The most powerful brands are more than just businesses. They’re experiences that are recreated in every incarnation of the brand, whether physical or digital.
Take Apple—one of the strongest brands in the world. You can spot an Apple store from a mile away, with its glass storefront, bright white lighting, and sleek tables covered in even sleeker electronics. But even more impressive is that Apple’s website design manages to recreate that in-store experience. Crystal-clear images of iPhones and MacBooks set against a matte silver-white background, minimalist copy in its trademark sans serif, ingenious layouts that let shoppers easily compare products—somehow all these components give online shoppers the same “look and feel” that they get when they walk inside an Apple store.
The ability to translate your brand experience into a web design is a powerful one because it solidifies your brand identity and helps your audience remember you. And luckily, you don’t need a branding and design budget like Apple’s to make it happen for your business. This article will explore simple steps you can take to ensure that your audience gets the full experience of your brand simply by visiting your website.
Define Your Brand Experience
Before you can implement your brand experience into your web design, you’ll need to clearly define what your brand experience is, or what you want it to be. In my mind, a brand experience is the culmination of all the aspects of a brand that make it memorable—the sensory details and unique moments you undergo when interacting with a brand that add up to an overall feeling.
To better illustrate this, I’ll use the example of one fictional consumer who fully understood the concept of a brand experience: Holly Golightly, Audrey Hepburn’s character from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. When describing how she copes with periodic bouts of sadness and fear, she says,
“The only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it—nothing very bad could happen to you there.”
At its most basic level, Tiffany’s is simply a jewelry store. But at least in its fictional incarnation, Tiffany’s represents far more than diamonds to its most passionate advocate—it represents grace, groundedness, and security. Whether or not the real-life Tiffany’s aims to cultivate this brand experience is up for debate, but considering it’s still famous for its clean lines, turquoise velvet, and charming window displays, I’d argue that Holly Golightly was on to something.
When determining what you want your brand experience to be, it helps to go back to your brand’s foundations: your mission and vision, your core values, your positioning, your brand archetype, and more. Consider as well your brand’s core emotions—how do you want your audience to feel when they interact with your brand? Do you want them to feel safe and calm, like Holly Golightly does at Tiffany’s? Do you want them to feel a sense of childlike wonder, like visitors at Disney World? The answers to these questions will help solidify your brand experience before you attempt to translate it into a digital format.
Start With Your Message
Something I’ve heard from my website design clients before is, “You make the design first, and I’ll write the content to fill it afterwards.” And while I understand where they’re coming from, it’s overwhelmingly been my experience that designing to frame a message is immensely more effective than the other way around.
That’s why I suggest that before doing any work on your brand design, you consider what you want it to say—literally. What message are you trying to communicate to visitors to your website? What are the pieces of that message that are most central to your brand experience? (Hint: those are the pieces that your web design should emphasize the most.)
Remember as well that your brand experience lies not only in what you say, but in how you say it. Make sure that the overall tone and form of your web copy accurately reflects your brand’s identity and positioning. If your brand were a person, how would that person speak? Would they use short, snappy sentences or lush, detailed descriptions? Would they make jokes or keep things professional? Considering questions like these when writing your web copy will go a long way in helping your brand experience shine through the screen.
Keep it Consistent
In the earlier days of the internet, the main purpose of a website was simply to communicate information, with little regard for how that information appeared. Webpages were largely text-based and contained few, if any, design elements. But as the internet evolved, it became an expectation that businesses have their own websites, to the point where nowadays, we use a business’s website not only as a way to get information about them, but to verify its legitimacy. For this reason, it’s essential that when your audience navigates to your website, they instantly recognize it as belonging to your business—and you can accomplish this by ensuring your web design is consistent with the rest of your branding.
Let’s say you own a restaurant—a small modern bistro that serves eclectic twists on classic favorites. Your atmosphere is upscale yet fun, decorated with funky colored glass sculptures and light fixtures. You chose your brand colors—turquoise and bright orange—to reflect this energetic environment, and those colors adorn your logo, signage, business cards, and menus.
