Your brand is what makes you and your business unique — if it could be distilled down into something tangible, we’d venture to call it your “special sauce.”

Your brand is a first impression — the first impression that customers and potential clients will have of your business. You don’t get a second chance at a first impression, so make it count.

The good thing is, you don’t have to go at it alone. We’re here to help you understand what it takes to craft the perfect brand and take it to market in our two-part guide to branding.

What Is a Brand?

Your brand comprises many things: It’s your business and website colors, your logo, the products and services you offer, and the way you present your business online. It’s the feeling someone gets when they hear your business or domain name, and it’s what they think of you as they browse your site. And yet, that still doesn’t fully capture what your brand is.

In essence, your brand is the summation of every single touchpoint a person can have with your business and what they think about you. That includes your site, social media, products and services, logos, your business’s mission and values, the way you speak to your audience on your site and in your blog, and how you provide customer service.

You can build and work on elements of your brand to influence it; however, keep in mind that it’s just as much what someone thinks of your business as it is the elements you can control, like your logo and colors. Ultimately, your brand lives and dies in the eyes of the consumer.  

To get a bit more technical, let’s look at how Merriam-Webster defines “Brand.” They say it’s a “class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer, a characteristic or distinctive kind, and a public image, reputation, or identity conceived of as something to be marketed or promoted.”

Why Are Brands Important?

Your brand sets you apart from the competition. When all else is equal, a customer’s brand loyalty is the deciding factor in where and with what business they choose to transact. Jeff Bezos once said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

So, what do you want your customers to say about you? And how can you influence it? Let’s explore different elements of branding that you can work on to craft the perfect brand identity.

Elements of Branding

Your brand isn’t entirely within your control. You see, it’s a living, evolving thing. You set the foundation upon which it grows: Deciding on a domain and business name, your logo, your colors, and your typography. Then, it evolves as people and customers interact with you, get to know your products and what type of service you provide, and when they buy into your mission and values as a business.

Business and Domain Name

Names affect brands, but how?

A good name lends trust and credibility to your business, to your brand. A good name is one of your company’s most valuable assets, and if you don’t believe us, you need only look to one of the largest businesses of our time, Starbucks, to find out why.

Starbucks co-founder, Gordon Bowker, tells us how Starbucks got its name in an interview with The Seattle Times. He says, “We were thinking of all kinds of names and came desperately close to calling it Cargo House, which would have been a terrible, terrible mistake. Terry Heckler [with whom Bowker owned an advertising agency] mentioned in an offhand way that he thought words that begin with ‘st’ were powerful words. I thought about that and I said, yeah, that’s right, so I did a list of ‘st’ words.

Somebody somehow came up with an old mining map of the Cascades and Mount Rainier, and there was an old mining town called Starbo. As soon as I saw Starbo, I, of course, jumped to Melville’s first mate [named Starbuck] in Moby-Dick.”

There you have it — Starbucks was named, in large part, due to the perceived strength of the “st” sound that begins its name.

“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

Jeff bezos

Words can indeed cause people to feel different things depending on the sounds in the word. Christopher Johnson, Ph.D., a verbal branding consultant known as “The Name Inspector,” discusses these sounds or “rhythmic contrasts” in words in his book MICROSTYLE The Art of Writing Little.

Did you know that business names can be thought of as either feminine or masculine depending on the sound or rhythm of the word?  He uses the examples of Chanel, a “feminine brand name”, and Black & Decker, a “masculine brand name”, as explained below.

The name Chanel is an iamb, meaning it consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (shə-NEHL or chaNEL.) “Iambs tend to sound lighter and softer,” Johnson writes, while “… trochees tend to sound heavier and harder.” Black & Decker is an example of a trochee; those consist of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable (BLACK & deck-ER.) He notes that “Most people ‘feel’ this difference even if they find it hard to pinpoint.” Keep in mind that means people will feel a certain way about your business name, probably without realizing it, so put some extra thought into naming your business.

Choosing the right domain name should be part of the process of selecting your business name. Both will support your brand, and for consistency, they should be as similar (if not exact) as possible. Successful businesses in this day and age require having an online presence, so a website (and therefore, domain name) is a must.

