Does your visual image reinforce what you’re saying?

Irina has an attractive look, for a tennis ball, that is. You see, Irina still is wearing her hair in a very severe, very bleached blonde, very short cut that looks like a barber did it with a single setting on his buzz cutter. I am sure that this was a stunning look on her young face in the 80s. Now it makes her head look like its ready for Wimbledon. Irina is a hair stylist who wonders why she doesn’t have enough business. Has she looked in the mirror, lately?

Your visual image, what you physically look like, is part of your personal brand. It can either reinforce what you’re saying verbally or it can introduce doubt in a large way.

Let’s look at Brandi, a gal who caught me at a recent networking event. Her self-intro was simple, yet powerful and immediately captured my interest when she said skincare. As soon as I heard that word, my eyes went instantly to her face to see how her skin looked. It was flawless. Without her having to say another word, I was completely convinced of her abilities as an esthetician.

Whatever business your in, you want to be sure that how you physically look is cohesive with it. This is especially important if you are in a field that is visually orientated like fashion, beauty, photography or design of any kind.

Color Creates a Visual Personal Brand

Katy Perry was recently featured in the Los Angeles Times, but it wasn’t for her singing. What caught the attention of the media was how stylish she became by wearing the color blue.

Selecting a specific color for your wardrobe is an easy way to create a signature look. When you mix it up with different textures such as lace and denim you can get a wide variety of looks from dazzling to casual all in the same hue.

Like Katy, you will want to find your favorite colors to go with your signature color. She favors white and silver with her blue.

A word of caution: If you dress in your color from head to toe you risk looking like Mr. Clean. Be sure  to add contrast to your outfits with neutral colors.

When you have a visual signature “element” you become more recognizable. As we know, brand recognition is what its all about.

Do you want to look more sophisticated in print?

By limiting your color palette and using colors low in saturation you can instantly look more sophisticated, elite and expensive. To proclaim these "high-end" qualities to the world, cut down on your use of color.

High end design is the realm of black, white and grey. Think of luxury cars, they are black, white or silver. If you were to see a purple mercedes, it would feel off or even wrong. In art terms, this is called being less saturated or if you go all the way to gray scale unsaturated.

For example: Ads for fragrances, especially for men, appear in using little or even no color - "low saturation" and low contrast.  If you look at the ad for "Dark Obsession" you can barely read the name and "for men" almost disappears. The bottle has just barely a hit of brown in it, you may not even be able to detect it here. Notice  how the bottle has a strong highlight on it. That is the point of highest contrast. High contrast draws your eye to it. When viewing the piece you will certainly land on the bottle, you can't help it. This is a pure branding piece with no sales copy! 

In the Chrome Azzaro sample, you can see how they have limited their color palette, using a low saturated image with a bit of light blue to highlight the product. Their typography is more readable than the Calvin Klein ad because it is a sales piece, in contrast to the branding example above.

When using these more sophisticated low contrast, low saturation color palettes be sure to keep your text readable.

You can remember this concept by thinking of high contrast as and shouting low contrast as whispering.

Keep an eye out for this type of color scheme and let me know where you find it. 

The door hanger that hung itself

On my front door I found this door hanger. It grabbed my attention instantly as it looked like a paint swatch. Without reading anything my brain when instantly to it's paint chip file, which led to further inspection.

Upon looking at it more closely, a second time, I saw there were words under the color blocks. It reads, "Why it takes a college education to paint your home." In art terms we call this a "second reading" as it was not the first thing we saw, it took a closer or second look.

The headline "Why it takes a college education to paint your home." tied nicely to the logo and name of the company "College Works Painting." The tagline under the logo "A higher degree of painting" followed the theme. It art and branding terms we would say its cohesive.

Flipping it to the backside we are rewarded with their second headline "Ninety-nine percent of a great paint job has nothing to do with painting." As you can see this is followed by a string of nine bullet points, logo, phone, website and license number. The 888 number and noticeable lack of address raise my suspicions. This is starting to feel like some kind of thin franchise deal. Speaking of thin, the paper is lightweight and the ink from the other side is visible. In art lingo we would say "it's bleeding through." The front is printed in just one color, blue and the back is printed in two colors, blue and black. The black is used as a percentage and appears grey.

They totally lost me with the headline on the backside of the piece "Ninety-nine percent of a great paint job has nothing to do with painting." I am sorry, as homeowner, I want a great paint job. The bullet points below don't adequately "pay-off" or explain the statement.

The second headline introduced a huge quality of doubt. The refrain in my brain is "Wow, they are only going to spend 1% of their attention on the actual paint job." Which leads me to "So, their college-aged enthusiastic sales person is going to give me a quick estimate, with a great price. Their college-aged painters will, show up on time, smell good, smile, finish on time and slop some paint on my house, get paint all over my driveway and use the wrong color."

Ok, now you've got me going on playing the rest of the scenario out. When I call to complain about my sloppy paint job the college-aged customer service person is going to tell me that "The painters tried hard and did their best and besides my Mom says it looks good!"

The good: Cohesive concept, they used the college theme throughout.

The bad: The text failed to communicate a compelling message. Instead instilled a feeling of distrust and doubt.

The ugly: The piece was printed on thin paper and in only two colors. It gives the impression of being cheap.

This door hanger hung itself. 

