MiGoVR - Asking ChatGPT about Web Development

Asking ChatGPT about Web Development

by Artificial IntelligenceDesignDevelopment

ChatGPT was introduced to us on Novemember 2022. It consists of an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. And yes the development of artificial intelligence (AI) is the most important technological advance of the last decades. According to Bill Gates, AI is as important as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet and the mobile phone.

We just asked ChatGPT to explain one of our services, “Web Development”, and the response was:

“Web development refers to the process of creating websites and web applications for the internet. This involves a combination of different skills such as web design, coding, database management, and server configuration, among others.

Web development can be broadly divided into two categories: front-end development and back-end development. Front-end development involves creating the user interface of a website, including the design, layout, and functionality that users interact with on a web page. This typically involves using languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Back-end development, on the other hand, involves creating the server-side logic and database management that powers a website. This includes building APIs, managing data storage, and implementing server-side scripting languages such as PHP, Python, or Ruby.

Web development also involves various tools and frameworks, such as content management systems (CMS), web application frameworks, and development platforms, which make it easier and more efficient to create web applications.

Overall, web development is a dynamic and constantly evolving field, as new technologies and design trends emerge, and as the demands of users and businesses change.“

migovr_blog_web_internet_blue-1

There is a lot of blue on the internet. Why?

by BrandingDesign

Go Google something. Okay, now, go and check Facebook. Great, okay, now, pop onto Twitter. And, just to seal the deal, take a peek at your LinkedIn.

You know what you just saw a lot of? The color blue.

Blue is the most popular color on the internet by far. But as to why, well, that seems to be up for debate.

Blue has long been the go-to color for links. But no one can seem to agree on exactly why, and who made that decision.

Internet folklore traces the popularity of links back to the father of the internet, Sir Tim Berners Lee. Some of the earliest pictures of him that feature links on his computer screen show links colored in blue.

When Mark Zuckerberg was building Facebook, in the days when he was still working out of a college dorm, the choice to make blue its main color was a no brainer. Mainly, because it wasn’t really a choice.

Zuckerberg is colorblind, unable to see red or green, and so blue is the only color he can fully interpret, which made his decision to make Facebook blue a pretty easy one.

The social network being one of the most popular sites in the world, and surely something most of us look at multiple times a day, has continued the trend of blue being the color we see most often online.

41 shades of blue

Apparently this is your favorite shade of blue. How do I know? Well, nearly a decade ago, Google, which was not exactly considered a purveyor of design, had an inconsistency.

Its homepage featured a button that used one shade of blue, and Gmail featured a button that used another.

They decided to standardize the shade they were using, but which blue were they going to choose?

To find out, they ran a bunch of user tests, testing a number of shades of blue that were almost imperceptibly different. How many blues? 41 to be exact.

As is talked about in the biography, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!, this story has become something of a legend. A tech company, and a manager, who, rather than trusting the gut of their designers, used data to make a design decision.

I’m not saying it’s good or bad. But, what I am saying is that the winning blue has been one of Google’s main colors ever since.

So, why?

Perhaps it is because the sky and sea are blue. Perhaps it’s because one influential person just decided he or she liked the color blue. Whatever the truth is of its origin, blue is the internet, and indeed, the entire world of design’s default color.

 

migovr_blog_deisgn01

Content marketing in 2017

by BrandingNewsTechnology

Content marketing is rapidly evolving. Producing generic content and throwing it out there hoping for a miracle is no longer a marketing strategy for any business that hopes to stay competitive.

Spun content on web pages, auto-generated videos, and other poor content marketing strategies will often have a negative impact on your brand, making your business that much less to succeed.

Over the past few years, successful brands have been taking advantage of advances in tech to develop successful content marketing strategies.

For instance, mobile accounted for 53 percent of the total time spent on a digital device compared with 47 percent on desktops back in 2013. In 2015, 65 percent of users spent time on mobile compared with only 35 percent of users on desktop, illustrating the important role mobile has played for content in recent times.

Every indication is that content marketing and social media marketing will continue to evolve, and technology will be firmly in the driver’s seat.

Check out this sample of some of the tech advances that are likely to transform this landscape in 2017 and beyond.

1. Artificial Intelligence

Many of us have been conditioned to tremble and cower at the sound of artificial intelligence, thanks in part to the years we spent following The Terminator and The Matrix. With AI now capable of producing decent articles and other forms of content, content developers and marketers also have good reason to be afraid of AI.

