Colors, Logos, and Loyalty: The Essentials of Effective Branding for Business Growth

Welcome to Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, the ultimate resource for business leaders eager to skyrocket their company's growth! I'm your host, Kerry Curran, and this episode is, “Colors, Logos, and Loyalty: The Essentials of Effective Branding for Business Growth” with special guest Jess O’Brien, Creative Director at Overdrive Interactive.

In this episode, we'll discuss the power of colors, logos, and the emotional connections they forge with your audience. Learn why consistent branding is crucial for building customer loyalty and why a well-crafted brand can be your greatest asset. 

Get ready for an insightful discussion filled with real-world examples and actionable advice. Whether you're a startup looking to make your mark or an established brand seeking a refresh, this episode will provide the tools and inspiration you need to elevate your business to new heights. Tune in and discover how to transform your branding strategy into a powerful driver of business growth.

Transcript

Podcast Guest: Jess O’Brien

Host: Kerry Curran
Title: Colors, Logos, and Loyalty: The Essentials of Effective Branding for Business Growth

Welcome to Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, the ultimate resource for business leaders eager to skyrocket their company's growth! 

I'm your host, Kerry Curran, and this episode is, “Colors, Logos, and Loyalty: The Essentials of Effective Branding for Business Growth” With special guest Jess O’Brien Creative Director at Overdrive Interactive

In this episode, we'll discuss the power of colors, logos, and the emotional connections they forge with your audience. Learn why consistent branding is crucial for building customer loyalty and why a well-crafted brand can be your greatest asset.

Get ready for an insightful discussion filled with real-world examples and actionable advice. Whether you're a startup looking to make your mark or an established brand seeking a refresh, this episode will provide the tools and inspiration you need to elevate your business to new heights.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:02.818)

Great. And so welcome Jess, tell us a bit about yourself and your experience and background.

Jess O'Brien (00:09.764)

Yes, okay. So I have a bit of a storied background. I've kind of explored all the different facets of the creative world and the world of marketing. I started, my God, 100 years ago now, in school for video editing and had the pleasure of having some really unique video editing internships. I worked for a documentary filmmaker who was making films about sex trafficking in Tel Aviv. I worked… very early in social media marketing when it was just sort of like the wild, wild west of social. So I had the distinct pleasure of working on the VH1 Top 20 Twitter account back when it was still Twitter and back when they were kind of trying to see what the impact of social [media] would be. So now social [media] is not really around that interns work in primarily, but I did get to have that instant impact right when social was hitting the ground. So I got to get clued into seeing how fantastic this new frontier of marketing was straight away. From there, I continued into the video production world working for a firm that partnered with agencies to produce commercials. 

And that's how I really got into the world of advertising. It wasn't something that I had studied or had really been aware of, other than my own personal interest and love of commercials and copywriting. So I moved over into an agency that primarily did branding for startups. And I got to experience this whole new world. Startups in Boston are just, it's permeating the scene, right? You look at all these different skyscrapers.

And you don't know that there are these startup hubs in all of these different skyscrapers. And you get to be in these incubators and learn about all these new products that are coming on scene and really get to experience brand building in its very nascent stages because it's a new product, new company, new brand. It's super exciting. And from there, that agency was actually absorbed by the agency I'm at right now, which is a digital ROI. Focused lead driven conversion type digital marketing agency who still does branding work, but we usually work with more mature companies that are looking to bring in leads and nurture and grow.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:46.434)

Great, so thank you. I know you have tons of background. It makes your experience even more robust, especially when it comes to building out brands. And it's not a simple process. And so talk to us about why it is important to use branding?

