While a company’s products and services may lie at the center of the business, the branding distinguishes the product and elevates it above others offered in the market. A brand is the combination of the designs, symbols, and colors used to delineate the identity of a business, creating distinctiveness. Branding succeeds when it connects with the customer’s emotions and sentiments.
The creation and success of a brand is multifaceted. It involves numerous people with different expertise—and at the forefront is the creative director, who must be able to lead and maximize the talents of their team. The creative director oversees the design layout and visual impact of marketing materials, coordinates with company executives to determine the organization’s visual needs, and spearheads a group of creative professionals to craft effective marketing campaigns. Here’s how creative directors design emotion, evoking customer sentiment through their adept use of branding.
They visualize a brand’s values
Creative directors understand branding isn’t merely configuring an attractive combination of text and images. To evoke customer sentiment, they must begin with the brand’s core—its personality, messaging, and promise. Creative directors work with a company’s executives to decide the organization’s selling points and values. When this is done, the creative director can work to generate the branding pillars and visual language of the company that captures the messaging the executives want to communicate. A great example of this is BeyondMinds, which started with its business descriptor and mission and vision before anything else. After this, they developed an enriched vocabulary around the company’s name and values and produced its overall branding. The result was a successful public launch, which led to the company raising $15 million.
They make a brand memorable
The attractiveness of a brand can’t stop at a stellar first impression. Creative directors understand that once customers have registered a brand’s existence, the brand’s next step is to make itself memorable—and, therefore, consistent. To do this, they take the established branding principles and collaborate with their team to form a branding style guide, which details the visual and messaging elements—including typography, color palettes, graphic assets, and so on—to be used across all the company’s marketing campaigns. The cloud storage company Dropbox is excellent at this, plastering all of its homepage, platforms, and email marketing with its signature blue box, making the brand that much more notable.
They synergize customer memories with brand stories
The most influential brands are those that align stories with clients’ experiences of the service. These customer memories comprise consumers’ expectations, emotions, and satisfaction when interacting with the brand. Customers who enjoy these experiences are more likely to turn into brand ambassadors willing to try, buy, and recommend new products and services of the company. Creative directors work with customer-facing marketing professionals like the social media manager, whose job is to analyze social media data and develop digital marketing campaigns and strategies to stay informed of the customer experience and deliberate how best to use them. Duolingo’s successful marketing strategy is a testament to how powerful this is, with the company leaning into its quirkiness to launch playful videos that users happily reposted because of their humorous resonance.
They keep a brand updated and relevant
As the brand matures, creative directors are challenged to keep it fresh and relevant. Done well, this expresses a brand’s commitment to growth and demonstrates reinvigoration, which can excite customers. Creative directors can initiate brand refreshes, which can be as simple as reintroducing core products with a catchy advertisement for both a new and nostalgic audience or as attention-calling as logo change to mark a new beginning. Facebook, for example, shifted its name to Meta and its logo to an infinity sign to better signify its more expansive roster of products.
Creative directors are tasked to use design to evoke customer emotion and sentiment. Through their talents and collaboration, they work to make a brand unforgettable.