Or do they?

While AI has been known to do impressive things, humans who take advantage of technology are often much better at accomplishing tasks than humans or machines alone. This is why content marketers who will take advantage of AI stand to benefit greatly from harnessing the powers of AI.

AI has the potential to change the content marketing landscape, even revolutionize it. It can be used better understand content for your keywords, enabling you to develop content that resonates with your audience. AI can also be used to help format content for SEO, discover relevant content for curation, and automate content distribution.

Content marketers will definitely have more to gain than loose from AI integration.

2. IoT and new devices

The world we currently live in is nothing short of unreal.

New devices are coming up each day with the ability to communicate via networked connections, thanks to the ever-expanding world of the Internet of Things (IoT). Users are no longer restricted to their PCs, laptops, and smartphones as far as interacting with content is concerned.

For instance, smart refrigerators can communicate with the user, Even the bluetooth speakers within a smart home. The challenge for content creators will be developing content that will be able to respond to each of the various devices within the IoT space.

This way, content marketers will be able to provide customized content based on location, monitoring data, and real-time alerts straight to the device. Marketers will even be able to send content based on proximity data, for instance, clothing retailers sending messages about dressing ideas during the cold season.

3. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

2016 has clearly been the year of virtual reality and augmented reality. If in doubt, just as any of the millions of users who at one point made Pokémon Go more popular than Tinder and Instagram. These developing technologies have uncovered a whole new platform for content consumption, one that Facebook’s Oculus Rift will most likely explore within the coming years.

VR will likely ease its way into the content marketing arena to fulfill the growing need for visual content. Content marketers will get the exciting opportunity to push content optimized for VR, which is largely unchartered land.

4. Live streaming

Live streaming has long been associated with live broadcasts of events such as sports.

Recently, however, live streaming has become just one of the many ordinary functions of a smartphone, right next to making phone calls and texting. Live streaming apps like Meerkat and Periscope have become more popular among everyday users

Live streaming offers content developers and marketers the platform to come up with more in-demand and live content, which still remains a vastly unexplored area.

Plus, with Facebook jumping into the live streaming arena, more users are likely to appreciate content that is modeled around live experiences.

5. Improved search engine algorithms

Search engine algorithms are finally becoming fully automated as far as updates are concerned. Most content marketers design their online marketing campaigns around manual search algorithms.

These are often updated manually and such updates are communicated promptly to the online community.

However, self-updating algorithms such as RankBrain will make it harder to predict what the rules are for maintaining organic visibility. RankBrain, a machine learning algorithm, scours the internet and fine-tunes search results, basically making it harder for content marketers to “cheat” their way to organic results.

Content marketers who will find ways to stay afloat will reap sweet, organic rewards.

6. E-commerce and social media

On their own, e-commerce and social media marketing have been explored by content managers for years. The likes of Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest have been used to propagate content and make inroads into new markets.

But the real game-changer is going to be social purchasing as more social media sites begin integrating aspects of e-commerce. Social media is currently one of the leading platforms that content creators use to distribute content and building audiences. With such sites becoming more focused on revenues, their focus will shift from content consumption platforms to becoming e-commerce hybrid sites.

As such, content marketers will need to find alternative platforms for interacting with their audiences since opportunities for organic visibility will have diminished considerably.

2017 and beyond presents a myriad of challenges and opportunities for everyone in the content marketing space. As a content marketer, preparing for the future isn’t optional. Early preparation will enable you to stay competitive as others in the industry play catch-up. Early adopters always have the benefit of self-differentiation, even when they implement technologies that end up taking a different direction.

Either way, it’ll be a huge win for the early birds.

by VIKAS AGRAWAL

migovr_blog_web_design_css

CSS Animation Trends in Web today

by DesignDevelopment

The web is an ever-evolving medium propelled forward by enthusiastic developers and creators. Animation is just a slice of web design that has risen to high acclamation in recent years. The methods and techniques for adding motion to an interface may have changed, but the end result is still a lively design with charming interactive tendencies.

The following trends are a catalog of the current era in website animation. While JavaScript is a fantastic animation language, CSS has become easier and heavily supported by the design community. By embracing these newer CSS techniques you’ll stumble down avenues of unique animation and exciting design trends for years to come.

Homepage trends

Aesthetic appeal in web design can be generated through various means. And while everyone can appreciate beauty, the self-proclaimed aesthetes will surely notice the power of beautiful animation.