Jess O'Brien (03:11.044)

So branding is an un-intangible concept, right? It's what lives in your audience's mind. It's the story that forms. It's the bridge from your product, whatever you're selling. It's the bridge from that to your audience. It's the package that's being delivered to them. And it's incredibly important because you want that package to match whatever you're selling to your audience. You wouldn't… put a paper bag around a Ferrari, right? There's that tension right there that doesn't match. So those elements work to form that connection to your audience. It's that bridge, like I said, between your product and your audience. And that's how you're gonna make that connection with them in order to build loyalty, to build a familiar feeling with your audience in order for them to start trusting you and understand that your solution is going to fit the problem that they are experiencing at that moment.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:15.298)

Right, and so, to your point, if your audience isn't aware of you and doesn't make that connection, it's going to be harder for brands to become successful. And I know you talked about the importance of packaging, but it's also the logo, the color, and the font.

Jess O'Brien (04:32.932)

Absolutely. And we've discussed this before. What I like to say, my simple analogy is you have two sodas in front of you. You have Coke and a brand that you've never seen before. Now, some people, I know the tech adoption curve is usually for tech products, but some people are early adopters, right? They're going to reach for that unknown soda.

They crave new experiences. My husband's this way. Every time we go to Whole Foods, he looks at that rack of all those different brands, and he just picks something new. But he's only trying that once, and then that next week, he's picking something else to try. So that's not building a customer that's going to be coming back time after time after time. That's someone you have to earn over and over and over again. Most people are going to reach for Coke.

It's something they're familiar with. They have that loyalty to the brand. They've seen it everywhere. It's that familiarity that makes them reach for Coke over that non-branded soda they've never recognized. And then when you take it a step further and add something like Pepsi into the mix, that's something like soda wars or something that's like, it's for years now, right? But you have an association with Coke and you have an association with Pepsi.

And you have that brand loyalty due to the marketing that has solidified in your head about that brand. Because the difference, and this is probably going to be really controversial, especially to diet coke lovers, the difference in taste is not that far away, right? It's the connection you have to the brand that makes you reach for Coke or Pepsi. And it's something that's not even an immediate connection, right? Nobody's thinking, Pepsi is a… smile with every sip. So I like that saying, I'm going to reach for Pepsi. It's something that's built over time continuously that has made Pepsi the thing that you associate yourself with.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:31.074)

Yeah, no, it's, I mean, as a diet coke lover, I'd say, is Pepsi okay, is the, my most unfavorite question, but no, really, I totally get what you're saying. And it's not just, it's not arbitrary, right? It's not just like, let's pick this, let's pick that. You know, it's a lot of investment and time and research that goes into it.

Building that and I know you've shared a lot of your experience as well. So how do you build a brand strategy?

Jess O'Brien (07:07.556)

Yeah, absolutely. And like you said, it all starts with research. So there is that qualitative research. If it's a product, a SaaS product, you want to talk to the sales team. You want to see how they're talking to people. And if it's something that's like a startup, you want to research the space itself and see what the audience is thinking and feeling about the space. And there's going to be some differences there if it's a categorical argument versus a product-based argument. Are we introducing a whole new category to people? That's all that research that you have to start getting those really important sound bites and start understanding how your audience feels and talks about the space because you're going to want to reflect that back to them. It all is going to become this big

Facets of information that you need to pull from and then you're gonna want to layer the different things on top of that like, you know things like typefaces, they have feelings associated with them. You wouldn't think that there is a huge difference between a serif and a sans serif, but there is I mean different spaces are used for different kinds of typography color palettes. There's so much color psychology at play when you're building out a palette you want to make sure that you're eliciting the

The right emotions that you want associated with your brand. And there is manufactured meaning at play, right? Like a color like red has so many different things attached to it. It has urgency, it has love, it has anger. So if you're picking red, like a lot of fast food brands do, which also it's shown to elicit hunger. So there's that obvious connection, right? Yeah, I think there was a study where people...

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:45.834)

Yeah.

Jess O'Brien (08:50.532)

I had two plates in front of them, a red plate and a blue plate, and they tended to eat more on the red plate than the blue plate. So there's like different things that are at play when it comes to colors and building that for your brand. But there's also that manufactured meaning, like I said. So when you pick red, you have to decide what that red is going to represent for your brand. And then you have to make sure that your audience recognizes what it means. And if you're an international brand, you have to understand what red means.

