Creating a solid, unique, and recognizable brand is the key to standing out in the industry. As a freelancer, designer, or small business owner, you need to make a great first impression and keep your business front of mind to attract potential customers.
Remember that brands should not be static and should constantly evolve to reflect the ever-changing consumer needs, business growth, and industry trends.
It’s a good idea to always keep an eye out for emerging branding trends to ensure that your brand and visual design remain fresh, engaging, and fun to new customers and loyal ones.
Every year, businesses must face the challenge of adapting to new trends and keeping track of consumer preferences, and Digital Creative Asia is known to help with that.
Similarly, even in 2023, companies must reinvent their branding to adhere to consumer needs. This article will introduce you to the top 5 business branding trends.
1. Retro and nostalgia
Brands will often travel back in time for inspiration and find themselves discovering retro-style branding once again. Nostalgic designs are being revived with a modern touch. The benefit of nostalgic branding is it allows the brands to express themselves in a vibrant, engaging way while simultaneously allowing customers to take a walk down memory lane. Such design and branding will let them go back in time by contrasting with modern trends they will be familiar with. It is a creative way for a brand to remain timeless and engage customers.
2. The power of color
Brands put a lot of thought into colors to express themselves and instill certain emotions. The colors they choose have power and can directly impact their audience. Red represents passion, love, excitement, and danger, while white represents peace, unity, and innocence. Many food brands like McDonald’s and KFC use a lot of red in their branding to instill passion and excitement in their customers. Facebook, Apple, and Samsung use white in their branding to instill trust, neutrality, and the emotion of innocence.
3. Environmental Marketing
While sustainability and eco-friendly marketing is becoming increasingly important by the day, the trend of implementing green onto your branding will be around for a while. Consumers are becoming aware of the damage brands may cause due to manufacturing processes, packaging, and sometimes even their products. Therefore, sustainable marketing means ensuring that your customers believe you care for the planet and are doing everything you can to fight against climate change. When a brand is cause-driven, consumers will feel that it is more meaningful to purchase your products and will feel more proud to associate with your brand.
4. Symbolism
The symbolic and minimalist design trend aims to remove visual clutter and strip branding back to its simplest forms. Bold colors and retro designs may be more appealing, but minimalism is more long-lasting and is a trend that will stay for a good number of years. Opting for this trend also allows brands to utilize the same style for decades before requiring to update their look. 95% of top brands use only one or two colors for their logo. For instance, Starbucks, Ford, FedEx, Apple, IKEA, and Spotify.
5. Flat designs
The use of 3D designs, 3D buttons, 3D imagery, shadows, and heavy gradients skyrocketed when the world switched from button phones to smartphones. They did it on purpose so people could get used to touchscreen phones. Since everyone was so accustomed to button phones, developers wanted to mimic that feeling in new technology. The goal of 3D designs was to bridge that gap and get more people on board with touch screens. The flat design trend has been going on since the mid-2000s. Now that touch screens are everywhere and are a routine part of our lives. Icons started getting removed, along with heavy gradients and the use of shadows.
In conclusion
Various trends will shape the future of business branding. Bringing back trends that were close to consumers’ hearts in the past can be the way to win them over once again. Brands will revive nostalgic trends with a modern touch. The right colors are also crucial for a good branding design. The importance and power colors hold will always remain a trend. Another excellent branding trend is sustainability since consumers are becoming more aware of how products harm the environment. So, brands need to convince them that we care. Minimalism and flat designs are long-lasting trends that show power in simplicity. It sends out a good message.
We hope this article has been insightful and helped you understand the future of business branding. Thank you for reading!