A website’s homepage can be improved through branding, icons, illustrations, or any number of added features. Once the underlying user experience has been created, it’s easier to focus on a layer of colorful graphics and spicy design techniques. Animation is one such technique that can really spice up a homepage to draw attention from new visitors.

Content Galleries & Slideshows

Interactive page elements can also utilize animation for a snappy response to user input. Mobile touchscreen apps were the first to pioneer the concept of immediate response based on the user’s action.

For example Google’s Material Design & Apple’s iOS both support multiple animation styles. Users can swipe, tap, touch & hold, pull down, pinch & zoom, among other alternatives. These interactions will create different animations based on the operating system’s UX guidelines.

Take a look at the Apple Mac website near the top of the page. It has a product slider featuring all of the various Mac products. On first pageload each item will animate and fade into the slider. Then as you click between different categories the items will animate in from the side.

What’s interesting about this effect is motion applied to each item. When moving to the right new items will animate in like the slider panned over to the right. When moving back it’ll actually feel like the slider is panning back like a video camera. This elastic animation makes the website feel more “alive” as if it behaves according to the natural laws of gravity and motion.

Form Input Fields

Another interactive element is the ever-popular web form. Most forms are comprised of various elements like text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, select menus, and other thingamabobs.

Animated forms behave just like content sliders – they give a sense of life to user interactivity. Users enjoy seeing a response from their click, scroll, or keypress event. The default browser response is often fine, but adding that little extra oomph to your form can make all the difference.

Sliding Navigation

There’s a big juicy hodgepodge of navigation styles to choose from – and unsurprisingly most of them can be animated. Many designers think of the hamburger sliding menus like you’d find on the Comedy Central or Supereightwebsites. But this is perhaps the obvious answer to sliding navigation.

Expansive Page Motion

Perhaps the most difficult and high-risk style of web animation is a layout based on many various animated elements. There is no official name for this technique but the idea follows that a designer would create lots of different animations for the pageload, along with user interactions like mouse hovers.

It’s risky because this can slow down a great website to a crawl with too much JavaScript. Running too many animations in sequence can be disastrous – but placing them in sync with a natural rhythm can make one of the most dynamic interfaces on the web.

SVG Animation

One of the newer standards into the field of web animation is SVG. These are vector-based graphics which can be rendered, resized, and scaled naturally without any quality loss. Adobe Illustrator is the most popular program for creating SVGs but there are other alternatives.

Final Thoughts

All of these trends have come together through an advancement of frontend technologies and browser standards. CSS animation is a powerful feature that has recently been gaining serious traction.

I hope these trends can offer a picturesque look into the modern state of web design and the potential future of CSS web animation.

migovr_blog_bad_design

7 signs your design style is out of date!

by DesignDevelopment

If you’ve worked in the design industry for any length of time you have probably seen styles come and go. Maybe you’re using some styles that are so popular they’ve reached their saturation point. Or maybe you haven’t even realized the possibilities that come with the constant influx of new technology. Whether or not you’ve already noticed the changing times, here are seven signs your design is stuck in the past.

You think serifs are a thing of the past

You’ve seen brands, such as Google and the L.A. Clippers, recently opt for a sans serif logo. Do you know why? The low-resolution of mobile phones and tablets made sans serif type the best choice for easy readability on mobile. However, 4K is on the rise and resolution on mobile keeps getting better. What does this mean? That’s right, serif typefaces are already making a comeback in digital design thanks to high definition screens.

You are constantly trying to keep up with the latest color trends

Every year there’s a debate on the best color of the year. Pantone named Rose Quartz and Serenity the joint Color of the Year for 2016, yet Behance found Bright Red to be the most used color for its users. Communication Arts editor Rebecca Huval argues chartreuse has become the go-to color for startups’ office décor. The point is, it’s not about what color you choose, it’s how you use it. Don’t overdo it with an explosion of colors. Consistent, color saturated design ensures your work will stand out among others and look great on mobile – even with reflection. No matter the color, it’s all about being bold and making a statement.

You do all of your work sitting at a desk

You never know when inspiration will strike, and it’s important to capture that inspiration immediately. Why wait until you’re back at your desk? Not only is distraction a key variability in creativity, but the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil give designers a more paper-like experience that makes it easy to sketch out and play with your ideas from anywhere. The benefit is that these mobile apps make it easy to put your ideas into production without the need to scan and trace.