Across the world because red means something very different in America than it does in China or in India. So that is something that you have to pay special attention to. And then, you know, when it comes to the logo mark, that's the association that's going to be an instant with your brand. Think of the Nike swoosh. You know, that and the funny thing about the Nike swoosh, it is color agnostic. They don't have a color that's associated with it. It's meant to have different colors that can play with it.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:43.234)

Mm-hmm.

Jess O'Brien (09:48.804)

So these are all different things you have to think of when you're building your brand. And they seem so small, but everything you do needs to be rooted in those mission vision values that you establish. And everything just kind of falls out of that. And once you establish it, it has to be a steady drum beat that you're beating with your audience to continuously build up that association with their brain. You don't want to continuously reinvent yourself. Like obviously there are refreshes that are going to happen.

But if you're reinventing how you look or how you sound every time someone encounters you in an ad, you on your website, you in a print ad, it's going to end up causing friction for them. They're not getting that consistency that's building up that fast association. Like with color, to serve it back, the most powerful thing that a brand can do is get themselves associated.

With a color because of that instant visual connection. Think about Tiffany's. What color is Tiffany's? It's...

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:53.57)

Yeah, it's Robin's egg blue or Tiffany's blue. Yeah.

Jess O'Brien (10:56.804)

Yeah, it's Robin Inks, Tiffany Blue. It is a copyrighted color. Nobody else can use that color. So when you see that color, there are certain things that just flash in your brain, right? It's a luxury. It's breakfast at Tiffany's. It's the fact that you're getting champagne and picking out jewelry. I've never been to Tiffany's, but I know all these associations. And you don't need to have a copyrighted color in order to benefit from this. But the power of color.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:07.266)

Mm-hmm.

Jess O'Brien (11:22.756)

And branding, if you can get yourself in lockstep with that color, you're doing so much work for yourself without doing too much work, right? Because now you have that instant visual cue.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:34.882)

Yeah, no, and it makes so much sense and I'm thinking about my own experiences going through building the RBMA brand and revenue boost. I wanted to use my favorite colors and then realize everyone uses shades of blue and shades of green and I'm like, okay, so one of the reasons why we went more with the brown tones was because it stands out, it's different. There's not a lot of brands out there using this color palette.

And same thing with the logo. The first samples I received back from the first partner I worked with were generic. I was like, no, I'm not an investment agency or hedge fund. We're talking about marketing and advertising and branding and fun stuff. And so yeah, it makes so much sense. And yeah, it definitely resonates. And I get how.

Jess O'Brien (12:19.076)

Right. Right.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:30.018)

Important it is and I know it's not always easy to get a brand to want to invest in that whole process to your point. There is a comprehensive process and sure you could pick the first generic logo you see or you know get somebody on Fiverr to create a logo for you but to your point there's like so much more that goes into it if you want it to resonate with your brand and yeah I think it's such an important aspect of marketing and strategy.

Jess O'Brien (12:59.716)

Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:59.746)

And you know, I know you're talking about like a lot of your clients are also digital marketing clients and talk a bit about how you carry that branding. Like how do you carry that branding through the creative development strategies and the communication plans?

Jess O'Brien (13:18.02)

Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, a lot of the clients we work for have those established brands. They're not looking, you know, unless they're going through a refresh, they're not looking to change anything. So it's all about trust, right? They're entrusting us with their brand guidelines. Someone has worked incredibly hard to establish these rules. That's why, my God, when I get a brand guideline that's like 90 slides long, I'm just like, this is.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:45.346)

Hehehehe

Jess O'Brien (13:45.86)

There have been some beautiful ones that I have opened and I'm like, my God. So those rules, I mean, as color is used in branding, color also has conversion attached to it, right? So when it comes to taking the brand and translating it into something that's like an ad or something like that, you know, there could be a color that's already associated with a conversion event on their website.

