Differentiating Visually

Jess Wilson

In the past, I did a post about how personal branding and various actions can change the perceptions of consumers. This week’s post will focus on how visuals can also alter the perceptions of your target market. Visuals are an incredibly important way to portray a specific mood or image for your brand. As an artist, your album artwork, logo, and personal image are all ways that consumers can derive ideas about the brand. Ries’ Pieces is a business blog focused on branding. In the post, “Being Different Visually,” the author describes how a number of companies differentiate themselves just by looking different from their competitors. The energy drink Red Bull has a very distinctive small can. Monster on the other hand, differentiated themselves by using a larger can. Consumers don’t have any difficulty in determining which product is which because each has their own way of standing out in the consumer’s mind. If your brand is easily recognized, it’ll stand out more and gain more attention from consumers.

Utilizing TED

TED.com is a great resource that links users with speeches and presentations conducted around the world. The website has videos on several industry related topics including technology, business, science, and entertainment. The speakers are often incredibly resourceful when it comes to passing on ideas, lessons, and knowledge pertaining to a specific topic.

Adam Sadowsky used his speech to tell the story of how his team had to overcome several obstacles in order to design and build the Rube Goldberg machine used in OK Go’s music video. The band had set forth several requests for requirements of the machine. For example, the machine had to start the music, go along with the mood of the song, synch with beats of the song, and be in filmed in one shot. Other requirements were set forth but it was these specific ones that seemed to make Adam Sadowsky’s task impossible to complete.