It’s said the best camera is the one you have with you, so use your phone to capture content or an app for colors, shapes, and brushes. Those elements are then instantly available on your desktop when you’re ready to sit down.

You think from only one perspective

You scroll through Instagram and your feed is full of selfies and over filtered, blasé landscapes. You don’t want your designs to be #basic, so it’s important to change perspective. Literally. Adobe’s Scott Braut recommends incorporating candid portraits into your designs or a cityscape from an interesting angle. Not a photographer? No sweat – stock imagery is a great way to start using striking images in your designs. You can even take it one step further by adding your own illustration on top of these images.

migovr_blog_deisgn

You take throwbacks too far

Despite cleaner high-definition screens, gradients – which harken back to the early days of the Web – made a comeback in 2015. We also saw popularity of a coloring approach to logo design gain momentum, possibly triggered by or the catalyst for the popularity of adult coloring books, and the rise of four pointed sparkle in design, skeumorphism and hand lettering. When it comes to these “cyclical trends,” use them appropriately. They’re great for temporary projects (eg. a music festival or new app) but not applicable for a company’s branding that will probably be around for a decade.

Your flat design is falling flat

Flat design has become hugely popular for designers. Just like the cyclical trends noted above, the reoccurrence of flat design is a normal cycle in the design industry. Despite its current popularity, sometimes this style can be repetitive and, many have argued, boring. Break the mold with depth.  And I don’t mean by adding a drastic gradient and drop shadow, both being sure signs of an amateur. Something more subtle, like what’s used in material design – a top design trend of 2016. Creating depth is more subtle and layered than most people realize.  There are wonderful tools allowing for multiple layer effects and the flexibility to set a design apart in the flat world of screens.

Your templates are looking like… templates

When it comes to creating online content, especially for small businesses, templates seem to be the path of least resistance. The issue is, no matter how good the template is, it still looks like a template.For most designers who pride themselves in “hand-craftsmanship” and “uniqueness,” this is pretty much a non-starter. And let’s not forget when the client asks for something the template can’t do.

Rather than diving deep into the world of development for the sake of the craft there are other solutions which allows designers to create websites with total flexibility. The best part is, no coding is required.

migovr_blog_01

What constitutes bad design?

by DesignDevelopment

Some of the most common issues with difficult-to-use sites are:

  • Poor legibility: a wide range of fonts and clashing colors can make a site hard to read, especially when it features lengthy posts
  • Confusing navigation: if a user can’t figure out how to find what they’re looking for on your site, or can’t tell where a link will take them (MMN), they’re not likely to stick around for long.
  • Slow performance: if you’re using a lot of scripts, images and animations, your site will take a while to load and bog down your users’ devices.

 

Mystery meat navigation (also known as MMN) is a disparaging term coined in 1998 by Vincent Flanders, author and designer of the website Web Pages That Suck, to describe a web page where the destination of the link is not visible until the user points their cursor at it. Such interfaces lack a user-centered design, emphasizing aesthetic appearance, white space, and the concealment of relevant information over basic practicality and functionality.

migovr_blog_responsive_design

Tips for responsive design

by DevelopmentNews

Test Your Design on Actual Devices

Planning how your design will scale for different sizes is an important part of designing for those devices, but you cannot stop at that theoretical approach.

Being able to interact with your design on real devices will show you how it really works, either confirming the decisions you made or showing you where improvements may need to be made.

In addition to your own testing, running usability tests with actual users is another important part of working with your designs in a real world setting.

First check existing analytics to see the percentage breakdown for users based on devices. Prioritize your tests based upon the breakpoint information. If you’re moderating the tests on-site, it’s also worth purchasing commonly used devices 

If you can spare the resources, it’s worth testing different devices with different users. While this multiplies the number of users required for testing, it is the safest way to prevent bias due to design familiarity. For example, if you’ve designed three breakpoints, testing with 15 users (five per breakpoint) will help you uncover most usability issues. Services likeUserTesting help scale usability testing affordably since they handle the recruitment, task creation, moderation, and analysis.

If you’re particularly tight on timing or money, you can test multiple breakpoints with the same users. Just randomize the order of devices presented to minimize the bias from design familiarity. For example, if you test mobile, tablet, desktop with User A, switch up the order for User B.

What is the Enemy of Creativity?

by Video

Anyone who’s ever tried to make something – put words on a page, draw a picture, build a campaign or create a new product – will have run into blockers.

