One of the things that goes into developing a brand is the emotional response you want someone to have when visiting your website. A website isn’t just there to give your customer information, but to link a sort of mood to your product. Good companies are aware of this. When I went to the Apple website, I not only got information on their products, but I also absorbed on an unconscious level that Apple products are sleek and cool.
What gave a brand an identity for me was the visuals on its site. The sites that featured their products front and center often left me with a more lasting impression of who they were when I got to the site. When I got to the website of the company called “Gates N Fences” I did not absorb it’s branding as well, because the photos of its projects were so small, and looked cheap. Meanwhile if I went to Apple, I got high resolution images often emphasizing the new features of its latest electronics. Gates N Fences may have put more info on their front page with text, but the text didn’t burn into my mind the way the images from Apple did.
I think another thing companies that have a good brand do well is synthesize messaging, despite having various products. I’m going to use Apple again, since I think they brand themselves so well. Selling watches and a streaming service sounds completely different at first, but Apple manages to turn them both into a cohesive part of their company with branding. On their website they accomplish this not only with the Apple logo, but by giving both of the pages for these products similar designs. Your mind never wonders how these two products meld together. You don’t question it much at all.
It’s also important that a website has some cohesion with their social media account. I’ve used Apple enough, so I’ll use Wendy’s for this example. When visiting the Wendy’s website, not only does it make you hungry, but the colors and the imagery give off a sense of fun. The social media account does this too, with posting a bunch of memes and giving snarky replies. There isn't a sense from the customer that someone hijacked the social media account, even if it is a bit weird.
I don’t own a business, but if I had to make a fictional one it would be a book selling business. I would probably try to mimic Apple and put giant images of books front and center on my website so people wouldn't forget what my company did, no matter the name. I’d also make the social media account friendly, not snarky or clever like Wendy’s. Books are often associated with a sort of intellectual heft, so maybe I would play up on that angle as well, with intelligent (looking) people reading books on my ads. I don’t know every specific detail I’d use for a site or ads, but overall I’d want to give the feeling to someone using my site that they just met a smart and entertaining person.
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