Here’s what else you should keep in mind when deciding on the perfect domain name for your brand:

• Does it pass the radio test?
  • If someone were only to hear your domain name in passing on the radio and never see it written out, could they navigate to it? If the answer is no, consider going back to the drawing board and choosing another name.
• Avoid unique spelling, punctuation, or excessive numbers.
  • For starters, it won’t pass the radio test. Do you really expect people to remember that instead of the letter “I,” you use the number “1” in your domain name? Or that you have approximately five hyphens and three numbers in your domain? No, you can’t reasonably expect that. And if people can’t remember or spell your domain name, the chances of them getting to your website are slim.
• Make it memorable.
  • Try to keep your domain name short. The longer it gets, the more chances people have of mistyping and never reaching your site.
• Buy alternate misspellings of your domain name.
  • This helps in two ways:
    • If there are common misspellings of your domain name, purchase them to ensure you get any traffic from people who mistyped your correct domain.
    • It prevents competitors from purchasing misspellings of your domain name. If your competitor owns those misspelled alternates of your domain, they can redirect traffic from there to their own site.
• Consider a new domain extension.
  • Is .com really king? It’s well known, and people recognize it, but nowadays, there are thousands of domain extensions that can help you get the perfect domain name.
  • Starting an online store? Try .store. Opening a yoga studio? Try .yoga. There is a domain extension for just about everything, and these TLDs can help add context and memorability to your domain name.

Business and Brand Logo

Humans are visual creatures, so hook their attention with a good-looking logo.

Why are logos important? Just like with domain names, a good logo is a calling card for your brand. Your logo should be memorable and unique enough that when people see it, they instantly think of your brand and don’t confuse it with another.

There are various types of logos, ranging from strictly visual (think abstract logos like Chase Bank) to mascots (used by many sports teams), emblems (law firms or universities), and lettermarks and wordmarks (like CNN or Google, respectively.)

Domain.com uses a variety of logos, like you see below, to help support our brand. 

When designing your logo, keep the following tips in mind:

• Leverage white and empty space. 
  • Your logo doesn’t need to look “busy” to communicate your brand.
• Rely on your business’s color palette. 
• Where will your logo be displayed? 
  • You’ll likely need different versions or sizes so that it looks good on your website, in your emails, and on social media. 
• Relevancy is key. 
  • Your logo is representative of your brand, don’t forget that. 

With Domain.com, it’s easy to create a professional logo to support your brand. All you need is a name, and Domain.com’s LogoMaker will instantly create hundreds of logo options for you to choose from. Then, you can customize everything from colors and fonts to icons and more. 

Sign in to your Domain.com account today and select “Business” at the top of your control panel to leverage the power and design capabilities of LogoMaker. 

Color Psychology and Branding

Designing a website can be a lot of fun, especially when you use a tool like WebsiteBuilder, which does all the heavy lifting for you. That gives you more time to focus on the creative aspects, like the color palette your business and site uses. 

Your brand’s color palette can affect the way people interact with you. This is due to color psychology, or “the study of hues as a determinant of human behavior.”

Certain colors lend themselves to specific associations. In Western culture, we say that green is the color of envy and think of blue as relaxing and meditative. The color black, for example, is believed to represent wealth and prosperity in Eastern cultures and is foreboding and threatening in Western cultures. 

Domain.com’s primary color is Carmine Red, as you see below. We chose it to help us create a strong, bold, and energetic brand expression that helps us stand out and build recognition. 

From there, we selected an accompanying functional color palette — one that’s monochromatic and leverages greyscale to add a stark contrast to our primary color. 

Go into your color selection with an idea of what you want those colors to exemplify. For Domain.com, we embrace a minimal and clean color palette to allow for deliberate emphasis on bold visual elements. Our colors are meant to inspire and drive action, to help the Doers out there get more done. 

Font and Branding

A successful brand understands that different fonts send different messages to their audiences. So choose your fonts carefully — no one wants to send the wrong message to their audience accidentally. 

There are hundreds and hundreds of fonts available to you, some you can find for free, and others require purchase. However, most of the fonts you’ll want to use fall into the following categories:

• Serif
  • Serif fonts are distinctive due to the flourish or decorative stroke at the end of the letters (both horizontally and vertically.) These fonts generally give your site and brand a more formal tone. 
• Sans 
  • Sans fonts add no serifs, or decorative strokes, to their letters. In fact, in French, “sans” means without. These fonts give off a modern and straightforward vibe. 

Domain.com uses Lato for its branding, choosing it for its flexibility and bold, modern style. 

What are you thinking about using for your brand? Why? Let us know in the comments!

