To your knowledge the best brands are complex, multi-dimensional and designed for longevity, its integrity is its brand’s Visual identity. To add on, their logo, colors, fonts and the style guides can be remembered understood by us in less than half a second and keep them registered in the Brain. How the brain process branding and a business’ visual identity make the most of our learning’s and carries important lessons for marketers and entrepreneurs.

To be clearer, we show you how our brains see you’re branding –

Step 1: Visually capturing and transmission –

We humans are incredibly visual. For a fact, almost 50% of our brains activities are involved in visual processing. When we see brands or a logo, our eyes sends a signal along the fusiform gyrus, a part of the cerebrum, which is the largest area of the human brain. This part of our brain recognizes whether this logo and branding are new and unknown to us or something we’ve already seen before. More than half of the consumers present elsewhere prefer to buy new products from a familiar brand than switch to a new brand altogether. And this is how effective the visual elements of your brand can be.

Step 2: Shape recognition process –

As our primary research is all based on the neuromarketing and involvement of neuromarketing, so continuing the traits from there, the brand experience travels to the Primary Visual Cortex for the brand shape recognition. This otherwise is also known as ‘V1’ or the ‘Striate cortex,’ this part of the brain is the first place where information from our eyes reaches to the cerebral cortex. The major function which the V1 performs is detecting edges, outlines and shapes in objects visualized in the brand. Although subtle, the brain research shows even a brand’s shapes can subconsciously effect how we look at it. Those curves are typically more inviting, whereas sharp angles and edges can represent a sense of power but may also indicate aversion. Neuroscience experts explain that our brains are predisposed to like certain fonts more than others, this happens not only with brands but almost anything and everything we see in our daily life.

Step 3: The Visual mapping –

Here, the primary Visual Cortex understands lines and edges, and the cells in secondary visual cortex, “V2,” are interpreting those colors and helping them connect short-term visual experiences with the longer-term memories stored in the vault of our brains. Researchers suggests that the V2 is particularly responsible for how we perceive color consistency, this explains why a red apple still looks red if we look at it outside, under a lamp or in different light conditions.

This also interestingly indicates few researches conducted between to the connection between color and memory, here seeing a logo in color makes it 39% more memorable compared to seeing the same logo in black and white. What we understand by the studies conducted are that color also drives engagement, a very important one and adding color to blog posts, product guides, print advertising and also other brand collateral increases readership in a large scale.

Step 4: Match the memory –

When we have broken down a brand’s elements into different sectors, our brains start to match the visual patterns like a puzzle leading to light. It detects to previous experiences with similar patterns stored in our memory. This includes things like ‘I’ve shopped at that store earlier at the same place,’ or ‘this logo looks so similar, I think I’ve seen it before’.’ Let’s take for instance, in a research conducted by a group of experts, they clubbed two different groups of people and presented them logos, one authentic and one fictional. Here the real logos activated additional parts of the people ‘brains and associated with their memory and meaning, whereas the fictional logos failed to do so. To keep this simple, our own minds we link the brands with different parts of our personal identity.

Step 5: Enrichment –

At our last step in concluding this whole article let me explain the enrichment process, in this segment, after our brains complete their beginning steps of memory association, we enrich our understanding of a brand by compiling other semantic attributes to what we’ve seen. A few examples to support this include some specific products, slogans, relevant imagery and associations we’re familiar with.

Neuromarketing