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.

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 ha