Customer Service, Values, and Branding

A consistent customer experience is at the core of your brand. To put this into perspective, let’s look at Starbucks again to see what they’re doing right. 

Whether or not you’ve had their coffee (and with over 28k locations, we’re betting you have), the odds are good that you’ve heard of Starbucks. How did they get to be so big and such a well-loved brand?

The intelligent minds at Starbucks realized that their brand, their business persona, was in the hands of their customers. Understanding that, they’ve since done everything they can to enhance the public’s perception of them positively. 

Starbucks trained its partners (what they call their employees) to greet you when you walk in the door and know that it should only take 3 minutes from that moment until you get your drink. I don’t know about you, but a cheerful greeting and expedient service are likely to make me think more fondly of a business.

Starbucks provides a consistent experience. You’ll find similar menus across most of their locations, all of which are easily identifiable by the green siren logo. Not to mention, that logo is one of the world’s most recognizable logos. Their locations are comfortable, inviting, and positioned as a “third place” — a place between home and work that’s welcoming and relaxing.

Starbucks’ mission statement is, “To inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.” They live this mission in their stores, and it’s reflected in the materials they choose to share on social media. They do such an excellent job of living their mission statement, and so it’s how their customers think of them — it’s the heart of their brand.

What would happen to the Starbucks brand if they decided to double all their prices, increase the wait time for drinks, and hire only surly service workers? Those wouldn’t be changes to the material goods they offer, but changes that affect the customer experience. Their brand would undoubtedly suffer because it lives in the eyes of the consumer.

Have you ever been to the Starbucks website? In our original definition, we said that “Your brand is the summation of every single touchpoint a customer can have with your business and how they think about you.” Websites are customer touchpoints, and Starbucks’ site is designed to reflect their commitment to their mission statement and ease of use.

We understand that you may not have a Starbucks-sized budget to run and market your business, but you can still cop a few of their tactics to grow your brand. Put your customers first, provide a good and consistent experience, and live your mission statement.

A Successful Brand Is a Successful Business

Take the time to focus on building and crafting your brand before launching your business in the market. 

Structural elements like your logo, color palette, and typography and fonts keep your brand consistent and robust. These core pieces work together to make your brand recognizable wherever it appears. 

Once you’ve nailed your structural elements, you can approach your brand’s more flexible and creative elements, like selecting what photography and illustration to use on your site. All of these things help communicate a broader range of emotions, showcase your products, and create clear points of view for your customers. 

Ready to work on your brand and bring your business to life? Domain.com has all the tools you need, so get started today. 

What if we were to tell you that most of that information is incorrect?

Back away from those infographics and stick with us as we explore the psychology of color and how it can affect your website and your brand. 

In this post we’re discussing the following:

• What is color psychology?
• The relationship between humans and color.
• Why color choice is vital to your website and your brand.
• How to decide on the right colors for your site and brand.
• The juxtaposition of colors: how they can work together to achieve your desired effect.

Color Psychology and Your Website

What is color psychology?

“Color psychology is the study of hues as a determinant of human behavior,” says Wikipedia.

Unlike what a lot of online information would have you believe, color psychology is not a science. The color red doesn’t always fill us with passion just as yellow isn’t the universal color of happiness.

However, colors definitely influence us: Our moods, our preferences, and our actions can all be impacted by color.

The Relationship Between Humans and Color 

When light hits our eyes it’s passed through our retinas and understood as color. Our retinas have two kinds of photoreceptors: rods and cones. “Rods work at very low levels of light. … Rods don’t help with color vision, which is why at night, we see everything in a gray scale.” And “cones require a lot more light and they are used to see color.”

There’s no doubt that “…colors are psychological experiences.” When light hits your eye, these waves are “converted into electrical impulses which pass to the brain—eventually to the hypothalamus, which governs the endocrine glands, which in turn produce and secrete our hormones.” Pretty interesting, isn’t it?

What makes a person feel a certain way about a color?

Diversity is real — look around you. Considering how widely people can differ, is there any surprise that colors don’t have the same effects on everyone?   

Keep this in mind when choosing the colors for your website. In order to select the most effective ones, you’ll need to start by identifying and understanding your audience. Here are three things that can influence how your audience feels about different colors.

Age

Did you know that people’s preference for certain colors changes as they age?