But somehow, when you outsource your web design, this all gets lost in translation, and you wind up with a website covered in burnt—almost maroon-like—orange, and a font that looks more traditional than trailblazing.
You might think it’s no big deal—the website still has your restaurant’s name and communicates essential information like your address and hours. But the problem is that unbeknownst to you, a person in your neighborhood has driven past your restaurant on their daily commute for weeks now, always thinking to themselves, “I want to try that place out sometime.” When it’s their turn to find a restaurant for date night, they think of your bistro, and look up your website with the name they remember from your signage. But when they reach your site, they think, “Hang on, this isn’t it—the place I keep seeing is turquoise and bright orange.”
Because your web design looks nothing like the rest of your branding, this potential diner doesn’t recognize your business. And while they might eventually figure out that it really is your restaurant, you’ve made them do extra work while decreasing their confidence in your brand. On the other hand, if your restaurant’s website is decked out in turquoise and bright orange, and uses the same fonts and logo that are emblazoned on your signage, your neighborhood friend will instantly recognize it and know they’ve reached the right place.
Keeping your website design consistent with the rest of the branding you’ve worked so hard to create doesn’t only help you bring in new customers—it helps you solidify the relationships you’ve built with your existing audience. Let’s continue the above example and say there’s a couple who visited your bistro a few months ago, and are comparing restaurant choices for their anniversary. One person suggests returning to your bistro, but their spouse doesn’t remember your name, so they pull up your website (which now accurately reflects your brand). Your bright turquoise and orange logo floods the screen, and immediately the couple recalls the pulsing energy of your restaurant’s ambience. They scroll down and see a close-up photo of the appetizer they enjoyed so much last time. There are even accompanying images of the colorful glass sculptures that decorate your restaurant.
Such a consistently and strategically branded web design goes beyond the most basic function of a website to tap into your audience’s memories and their associated emotions. It serves to remind them of why they visited your restaurant in the first place, and to make them excited to return.
Use Synesthesia in Your Imagery
A truly memorable brand experience is one that engages your audience’s senses, from colors to scents to sounds. Recreating that full sensory experience in a digital space is challenging, but not impossible. One of the simplest ways to accomplish it is to harness the phenomenon of synesthesia: where an individual processes information via a different sense than the one for which it was originally intended (for instance, “seeing music” instead of hearing it). By implementing imagery and other visual media into your website design that stimulates other senses, you can treat your online visitors to a brand experience that transcends dimensions.
The most obvious example of synesthesia in web imagery is when restaurants post photos of the food they serve on their websites—a close-up photo of a gourmet cheeseburger is enough to make most people’s mouths water. Product-based brands take a similar tactic: Apple’s product photos are so detailed that you can almost feel the smooth metal and glass of their devices, while beauty brands like Sephora include close-up images of their makeup and skincare products that emphasize color and texture. But service-based brands can employ synesthesia as well by choosing imagery that speaks to their audience’s senses, emotions, and cultural memories. Natural images like plants and trees can inspire energy and growth appropriate for coaching programs, while photos of blackboards, pencils, or paint are ideal for creative professions like architecture, copywriting, and design.
Remember the Details
Perhaps the most important thing to remember when designing your website is that all these previous steps will be next to useless if you use a design template that doesn’t allow you a high enough level of customization to communicate your brand experience. Web design templates, or website themes, can be extremely useful, but not all of them will allow you to customize your website for a consistent and unique brand experience. And in attempting to make your brand experience fit within the confines of a template, you may risk losing some of the details that make your brand so unique.
One way to avoid this issue is by outsourcing your website design to a creative professional willing and able to gain an intimate understanding of your brand—and my team would be honored to fulfill that role. If you’re ready to clearly define your unique brand experience and then translate that experience into a web design that will delight your audience, schedule a free consultation with my team today.
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