Branding is an integral part of marketing your brand and products. As a business, you must keep up-to-date with the latest happenings in branding technology to stay at the top of your game. You need to be prepared to embrace the changes to drive growth and reach new markets.
You need to future-proof your branding strategy to keep atop of your competition. For that, it’s necessary to know the latest trends in branding and how they affect you.
Let’s look at some of the latest trends defining branding strategy in 2019 and beyond.
One of the latest branding strategy trends is that of changing logos. Gone are the days when marketers followed the “never change your brand’s logo” strategy. It is common to see brands come up with new, shapeshifting logos.
You need to have a wide variety of logos at your disposal so that you can use them wherever required. Simple logos might be needed for your mobile app and online branding. Similarly, you may need minimalistic or black-and-white logos for some aspects of your branding. There can be a number of uses for your logos, and you need to figure out how many you may need.
Ensure that your logo is adaptive, contextual, and variable. This will help you do your branding effectively across multiple platforms.
For instance, brands such as Walt Disney, Chanel use such shapeshifting logos.
Image via JUST Creative
Chatbots have become fairly popular already, and through artificial intelligence, you can use them to solve your customers’ queries. With chatbots, you can ensure that your customers don’t have to wait to speak to your brand. They also eliminate the need to have a customer service representative unless extremely necessary.
Through chatbots, you can create a complete artificial experience for your customers and give them the feeling of interacting with your brand. You can control everything that the chatbot will communicate. This gives you the advantage of putting your brand’s persona out there through the chatbot.
The chatbot should be able to represent your demographic. Additionally, brands should also be careful in assigning gender and personality to the chatbot. It’s a great idea to have it all outlined when developing your brand’s voice.
Mastercard, for instance, has added a bot on Facebook, which can help their customers do simple tasks. These include checking account information, monitoring spend levels, listing purchase history, and more.
Image via Facebook
Geometrics have become especially important now, and this trend is going to stick around in the future as well. This form of branding involves different shapes and lines. However, you need to ensure that your geometrics are fun and more approachable.
For this, you need to fill them up with bright colors that can add cheerfulness to the gloominess of the geometric designs. You must also ensure that you don’t leave edges as they are. Instead, you can add a few curves around to make the design more playful and inviting. Through this method, you’ll be able to incorporate straight lines and curves both to give you the best of both worlds.
For instance, Airbnb modified their logo to use geometric shape with curves instead of the bulky text that they had earlier.
Image via Lucidpress
According to Gartner, influencer marketing has become a well-known form of marketing among consumers today. In spite of knowing that the influencers are marketing products to them, they continue to consume their content. Additionally, it’s a more affordable form of marketing. A single sponsored post by an Instagram influencer with more than 1 million followers only costs about $1405!
Image via Influence.co
While influencer marketing is already a popular branding strategy, it’s expected to change slightly in 2019 and beyond. You can expect influencer marketing to become a form of marketing where brands collaborate with the right influencers for longer-term campaigns.
In this form of influencer marketing, the posts won’t be sponsored posts. Instead, the influencer will create regular posts with organic mentions of the brand.
They will be a part of a broader strategy and will be brand activates rather than just one-off influencers. You must, of course, be careful about what they post as they’ll be seen as extensions of your brand.
Beats by Dre used influencer marketing to reach out to their target audience. They sent out free pairs of headphones to artists and asked them to provide feedback on the product. When they launched Beats, they put these artists in their ads and Beats in their music videos. This helped them gain quick traction.
Image via Single Grain
Another trend that can help define your branding strategy is vintage designs. This is expected to be mainly for logos and packaging. To come up with vintage logos, you can keep a few guidelines in mind.
These logos usually revolve around the primary image. This image could be hand-drawn and can include the name of the company in a font that seems like it’s hand-written. It’s necessary to understand the psychology of colors and fonts to master these designs. You may also choose to add your slogan to the logo if you wish to. Vintage logos also contain the year of establishment; you can choose to add that as well.
As for vintage packaging, you can start with the colors. The colors have to be natural and should give off an old-fashioned look. Take care while creating the typography as well; you need to make it appear vintage too. The choice of how vintage you want your branding to look is totally up to you. You can choose to use a mix of modern and vintage elements too.
Branding is a must for every brand. It gives an identity to your brand; one which your customers can recognize and relate to. Just like marketing, branding changes by the moment as well. By keeping up with the latest branding trends, you can fuel your brand’s growth and define your branding strategy. Adopt new logos, bring in vintage looks, utilize influencers, and use modern geometric designs to improve your branding.