And it's always worth it to do A-B testing to find out what color is resonating the most with your audience to get them to make that click, right? And that's in a branding in itself because once you have found the conversion color that is associated with the audience taking the action, you want to make sure that's consistent because you have taught them something. You have taught them what that color means.

And then they're looking for that color, right? It's gotta be the most vibrant color, it's gotta stand out the most, and everything we do is really with the focus on driving action. So while we're making sure that we're tonally staying aligned with the messaging, with all the things that are the wrapper of the brand in order to deliver this message, we're making sure that we're reflecting.

Everything that the audience has already been taught about this brand because we don't want to cause friction if you're seeing an ad and you're recognizing that name, but the the colors are different and the tone is like Sarcastic when usually they're warm and inviting you're now experiencing something that's causing a little bit of them It's disconnected in your brain now because now you're trying to align yourself

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:29.794)

Mm -hmm.

Jess O'Brien (15:31.812)

With these new expectations that they have set with this ad. But if everything is already along the line of what you recognize with them, then you're not paying attention to all those other elements. They're just existing there for that familiarity. And you're able to have a better focus on the exact message that's in that ad targeted you at that moment, telling you exactly what the benefit is to you and exactly what we want you to do at that time.

So in that way, branding almost becomes a little invisible, and that's why it's so important. It should not be a standout thing that distracts the audience away from the action we want them to take.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:12.002)

Right, right. And to your point, and you know, we're talking about the consumer journey, whether it's B2B or B2C, they have to know you exist and then they have to trust you. And then they have to be in the market. You have to be there when they're in the market. And so, right, if you're hitting them with the wrong message or wrong ad, it's, you don't want them to have to work hard to find you and, you know, convert, whether it's, you know, registration or purchase. Yeah.

Jess O'Brien (16:38.916)

Absolutely. Yeah, and to go back to the soda thing, I mean, think about Olipop. Olipop was brand new soda, but they immediately knew how important branding was. Same with Oatly, the brand Oatly. I love their branding. It's fun, it's whimsical, it sticks out from the other oat milks on the shelf, but both of those brands understand the importance of brand awareness.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:44.586)

Yeah.

Jess O'Brien (17:03.076)

Plus conversion, right? Like, Olipop, before it even really hit all the different grocery stores, was saturating the market. Their branding is unique, it sticks out, you see it from far away, and they made sure that they were in the hands of every celebrity pushing that one message. Healthy soda.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:03.106)

All right.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:20.242)

Yeah. And of course there's the liquid death, which I think is the mic drop of all branding stories. I mean, it's water. But it's, it's, you know, they're right. The packaging, the logo that, you know, that it kind of aligns with their target audience. The person that doesn't want to be seen, in an environment where they're supposed to look cool or tough drinking from a little like an Evian bottle.

Jess O'Brien (17:26.532)

Yes.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:49.602)

So I know we talked a lot about the importance of building a brand and you had shared with me as well that a lot of the work you do is helping brands kind of pivot or rebrand when it's time to pivot. Can you share a bit, how do you know when it's time for a brand to look at, consider rebranding?

Jess O'Brien (18:08.804)

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a few trigger points. And at the beginning of that kind of engagement, you have to determine, is it a rebrand or is it a refresh? Are we blowing up everything? Are we peeling back the layers all the way down to mission vision values and looking at brand attributes and saying, OK, do these baseline attributes that are basically the building blocks of our brand, do they still resonate?

Or is it a refresh where we're saying like, okay, we have this logo, but we want to modernize it and we want to like take our look and feel and we want to do something a little different so that when someone sees us, they're not seeing a new brand, but they are noticing that evolution. So we look at those trigger points, which could be, you know, company maturity.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:56.29)

Mm -hmm.

