Crafting a soulful business in today’s market will set you apart from the rest and ensure your business has longevity, because buyers are now seeking more from the brands they interact with. In an era of fast business, over reliance on automation, and false promises, people are feeling buying fatigue. In my experience, brands who recognise this and take steps to provide their audience with brand experiences and brand community see greater engagement, conversions, and loyalty.
How do they achieve this? By implementing bold brand marketing strategies that drive memorable and positive customer experiences, leading to increased brand awareness, advocacy, and sales.
Brands who employ bold marketing strategies have a common goal—to meet their audience with high emotion. The desired emotion can range from humour to delight, empathy, anger, and joy. The point is, it’s hard hitting and memorable. The method for achieving this is to create brand visuals, messaging, and storytelling which are playful, daring, surprising, unusual, novel, inclusive, divisive, boundary-pushing, or subversive in nature. And the degree to which these are seen and felt can be mild to striking—it all depends on the brand, their personality, audience, and goals.
What does this look like in real life? Let’s look at a successful real-world, bold branding example. The mental wellness app Headspace has one of the most recognisable brand identities in the health space. The instantly recognisable orange smiley is literally the face of their brand values which include being "kind, warm, and welcoming." This focus on emotional expression and audience empathy can be seen across their brand marketing which includes shapes, objects, and characters personified to represent the needs and emotions of their audience in a simplified way.
And here’s where they go bold—their bright and upbeat colour palette and playful illustrations may seem jarring with serious mental health topics, but they deliberately employ this to help destigmatise seeking help and to make mental health more "approachable and normalised" (It's Nice That). This clever strategy is one based on inclusivity and empathy but also subversion of the norms and stereotypes in mental health support for adults, in which the messaging tends to be serious and heavy. Headspace challenges this norm and has instead chosen to approach it in a new way. Their 1.3M followers on Instagram alone suggest it’s working.
It can be easy to look at a successful and established bold marketing example and see why it’s working, but what about the rest of us? How can small businesses and entrepreneurs take cues from these bigger brands? It helps to consider the transferable touchpoints which enhance the customer buying experience no matter the size of the business.
Let’s look at Headspace once again. Their visuals alone don’t determine their success. It’s their well-thought-out customer touchpoints which take the experience from good to stand-out, and why customers become loyal brand participants. To create brand awareness, they use bold, bright, and consistent visuals full of relatable emotional expression, along with playfulness and lightness which makes them intriguing and approachable—think of this as their shop window. Once you’re in the app, it’s like stepping inside a well curated store where they consider every question, challenge, and need of their target audience. They provide helpful guides, explainer graphics, easy navigation, personalised home screens and—what I consider to be their star quality—community sharing and insights.
They actively encourage their members to write in with questions and personal stories and then answer these in video guides, helping people feel seen and part of a wider community. They also do features where they go out and interview people on the street and invite them to do impromptu guided meditations, helping their audience at home feel immersed in the brand experience. They also have a feature on the home screen which gives you a live counter of the number of people around the world who are doing the same meditation as you at that given moment. It's brand activation at its most soulful. And it’s always delivered beautifully within the structure of their bold and beautiful visual interface.
As you can see, the key to enhancing your buyer brand experience is to pre-empt their needs, challenges, and desires—based on real audience research—and package it all together in a bold and imaginative presentation which directly answers these questions.
Let’s go back to the question of how can small businesses and entrepreneurs take cues from these bigger brands and apply it to their own bold brand marketing practice? Here are my top takeaways you can start using today:
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This starts with consolidating your brand purpose, values, audience, vision, and mission. Any good brand logo and identity relies on these core brand tenets to inform the colours, personality, style, and feeling which form your brand visuals. A skilled brand designer will be able to tie all these elements together including accompanying illustrative graphics to supercharge your brand storytelling.
This is why having a brand strategy is so crucial. As discussed earlier, knowing this will help you determine the flavour that works best for your brand marketing. Once this is clear in your mind, hire an experienced designer to create a visual representation tailored to the message you want to convey.
And use branded guides, FAQs, and other helpful resources to dive into the emotional transformation on the other side of working with you or buying your products. Use evocative imagery to reinforce your messaging.
And use bold brand graphics or illustrations to visually guide and engage your audience. This could include a customer journey roadmap, captivating call-to-action buttons, colourful email signatures, bright and bold newsletter headers and footers. The possibilities are endless, but the more touchpoints that consistently use your unique brand style, the more nurtured your customer buying experience will feel.
And share it through your visual marketing such as with impactful infographics, customer quotes, video participation, survey results, and giveaways, remembering to add your bold branding in the presentation.
As you can see, successful bold brand marketing marries together purpose and strategy with strong visual brand design and a consistent approach to presentation.
In today’s competitive market, brands providing community-centric buying experiences are more likely to see greater emotional engagement, soulful sales, and brand loyalty which runs deep. This centres on placing your audience at the centre of your brand messaging and enlisting bold visual storytelling to emotionally engage and intrigue your buyers, leading them through your brand world and across all touchpoints.
Now is the time to create rich and memorable moments for your customers, shielding your business from one-time buyers and instead cultivating loyal brand advocates. Which experience will you gift your audience first?
From zesty nickname to penned artist name, UK illustrator-designer Rosetta "Lemon" Westbrook brings a bold, hand-crafted approach to commercial design, community projects, and her own artwork through her brand Get the Zest Studio.
With over 8 years of professional experience including graphic design, illustration, and marketing, Rosetta provides tailored visual branding and curated artwork for clients like UNESCO, food brands with B Corp status, mental health charities, small creative businesses, and entrepreneurs. Her vibrant perspective has earned features in magazines, guest blogs, and four business award nominations.
Through her practice, Rosetta’s vision is to enrich people’s everyday experiences and environments, help people feel more confident around creativity, and strengthen community connections. When she's not creating, you’ll find her reading all sorts, seeking awe, home brewing kombucha, adding a fried egg to most meals, and raising vegetables in pots.
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