The Science of Marketing

The old adage still rings true: a picture is worth a thousand words. In order to capitalize on this axiom, marketers often spend an enormous amount of time and money creating visual identities that paint a consistent picture of their company or products. But alone, logos, color palettes and design schemes cannot tell a complete story. When building effective brands, we must also consider the words our audiences hear, read, and repeat as they interact with our company and their colleagues. The verbal identity, the linguistic counterpart to the visual identity, is frequently overlooked in brand development. But ignore it at your own peril, because a word is often worth a thousand pictures.

The most important reason to create a visual and verbal identity is consistency. A company should look and sound the same whether someone is visiting its web site, reading its product data sheet or participating in a technical training session. But this level of consistency cannot be achieved by creating visual and verbal identities separately, nor can they be constructed in an ad-hoc manner. In order to drive uniformity throughout all of a company’s touch points, the verbal and visual identities must be integrated, and their creation must follow a structured process that helps focus creativity.

Phase 1: Discovery
The first step in the process is to gain an understanding of the company and the landscape in which it plays to establish an anchor point for the visual and verbal identity. This is done by considering the company’s business strategies including its financial goals, product road map, sales approach and partner activities to ensure that the visual and verbal identity captures the essence of the business. But a visual and verbal identity cannot come from the business alone. It is also crucial to look outside the walls of the company and examine the market forces at work, including an analysis of the company’s target markets, the buying cycle for its product offerings, and the direct and indirect competitors it faces. Understanding the dynamics of the market helps ensure that the visual and verbal identity is relevant, interesting and differentiated to the target audience.

Phase 2: Development
With an understanding of the business strategies and market forces, it is time to construct the visual and verbal identity. The development phase is both an analytical and creative process through which the integrated visual and verbal identity comes to life through well documented guidelines that govern the words and pictures used to tell a company’s story. While the contents of a visual and verbal identity may vary based on the type of company and the market in which it plays, they all draw from a similar set of tools. The list below is an example of the types of elements that comprise the visual and verbal identity.

Visual Identity Elements

• Company Logo
• Product Logo
• Color Palette
• Fonts

Verbal Identity Elements

• Company Tag Line
• Product Naming Scheme
• Category Definition
• Messaging Framework

Phase 3: Deployment
With a visual and verbal identity developed and documented, both sides of the company’s story can be consistently told across all of its communications programs. The deployment phase brings the company’s story to life by infusing all elements of the visual and verbal identity into its funding materials, collateral, web site, presentations, advertising, and other programs. In constructing each item, marketers can reference the visual and verbal identity to govern not only how each item is designed, but how it is structured and written as well. This is particularly important when different people or companies are responsible for developing different items.

Treating the verbal and visual identity as one enables marketers to achieve a new level of consistency across all company touch points on the way to better branding. By following a simple process for the creation of this integrated visual and verbal identity, marketers can ensure they are using the right words and pictures to tell both sides of a company’s story.

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