What does visual branding mean to you? The most common answer is “the design of the logo!” Wrong.
The logo is an essential but not a complete part of your visual branding (sounds like a cereal commercial, I know). A well-designed brand is more than just a fancy logo or a cool emblem design. It’s about how your business is presented to your audience. It’s the overall messaging, the imagery, the sensation of how you differentiate from your competitors.
A good branding scheme will consider not only the logo (and what the shapes represent) but also the font selection and the combination of it, the alignment of headings and paragraphs, the colour scheme and the inversion of it. A well-trained graphic designer crafting your brand will also take into consideration how consistently it can be replicated on all sorts of media. Because your brand has to come across with a cohesive and unified voice that carries your personality and deep core, much effort must be given to the simplicity, the elegance and usability as well.
More Competitors in Your Pool
Many real estate agents, especially starting out, will say “I’ll get my branding done when I am bigger” – but this is one of the biggest branding mistakes one can make. Not only does it cost a lot more down the road to design your website and print media as your brand kicks in (otherwise everything will look scattered), but the fact that there are so many real estate agents in the hot markets in the country means that the branding is even more important.
For large corporations, they may have fewer than 10 major competitors in the market. For real estate agents in Vancouver, for example, you have around 13,000 competing real estate agents. Standing out among them is a much bigger challenge in many respects.
Branding Makes It Easier To Remember You
When your business is presented in a comprehensively branded manner, everything flows. This visual impact makes it much easier for people to remember who you are. It’s a much bigger impression than the generic cards provided to all agents by the brokerage at a cheap cost.
Alice Rei Ho's (Vancouver real estate agent) branding incorporates Chinese calligraphy to emphasize her cultural awareness, completed with a well architectured font and colour scheme.
Keeps Long-Term Costs Down
A firmly set brand means your identity as a business is defined and planned. The amount of time and money spent on creating new advertisements, print media and other promotional items will be reduced, leading to savings of thousands of dollars over the coming years (if not more). A well-designed brand is also simple and easy to replicate, and can keep printing and production costs down.
Dave Jenkins (Port Moody and Coquitlam real estate agent) has a well branded set of stationery spanning from introductory booklets, folders, listing feature sheets, business cards, newspaper ads and more.
A Memorable Impression
Imagine listening to a speech where the speaker is stumbling all over the place, without a cohesive message or a well-prepared script. Then imagine a charismatic speech that is powerful, organized, short and simple but memorable, such as that of John F. Kennedy. A listing presentation that is well organized and put together with a consistent brand image flowing through is like a well delivered speech. A well-executed branding scheme helps you leave that great memory imprinted in your potential customers’ minds.
