Your business’s external and internal environments send important messages to customers, just as a home’s curb appeal sends messages to prospective buyers. Both create expectations about what’s inside.
Your environmental brand consists of both the internal and external environment. There are 5 categories in each area that business owners must address to ensure the environmental brand fits and enhances the overall business brand.
Accessibility. This broad category has several meanings, including literally the ease of access for all people, including those with impairments. Businesses in the United States must comply with The Americans with Disabilities Act, but applying “universal accessibility” principles improves access for everyone.
One aspect of accessibility is the ease of doing business with your company. You can address accessibility by accepting credit cards, and providing enough parking, and creating tiered levels of business benefits for customers. The point is to juggle the brand image you want to convey, the brand promise you make to customers, and meet the desires of your ideal target market.
Style. The property must not only match the image you want to present, it should set the stage for and enhance the customer experience. Once the patron enters the building, everything in the public areas of the facility should present a seamless experience that clearly communicates the brand promise.
Color. Colors can be soft or bold, subtle or dynamic, edgy or conventional. The colors selected for your property should compliment the brand’s identity, the physical plant, and create the mood and atmosphere that fits the brand experience you’re creating. If the employees wear uniforms, the colors should be appropriate to the theme and environment.
Cleanliness. Nothing repels faster than a dirty environment. Cleanliness only starts with the outside of the building. We’re all customers and we can all remember places we’ve visited with trash in the parking lot or near the entrance. We’ve also thought “If it looks like this on the outside, how much care do they show the inside?”
Atmosphere. This is what you get when all the environmental brand details come together to create the overall look and feel. Atmosphere is what makes one restaurant “romantic”: and another one a place “to see and be seen.” There are many tangible components that create an atmosphere like lighting, color, and fixtures, and many intangibles. When the atmosphere is right you’ve created a place people love, but when it’s not? It’s on everyone’s “must miss” list.
Your brand is similar to a package in a grocery store. We pass up the items with visual blemishes because we’re concerned the contents will be less than perfect too.
A business that presents an image consistent with its brand promise has an easier time convincing customers it delivers a quality product.
Abiah is a brand strategy and design firm whose work delivers a bottom-line difference for clients. Get the Guide to an Aligned Brand when you take the Brand Test at http://www.abiah.com/brand_test/index.php.
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