Branding
Branding
A brand is how a company is presented to others (clients, customers, employees, investors and even competitors). As a business owner, you must think what image a customer or soon to be client thinks about when they hear your company’s name or sees your truck driving safely down the streets of their neighbourhood. You need to take advantage of brand power because it influences marketing, advertising, sales, and even if a person would recommend you.
A brand has the obvious physical elements like color, a name, and a logo, but it also has a psychological aspect to it because a customer can associate your brand with a feeling. When we think of a popular brand like McDonalds or Mercedes one often thinks of fast, be it food or a car. A brand operates much like a simple word. A word, after all, is made up of an image, a sound, and an idiom, take the word “Apple” for example. When we say the word and we may think of a Granny Smith or a Delicious Red in our mind, or perhaps of the company who made the iPhone. A brand can also achieves this language effect, the effect that forces our mind to imagine a word when we hear it, see it, or say it. By creating a brand for a company, you are creating a sign for your customers to see, hear and think about.
How Words Function in the Mind
Company Colors
One of the first decisions you need to make for your brand is selecting the company colors of it. Colors have two main functions for our purposes as business owners. (1) eye-catching and focal point (2) sub-conscious effect.
Eye Catching Colors
You want a brand that swings for the fences, the smaller the company, the bolder the brand needs to be, and the simplest way to get noticed is to use eye-catching colours that are also not overused by other companies.
When selecting the colours for a Home Service company you first want to select a base bold colour like green, red, yellow, orange, or pink and then some matching colors to go with it. This way your company truck sticks out like a sore thumb because you would rather have a person say, ‘wow there is that ugly company again!’ than to have them say nothing at all as your forgettable white and blue truck blends into the other vehicles on the road. The goal is to invade the mind of the people of your city. That way when they need an essential home service, your Flamingo Pink Company Brand pops into their head, and they reach out to you all because of a colour.
Colors That Fit Together
It is possible to pick 2 to 4 colors and have them match, while still having a bold eye-catching brand. To do this we need to dip our toes into the world of color theory, again if this kind of stuff puts you to sleep, then it is time to hire a graphics designer or just has us at the TSS rebrand you so you do not have to learn what colors coordinate with red and are still bold enough.
Colors and their shades are nearly infinite especially when hex codes are used to create very specific shades digitally. However, in nature, only so many colors occur and this acts as a good starting point for understanding color. The color wheel below starts with a color in nature and then shows us shades of each base color using something that exists in the physical world, for the most part.
Do not worry to much about the colors name, as some can be pretty strange, as I bet most of people have never heard of malachite (a green stone) but it does help when you want to find the color code for a particular color. A color code is also called a hexacode since it has six digits. So, our yellowish-green stone, malachite, would be #0BDA51. Another thing you need to realize is that not all people see all colors the same way since it depends on the shape of the color cones in your eyes, so not everyone agrees to what each color is, green is green, but how green it is, is still up for debate. This universal hexacode is entered into the color settings of the given editor.
The colors you do pick are then the same used throughout the rest of your branded assets, but of course, a lot more goes into a brand than just colors. Picking one color is hardly enough, for your company you will want to pick at least two others that pair with it.
Just like white wine goes better with fish, and a steak pairs with a glass of red, while wings & beer seem much more fitting together than a scotch on the rocks with chicken wings would be, so do colors that seem to match up. It is much easier to show you than explain, so look at the images below that show how color pairs work together.
What you have just seen is the template patterns you apply to a color wheel to test out combinations that complement each other. This can help you find your company colors and act as a starting point before you start to play with shades. Another way is more organically, we turn to the natural world for examples of color patterns. The next color theory is based on harmony found in nature, often colorful plants give us great color schemes. As seen below: 
Next up with play with contrast, or color context. This is where we set differing and similar colors next to each other to evoke a new interpterion whether we are trying to hide or highlight something. First, we see that the red is much bolder and feels much stronger when it has black as its background.
While on the other hand, the red square against the orange background is duller, and the blue background does not really match well with the red. On the topic of matching, we see that shades of the same color match really well. 
But what we can observe from above is that the darker shade of color brings out the light purple more, and makes it pop. While a lighter shade softens and hides the light purple.
Let’s put some of these theories into practice by looking at a truck wrap and seeing how the colors fade or pop with a given design.
Two truck wraps with nearly the same colors, but the way they are arranged has a huge impact on where the eye focuses at first glance. The first wrapped truck struggles to form a focal point, we cannot say with certainty where the eye will go. The reason for this is that the white is too prominent in the design it brings too much to the foreground that it is lost—we say it is too busy. The human eye is meant to focus and ignore things, so when it is presented with too much detail it fails to capture meaning. The colors while coordinating well, are too detailed, too many stripes are used that it looks jumbled at first and needs to be studied to be understood.
The second design does a much better job at using white to create a focal point and it does this by using solid colors in the background. We can’t help but look at the company’s name at first glance. The solid color design with large swaths of color does not pull the eye from the white but instead, acts as a unifying force.
What goes into a Brand?
A brand is multiple things that come together to form a concrete image of a company. In the Home Service industry, a brand needs these features:
We have already touched on colours and their importance, but let’s discuss another basic, the name. A good company name is one word or two words.
It can also contain a kind of subtitle that explains the industry it is in. Let’s look at some great company names. Which ones do you think are good, and which ones are just average? Finally, how well can the name of your company be optimized on Google? Perhaps it is time to rename your company, but this is a rather risky choice.
Sample Company Names:
- Scrap Kings
- Pro-Comfort Heating
- Cooling Quest
- Raymonds Plumbing
Logos
Going back to our first discussion on words, and how our mind pictures every word we hear, the logo for a company is the image I want the customer to conjure in their mind when they hear the company’s name. Therefore, the logo needs to be simple. Company logos fall into two categories, ones made from letters or ones that use shapes. Think of the difference between the McDonald’s logo and the Starbucks logo, one uses the letter “M”, and the golden arches and the other uses the likeness of a mermaid, according to the company it’s a mythical creature, the Siren.
The McDonald’s logo is so well attached to the brand and the company they are indistinguishable. This is the goal of a brand, to make its logo instantly recognizable. Companies go to great lengths to explain the meaning of their logo, it’s not a mermaid it’s a Siren, it is not an “M” it is the golden arches. Coming up with a logo is no small feat, it may even require the addition of a graphic designer or input from your entire company. As the owner, you need to draft up the concept of a good logo.
Branded Everything
Once you have created a unified company color, logo, and name, put it on everything in your company, at the top of documents, on training manuals, on toolboxes, on the office wall, on trucks, on sales material, and of course, on the uniforms. Especially on anything customers will see the most because a large part of brand power, is awareness. That simply means the more often your brand is seen, the better the chance the customer is subconsciously influenced by it.
Value Proposition
Finally, the concept and idea behind your brand are what we call a value proposition. A brand needs a soul, it needs a company philosophy, core principles, and most of all, a reason for the customer to do business with you. Without a value proposition, your company is just a meaningless logo.
For an in-depth guide on how to make a value proposition, check out our dedicated write-up.
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