Jess O'Brien (19:02.404)

If a company has gone from a startup phase to, you know, it's out in the market, it's an established brand, that could be a trigger point. There could be a switch up in the audience. We had a client that wanted their website redone. And we see that a lot. We see refreshes attached at the hip with websites because generally like, hey, this is a good place to get it all done at the same time. And your website is there to deliver that message because...

What are people usually frequenting? It's your website. So they had a developer audience that they were originally going after when they were more in the startup, new business phase. And then they realized that their purchaser was actually in the C -suite. And so everything that they had done visually was more keyed into developers. So they had come to us looking for a more mature looking website that was more reflective of their new audience. So they wanted their audience to see themselves on the website and they wanted the packaging around it to feel elevated, to feel a little bit more luxurious, which is a weird thing to say with a SaaS platform, but you can see the difference between like a whimsical platform, a more serious one. So that necessitated a little bit of a refresh without being a whole

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:18.466)

Mm-hmm.

Jess O'Brien (20:26.34)

Rebrand because the company's values, the company's mission had not changed what they were trying to do. The product still had the same solution. It was still solving the same problem. It was just being purchased by a different audience than they had originally thought was looking into them. And so like those are some big triggers. You know, when it comes to a full rebrand, we've had companies that were expanding.

From the state that they were in, they were either a local company or they were on one coast only and they were going into new markets. Well, with copyright and competition, sometimes you need to change your brand pretty radically to either appeal to a wider audience, especially if your brand is more centralized and has a local feel. Like if you're like, you know, we're in your backyard, we're your neighbors.

Can't be everyone's neighbor when it's the entire country. So that might necessitate a bigger shift. Or we had a brand that we were working with that their company name was able to be used when they were in one state, but when they were in several different states, there was a competitor who was in the markets that they were expanding into who had almost an identical name and an identical look and feel. So we had to strip away everything and give them.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:22.338)

Right.

Jess O'Brien (21:49.7)

A new look and a new name that was rooted in their mission vision values. They were American first, they still wanted to stick with the same color scheme, but they wanted a new way of treating that across their branding efforts. So it was just a very interesting because when you're usually looking at a rebrand like that, you are looking at a change in mission vision values. But this time around, it was like, no, we still represent the same.

Everything, everything's still the same, it's just unfortunately we can no longer have our name.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:22.626)

Yeah, no, that's really interesting to think about the depths of branding. And I know it's often, as we talked about, you don't always find that executives want to spend the money to invest. And I think you've definitely provided a lot of food for thought for the importance of investing in that right brand strategy and getting the research and knowing your audience and your product and the unique value that it brings, the solution it provides, and all of the looks and feels that go with that. So thank you, Jess. I know I've learned so much from our conversations, and it's been really interesting. So thank you for sharing your expertise, and I hope we can have you on again.

Jess O'Brien (23:08.164)

Of course, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. I hope I didn't cap your ear off on it all.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:13.762)

No, I loved it. No, you're great. You're good. Thank you.

Jess O'Brien (23:17.028)

Yes, you're very welcome.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:19.81)

All right, one thing I wanna do.

Kerry Curran, RBMA 

What are the main benefits of branding?

Jess O'Brien

So your brand is the story that is formed in your audience's mind about who you are. It's how they connect to you. It's how they feel about you. It's the immediate association. It's an intangible concept. So if you can influence that from the start, you're able to form that story for your audience and get them to associate you with how you want them to feel about you. 

And if you can form that good association, if you can form that loyalty, not only are you creating a familiarity that gets people ready to buy because they have that comfort level with you, but it also instills that trust that keeps them a customer and it gets that customer loyalty. And there's really no monetary amount you can put on a customer loyalty event. Keeping a customer is always going to be easier than gaining new ones. And your best marketing at the end of the day is happy customers. It's brand loyalty because, you know, happy customers lead to more customers.

Kerry Curran, RBMA

That's great, thank you. That was perfect. Awesome.

Jess O'Brien

Yeah, of course.