What Does Clutter and Branding Have in Common?

Well, if it is really good branding, the answer is nothing. Good branding can be seen as the anti-clutter agent of our post-modern culture. Sometimes it is hard to appreciate this truth when we are bombarded with advertising messages that taunt their brand messages.

But the enormous amount of words and images that fill our daily pipeline are actually serving us well when they are filtered through a quality branding process. We can best see this at play when we drive down main street USA. Try this the next time your driving down the main drag in your town. As you observe the many signs and messages, notice how the clean, high quality images and message stand out while the low grade graphics and over crowded messages just add to the clutter. We can observe this same contrast of quality and clutter strolling through a magazine, viewing a power point or surfing the web. So can we really make a case that quality brands reduce clutter in the world? Surely there will be many opinions, but when you think of your favorite brands, you can sort through a lot less clutter when they are well crafted and simple.

So why so much clutter in the marketplace? Well, it could be due to the misguided passions of many business owners who approach marketing without a clear brand position and a strategy for implementation. The tendency for small businesses, driven by a passion to tell their story, is to overload their messaging with too much image and information. The results in most cases are messy. This quote from the Brand Gap says it well.

“Our brain acts as a filter to protect us from the vast amount of irrelevant information that surrounds us every day.”
The Brand Gap: Revised Edition, Marty Neumeier

So if your guilty of creating clutter, you will serve the public and yourself well by adopting a clear brand position for your products and or services and applying the skills of a designer who truly understands branding. It does not have to be overly complicated or expensive to get great results. To declutter your brand, consider the following steps.

1. Define a clear and focused position—what makes your business unique and desirable to the market.
2. Clean up your operational and promotional collateral that follow a comprehensive style guide—consistency allows your brand to be reinforced in the mind of your customers.
3. Develop compelling sales and marketing strategies that powerfully connect value propositions to strategic customer desires.
4. Deliver customized marketing campaigns that help sell to more strategic customers with less effort.

Don't let all of this information give you a headache. If you need help with any of these steps, or you have questions about branding, feel free to contact us.