Joe Hallock performed a study on color psychology and in it he quotes another scientist named Birren. Birren noted that, “With maturity comes a greater liking for hues of shorter wave length … than for hues of longer wave length.” This means people tend to prefer colors like blue or purple more than colors like red or orange as they age.

Gender

Are boys born inherently preferring the color blue? Are girls naturally drawn to the color pink? Hardly!

According to Smithsonianmag.com, “Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19^th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I.” And at first, there was no common consensus on what color was better suited for what gender — many publications listed pink as the manlier color since it derived from red.

“Our preference for a specific color can be related to how we feel in any situation, how we want to feel, and even how we remember certain experiences (to name a few),” says Hallock.

Here are the findings from Hallock’s study relating to color and gender.

Looking at the chart we can see that blue is a favorite color among both males and females. However, take a look at purple, a color that only the females preferred.  

Culture

Does a person’s cultural background inform their color preferences and associations? Absolutely.

For example, in Western cultures, white is a color symbolizing purity or cleanliness. In some Eastern cultures, it’s the color of mourning. Depending on your audience and where your customers are located, you’ll want to be mindful of your color choices. Research the cultural associations of the specific colors you’re interested in using for your brand or site before choosing something simply because it looks good to you.

How to Identify Your Website Audience

We hope that you took the time to work on your ideal customer persona and ideal audience before launching your website. If not, there’s always time to refine and do it now, but don’t delay.

We also recommend using Google Analytics to learn about where your site visitors are geographically located, what devices they use to enter your site, and a variety of other information. Analytics gives you a great amount of insight into the people who traffic your site.

Never used Google Analytics before and don’t have it set up on your website? That’s ok, use this guide and get started with Google Analytics in under a day.

Choosing Colors for Your Website

Now that we understand different factors affecting people’s perception and feelings regarding color, we can start talking about choosing colors for your site and your brand.

Can you answer the following questions?

• Where is my desired audience located?
• What age group am I targeting?
• Am I targeting website visitors or shoppers of a certain gender?

The answers to these questions should help you choose your site colors.

If you are designing a website that sells clothes to kids and pre-teens, opt for brighter colors and a more engaging design. In youth, humans tend to prefer bright colors and this could help you sell more products on your site. This color preference is vastly different from older generations that prefer more subdued blues and softer colors. If you’re in the life insurance business, it doesn’t seem like yellow, orange, or red are the best colors for your website. Choosing colors that your audience isn’t attracted to can lead to lower engagement on your site and fewer clicks.

Test Colors on Your Website

One of the nicest things about websites is that they’re easy to edit and work on nowadays. You don’t need years of schooling under your belt to change a few colors on your site. Any good WebsiteBuilder will give you the option to update colors, usually with just the click of a button.

And chances are, your website won’t be perfectly optimized when it goes live for the first time. This is why we encourage you to perform audits and tests on your website. You always want to know what’s working and what isn’t so you can make any necessary adjustments and get ahead of your competitors.

Here’s a simple test you can run on your website: Updating your button colors.

What’s a button? A website button is usually an HTML element on your website, directly on the user interface, that aims to influence and impact the user experience. Or in other words, they’re the Call-to-Actions you hope your visitors click on. Take a look at a button on Domain.com’s website below, circled in blue.

Pro tip: Want to know where people are clicking most on your site? Try heatmapping!

There are various free and paid heatmapping solutions that you can find by running a quick online search. Heatmapping, quite literally, allows you to see where users are clicking most on your site or how far they’re scrolling by “color coding” your site. It’s a tool that analyzes and visualizes data and layers it over your site (not visible to your visitors) so you can tell what the most important or engaging content on your site is. Keep an eye on your heatmap after updating and testing your button colors so you know which ones work best.

Choosing Colors That Work Together on Your Website

Not all colors play well together. Some colors are complementary, while others don’t bring out the best in one another.

Human brains, interesting things that they are, perceive colors differently based on the colors they’re around. You can dive into that in this article by Canva, where they discuss Henry Matisse, who understood the power and impact colors could have when used together.

Choose The Best, Most Effective Colors for Your Website

Don’t choose the colors for your site based on what you find most attractive and appealing. Chances are, that might not be the same way your audience thinks.

To understand what colors work best on your site, it’s vital that you know your audience and the audience you want to attract.

Use the tips above to create a well-designed site that drives action and performance through use of color.

No website? No problem. Get started with your site today by trying Domain.com’s easy to use WebsiteBuilder.