In many cases, your signage is the first thing customers and visitors will encounter when they arrive at your place of business. You’ll want to make a good first impression – so what does your signage say about your company?
There’s a reason why the biggest and most successful companies in the world invest millions every year into branding and marketing – it works. And for brick-and-mortar businesses, getting the right branding over the front door can make a world of difference.
In this article, we’re going to look at why signage is so crucial for the success of your business and explore some of the things that make a sign good or bad for your branding.
Why is good signage so important?
In 2012, delivery giants FedEx conducted a survey into the shopping habits of the general public – and in doing so learned that 52% of customers would avoid a store with low-quality signage.
Worse, nearly two-thirds of those polled – 60% – said they wouldn’t like to visit a business that had no signage at all.
In other words, if your business doesn’t have great signage you could be losing more than half of your customers before they even step through the front door.
Signs aren’t just tools for visual branding; they are also fundamentally informational. Without signage to give context, an unmarked retail outlet might sell anything from pizzas to pipe fittings. Signs exist to help customers understand what you offer and what they can expect.
This can be of particular importance if your business has an ambiguous name. Without informational signage to give context, who could say what ‘Wilson Industries’ might offer? Is ‘Brooke & Abbott’ a butcher’s shop or a law firm? What kind of food do they do in the ‘City Cafe’?
It doesn’t make sense to force your customers to play a guessing game just to understand what it is you do – and it’s no surprise that this kind of ambiguity can lead to a lukewarm customer response.
In any case, it’s also very likely that all of your neighbours and competitors will have prominent signs installed. Signage is everywhere in a modern city, from buildings to bus stop billboards to construction hoardings to vehicle wraps.
How can your business possibly hope to get noticed without signs of its own?
Signage communicates style
Like it or not, your visual branding style is very important.
Your choices of colour, typography and design can play a major role in influencing how your business is perceived by customers.
After all, Coca-Cola adopted their iconic bright red-and-white logo specifically to make you feel a certain way about the brand – and you would probably have an entirely different reaction if it were picked out in shades of dull grey.
Visual branding is the art of communicating your company’s personality and ethos via design cues, and signage is the perfect place to display it.
Implemented well, your signage can give customers and visitors the right ‘gut feeling’ about your business before they’ve even conducted a transaction with you.
By identifying the traits you want your business to embody, you can make design choices to communicate those.
For example, you may feel that your accountancy business should seem sensible and dependable, and therefore opt for restrained colours such as blacks, browns, greys and muted blues. Alternatively, signage for a toy shop might be bright and colourful with large letterforms and a cartoon mascot.
Colour psychology is probably too detailed of a subject to fit within the scope of this article, but in a nutshell, the colours you use for your branding can influence the ways in which customers subconsciously think about your company.
As an example, green tones tend to be strongly associated with health and nature, and as such could be an excellent choice for a therapist’s office or a supplement store. Meanwhile, black and purple often connote sophistication and style, and therefore might be appropriate for a luxury hotel, restaurant, or aspirational retailer.
The same is true of typography; the style of lettering you select for use on your signs can play a major role in influencing how customers perceive your company.
For instance, an old-fashioned font like Baskerville or Clarendon might imply traditional values and old-school trustworthiness – perfect for a bookshop or a law firm. Alternatively, a sleek sans-serif typeface like Futura can suggest modern sensibilities and forward thinking (ideal for a technology business, say).
By using the right combinations of fonts, colours, and other design elements such as iconography and illustration, you can create a sign that perfectly primes customers to respond well to your business.
Signage can fulfil vital functions
Can you imagine shopping in a supermarket that had no aisle signage – or navigating an airport with no wayfinding information?
For many businesses, signage isn’t just a matter of branding; it’s a key component of the visitor experience.
Customers need to be able to find their way around, even in small premises. Where can they find the checkout? Where is the exit? Are there customer toilets? Are they going the wrong way?
Signage is also incredibly important for safety, and in many cases is required by law. Signs are absolutely crucial for helping people find fire extinguishers, escape routes and other emergency aids – as well as providing information for everyday safety issues (such as instructions for children to not play on the escalators, or hand-washing reminders in a professional kitchen).
Even in environments that are not immediately identifiable as hazardous such as kitchens and building sites, signs can provide gentle reminders to watch out for minor obstacles such as low ceilings or unintuitive steps.
In conclusion, signage is a vitally important part of your business. It affects the way your customers view your establishment even before they’ve stepped inside, and it’s a key part of your overall visual branding.
Great signage can draw customers in and give them ‘a good feeling’ about your company – and getting it right can be a major contributing factor in your ultimate success.
Contact us today to find out how we can help with your signage project – you can call us on 01233 625383 or contact us via the website.