Trust means your future customers believe you’re likely to be honest and competent, and will deliver a good experience. Sometimes trust comes from friends telling friends they had a great experience. But most of your future customers wont have word-of-mouth to rely on. They have to decide on their own whom to trust. Thats the mission of your logo, website or brochure, to create your business dress and body language–your visual branding.

Here are a few basics to help your business look credible:

1. Go for simplicity and lack of clutter. (Think Apple, the master of simplicity in branding.)
2. Create or demand a clean, well-balanced graphic design.
3. Use one or two basic colors that go well together, not a hodgepodge.
4. Choose one font and stick with it. You can express almost anything by using variations within a single font family: size, weight (boldness), italics, etc. If you really must, choose a second font for major headlines. But first try it with one font.
5. Coordinate a single look – design, colors, etc. – across everything you do, including your logo, website, brochures, ads and signage.

Related posts:

1. 8 Important Attributes of a Branded Organisation Building a brand requires real understanding, knowledge, talent, correct creative...
2. Brand System – The Experience As mentioned before, experience is the third spep in defining...
3. 3 Branding Myths & 3 Branding Principles Branding isn’t just one aspect of your marketing campaign. It...

Results from TippingSprung’s first annual survey of brand names revealed the top brand names in a number of key categories. Major trends in brand naming were also uncovered. The survey focused on names and products that had been released within the prior 18 months.

Choosing a name is one of the most important decisions a company can make when launching a brand. While packaging, taglines, or even product formulation can change on a regular basis, the name is the one element of the brand that remains constant.

said Martyn Tipping, president, TippingSprung.

The following are a few of the trends noted in the survey:

Authenticity and simplicity rule.

The survey shows that companies are gravitating towards real-word names rather than coined or made-up names. This reflects the consumers’ desire to connect with brands that communicate authenticity and simplicity.

Marketers are stuck in the middle between consumers and lawyers.

Corporate trademark lawyer may like coined names like Verizon or Altria that can be registered and protected in multiple classes. Savvy marketers are trying to satisfy the needs of both audiences by developing coined names that have instantly recognizable roots and meaning. One approach is to “embed” a real word prominently in the new name, as in the examples of Achieva, Genworth, and Scenium. Another approach is to bring two words together to create a new name, as in the case of PureVision, SoundDock, or CallVantage.

As companies get more complicated, so do the names.

With a resurgence in corporate merger and acquisition activity, TippingSprung believes that consumers should brace themselves for a new onslaught of coined names.

Related posts:

1. Portmanteau – Brand Naming Tips The Strategic Name Development Blog has an excellent post about...
2. 5 Myths of Brand Naming After the 5 Tips on Brand Naming, here is an...
3. Logo trends 2005 The word “trend” seems to raise the little hairs on...