I think I will walk over to my neighbor, Todd, a local contractor with gnarly hands and a gruff attitude and ask him about painting my house. He seems like a better bet.

Show Your Colorful Personal Brand

Part of your personal brand is your personality. Let it show, let it shine. When I revisited some of my recent writing drafts, a few seemed rather dry bordering on medium gray number five. It was hard to see the “Alice” in it. I forgot to add living color! 

Many of us who have grown-up in corporate or spent time in academia have forgotten to have some fun when we communicate with the written word. At my company, ShoutBrand we believe in "just right" - a balance. In this case, we are looking for writing that is just informal enough.

Here are three tips:

1. Use a conversational style.
If appropriate, write like you were chatting one-on-one with a friend. This technique is often used in sequential email marketing. For example:

“This morning when I was out for my walk, I started to think about how something seemed missing from my most recent writing drafts. They just weren't, well, as fun as they use to be. Then I saw it, a sign that said, "STOP" - yes,  a regular old stop sign. That got me thinking about….”

2. Add colorful, unexpected substitution in a cliché. 

It hit me like a ton of ice cubes. (Instead of bricks.)

For a list clichés

3.  List of three, where the third thing is not anticipated

The roles Jaclyn plays best are doctor, lawyer and superhero.

When in doubt, insert a bit of color. A little hot pink magenta or lime green goes a long way in making your text interesting. Show your colorful personal brand, by letting your personality glow.

How do you pump-up the color in your writing?

Know Your Stock Photography Rights

Images are an integral part of any marketing piece. I like to use the word "image" vs "photo" because many time the images we use are not photos! They may be charts, graphs, info-graphics or other types of illustrations.

Never before has there been such a vast quantity of accessible images available. And they have never been less expensive!

Although you can view many images with a quick Google search, you will NOT want to use these images in your marketing piece, unless you can obtain the rights to use them. When you just "download" images without regard for ownership, you are literally stealing them. Fortunately, there are many websites where you can get high quality legal images for next to nothing. The general term for these image banks is "Stock Photography." It's important to know your stock photography rights!

For those not familiar with purchasing stock images, let's go over the two basic types:

Royalty-FreeThe majority of stock photo images available today are in this category. You buy the image and you can use it over and over again without ever paying any royalties, hence the name.

Royalty-Free photos are usually inexpensive, especially if you are using the "small' size image. There is a huge amount available for $5 or even less. The pricing can be a bit tricky as many site use a credit system. You first have to buy a block of credit and then apply those credits to the images you are purchasing. Pricing does vary, so you will want to check pricing as you go along. Although the images are inexpensive it is still not a nice surprise when one costs $50 when you are expecting to pay $5.

Note: Generally there are some restrictions to usage above and beyond what most people would do with the images. Such as offer them for resale, use than for the primary image of a print-on-demand item or use them more than 250,000 times!

Upside: Inexpensive, although prices do range it is always a good idea to check the pricing of an image.
Downside: Others people may be using the same images, as there are no restrictions.

Rights Managed
Some images are right-managed, which means you pay for a specific usage and only that usage. Before the site will give you pricing they will ask you several questions about how the image is being  used such as size, placement, media and distribution.

For example: A half page image used inside a text book will be a lower cost than a full page image used on a cover with a national distribution. Generally speaking these images are more expensive, in the hundreds of dollar range.

Upside: Generally higher-quality images, less dilution
Downside: More expensive and limited one-time usage

Stock photography is good for any general images. For example: Lifestyle images like a happy family, a group of businessman, the skyline of New York City or an ice cream cone.

Stock images are generally brand-free, meaning you will not be able to find image of specific items. For example: You won't find pictures of Wheaties, Starbucks coffee, or Target Stores. It is hard to find any type of images featuring cars as their brands are so recognizable.

To find stock photo sites simply search for "Stock Photography."

Some popular sites are:
BigStockPhoto.com
iStockPhoto.com
123rf.com
GettyImages.com

Note: There are many other kinds of stock sites, such as stock video and stock music!

Happy hunting!

Are you creating TRUST or DOUBT?

Are your actions saying, "You don't care?" Are you creating TRUST or DOUBT?

Yesterday I noticed that the house next store "SOLD" as they had place the rider on top of the FOR SALE sign. Since the sign is proximate to my driveway, I noticed a yellow post-it note on the "SOLD" part of the sign. Curious, I took a closer look. It simply had the address on the note "204 E. Maple Ave." The person placing the "SOLD" rider on the sign did not remove the instruction.

It made me wonder WHY; why did they leave the post-it note on the sign? Is it because they forgot? Is it because no one told them to remove the note? Or is it because they simply don't care about the quality of their work? Whatever the reason it's sloppy.

Although this is a tiny thing, it would make me think twice about hiring this particular Realtor, even though he is THE Realtor in our neighborhood.

Real Estate transactions are riddled with small details on so many levels. Could I trust this Realtor's office to handle my sale if they can't even get a sign right. This lack of detail introduced DOUBT, which caused me to discount any trust I had in this realtor.

Now this reaction maybe a little extreme, but I am doing it to make a point. Details count. Audience counts. How you are displaying yourself and your company to the world counts. Remember with each action and interaction you are either building DOUBT or TRUST.

DOUBT is poison. It only takes a small amount to contaminate a large amount of TRUST.

Today, will you build TRUST or DOUBT?