? Well, Stefan makes a strong argument to give equal if not more important to the aesthetic appeal of your campaigns.

Being daringly creative can help your business to make its presence felt in a market of an ever-growing crowd. Such an aesthetic approach clearly tells your audience that you have the courage to go an extra mile to demonstrate your creative prowess.

 

VR Content

Virtual reality is fast becoming a go-to option for delivering lasting impression by brands across the globe. VR and 3D are technologies still in their development phase, but businesses are now eager than ever before to be early adopters to reap the financial success.

To measure the scope of VR you can refer to Goldman Sachs’ expectation that VR is going to touch a massive $182 billion mark in the coming years. Among all VR technologies, 3D, in particular, is offering a novel way of offering authentic experience by presenting stories in an entirely different way.

These trends will let you keep your branding efforts on track but remember that these are just trends, not the success drivers. Your branding success lies in offering tangible value to your audience that makes them put their loyalty in you.