This fortnight’s BookMachine article, sponsored by Getty Images, is all about the growing importance of visual branding, in Publishing and beyond! Check out the full column here, or read this taster to get you started:
Having a recognizable iconography associated with a brand has always been a crucial marketing techniques to draw in consumers. Yet, in a world where we are bombarded by an increasing number of advertisements every day, standing out and having a consistent visual brand is becoming harder, and more important, than ever before.
The stats: how much do we really see?
Every second, our senses receive over 11 million pieces of information from our skin, eyes, ears, sense of smell and sense of taste. Of these, the average person can handle a maximum of 40-50 pieces in their working memory, which means that we ignore 10,999,950 bits of data every single second we are awake. The job of a visual brand is to be interesting and engaging enough to become part of the 40-50 pieces of information committed to memory, and then draw the consumer towards its products.
Estimates vary wildly as to the number of advertisements we see in a day, ranging from 300-400 to over 5,000, but there is an agreement that whatever the number, it is on the increase. Marketers are putting adverts everywhere, from billboards to your Facebook timeline, and the speed at which they’re flicking past is astounding. One key marketing technique to overcome this fire hose of imagery is repetition of an image or phrase. [READ MORE]