These enemies of creativity come in many forms, and they’re shared all over the world.

On a trip to Austin for the SXSW Festival, we asked some creative people what the enemy of creativity is for them.

Whether it’s the TV, or the tyranny of a deadline, these might sound familiar.

 

migovr_blog_tips

Tricks for writing a great blog post

by News

An estimated 53.6 million new posts appear per month on WordPress alone. Why even start a blog with so much competing noise out there?

Because a business blog for your ecommerce store is a great way to establish relationships with customers in a non-sales context. Good blog content engages by solving problems and informing readers. Your business meets a unique customer need and your blog should speak to that. If it does, and you follow the advice below, you’ll increase your chances of standing out from the 53, 599,000,000 other posts going up this month, and you just might gain a few new customers.

migovr_blog_tips

1 Get to know your audience

Before you start writing anything, ask yourself these two questions:

Why am I writing this?
Your business goal may be to get sales leads, but the primary goal of your blog is to inform your readers and give them advice to solve a problem. In this way, you can use your blog to build authority and trust, which you’ll need to attract and retain customers.

Who is my audience?
You should have created customer personas when you started building your business. Get them out and keep them in mind when you’re writing. This will help you get into your ideal customer’s head and write TO them: what are they interested in? What are their problems? What kind of tone do they react to, ie highly technical or casual and relaxed?

2 Have a conversation

Once you know who you’re talking to, think about how you’re going to talk to them. A blog should be friendly and engaging, practical and easy to navigate

– Get to the point: Your readers are busy people, so show that you value their time by getting straight to the point. Favor the active tense and be concise: don’t use ten words when you can use five.

– Keep it simple: you’re here to make your customers’ lives easier by providing expert help, not to show off your expansive vocabulary. Avoid industry jargon and long, rambling introductions or side-notes.

3 Inform, don’t sell

People are bombarded with sales messages from the time they wake up to the time they slip back into bed at night. Chances are, they’re not coming to your site to read another pitch. They’re going to be asking themselves ‘What’s in it for me?’, so make sure you have a compelling response. Develop blog content that gives something to your reader: the answer to a question, the solution to a problem, a piece of information they didn’t know.

4 Craft catchy headlines and tweet-able titles

Headlines and subtitles have a dual role: to attract curious readers and push your blog to the top of search engine rankings. Short, to-the-point titles are easy to share on social media, where you can generate conversation and engagement around your blog.

Think about using evocative, sensory words, or incorporating questions that pique interest. Numbers have been found to attract clicks, but they’ve been heavily used to the point of being annoying, so use them sparingly and always with a compelling theme connected to your business, e.g. “7 tips for a good night’s sleep” if you sell bedding.

5 Structure your ideas

No one likes sifting through a rambling jumble of text online. Make it easy for your readers to follow your train of thought and pick out the information that they need. Try these tips:

  • Use subtitles to organize your ideas
  • Divide body text into digestible paragraphs
  • Use bullets for easy-to-scan lists

And remember, ALWAYS check grammar and spelling. Not only will this make your writing pop, it will reassure your readers about your professionalism.

Use related images to break up text and add an attractive visual elements. Photos, drawings and diagrams can also be great ways to explain complex ideas.

6 Use keywords

Before you begin writing, make a list of keyword related to your business and the subject you’re tackling. Keep them in mind as you write and try to incorporate them judiciously throughout your text, especially in titles and subtitles. Over time, and coupled with reader engagement–comments and social sharing–keywords will help you rank higher in search engines.

Be wary of using too many keywords–you’re writing for people, not search engines–and never, ever copy and paste text from your own blog or other sites. Duplicate content will get you into major trouble with Google.

7 Go Out on a Bang

Before signing off, recap the main takeaways for your readers and include a call to action. This is where you might be able to slip in something related to your sales goal, like getting readers to sign up for your newsletter or check out a related product page.

Here are some suggestions for writing calls to action:

  • Ask readers a question to encourage comments and shares.
  • Use engaging text that asks a question.
  • Give a clear direction of what you want the reader to do next.
  • Create a sense of urgency.
  • Focus on the benefits.
  • Embed call to action in link. You can be creative if it’s appropriate and clear.

…and most importantly…

8 Be consistent

Creating and maintaining a business blog takes a lot of time and energy, but you don’t have to commit to writing an article every day from the beginning. Build a healthy blog by posting regularly, even if it’s only once a week. You can use newsletters and social media to inform your community about new posts. Just remember, once you start the machine, you have to keep it running!

An old blog post with more information about creating an editorial calendar which helps with consistency …

Key Takeaways

  • Post on a consistent schedule
  • Tailor content and tone to your audience
  • Write posts that deliver value to your readers
  • Structure content for readability
  • Run spell check!
  • Finish on a call to action
migovr_blog_branding

Small Business Branding

by Branding

As a small business, how do you stand out from your competitors? You know you need to, but every other company like yours is also trying to stand out.

Customer Perceptions

Regardless of the size of your business, branding is so important that you can never just leave it to chance. It is just as important as product development – get it wrong and your product will never sell or your service will never be used.

Your customers brains are overloaded with new information every day. Done right, your branding will find a way of cutting through the clutter.

Just think about the visual and auditory information that is assaulting their senses on any given city street, television channel or website. Every aspect of your customers’ lives is like this. In all this ever-changing mental clutter a consistent company brand image is essential to any company’s survival in the 21st Century.

Your company branding should tell people who you are, what you do and why you do it. It should indicate your market positioning and your unique selling points.

A customer should be able to see consistency across every channel they use to communicate with you, so should include every aspect of your business, including lighting, colors, ease of access and staff attitudes as well as the more obvious logo and name. Even the smell of your office or storefront is part of your brand.

Brand Power

Let your brand do the pre-selling for you. This is how Apple manages to sell so many devices. People are buying the brand. Many buyers do not care if the product will last beyond the guarantee period, they must have it because the brand is part of the image.

The reason people buy Kelloggs’ cereals is because the company’s marketing has focused on natural and sunshine. Both are powerful images today.

People buy Toyota cars for their reliability and Volvos for their great safety record.

It takes time to establish your brand’s unique selling point, but once established it will enable selling to your target customers a breeze. They will have decided to buy your product before ever contacting you about the details. This is the power of pre-selling.

Unique Selling Point

You need to develop a unique selling point (USP), a reason for people to buy from your company. This guide from Entrepreneur includes some excellent examples that every business owner should read.

There are thousands of companies very similar to yours, and you are competing with everyone of them around the globe for every single customer. Even the person that is standing outside your physical premises has in their pocket an instant connection to the Internet and every business that is online from all over the world.

Why should they buy from you? You must give them a reason to do so or they will buy elsewhere.

Your branding and USP are your tools. They are the only reasons they will take out their wallet in your store or on your website today.

Ideally they will be aware of your branding before they’re standing outside your store or viewing your website, but even if this is not the case, your branding can still win you the sale. If your branding is welcoming, with great customer service then they will likely complete a sale. They’re also more likely to come back for future purchases and to recommend your company to friends and contacts.

Customer Loyalty

If your customers were just half as loyal as Apple customers then your business would be a run-away success story. Yes, Apple makes great products, but they do have imperfections. Their customers are so forgiving because of the loyalty they feel towards the brand. They overlook the imperfections and high prices because they need the brand more than they need the product, so they are prepared to pay a hefty premium.

When it comes to cars many buyers will look for the same manufacturer every time. Ford, Mercedes and Kia owners stand out as the most satisfied repeat-purchasers. These companies all have a single brand strategy. When customers’ needs change they replace one car with another from the same range because they identify with the brand.

Making sure customers come back should be a top priority for every business. They have made one purchase and if they are happy they are likely to become repeat customers. It’s your job to make sure they are happy.

Emotional Engagement

Only 20% of reasons behind buying decisions are logical, the other 80% are emotional. If your company’s branding gives the right emotional signals then people will buy. This gets you out of the suicidal ‘race to the bottom’ where the lowest price is the main USP.

Emotional signals come from happy staff, correct lighting, well-chosen color schemes, ample parking and inviting websites. They come from a well-maintained store exterior, personal contact with the business owner through email, appropriate temperatures, from seeing your company associated with charity events and how easy your mobile app is to use. Everything.

In Conclusion

Large companies that have to account for every cent to their shareholders have huge budgets for branding. The shareholders accept this fact because they know how important branding is to the long-term success of any business.

Branding is the only way to make your company stand out. The image your company has, its brand, is your main route to emotional engagement with prospective customers and success.

How have you set your company apart from the competition? What have you done to ensure your own branding has a positive impact on consumers? Please share your thoughts in the comments box below.