Brands are Like Bodies

Let me cut to the chase. Color is absolutely, non-negotiable critical. I wouldn’t be going out on a limb to say that color is even more important than the logo. But… which colors you choose for your church is only part of the equation. How frequently and consistently you use a color palette is what makes or breaks the brand-color association. Effective branding through color is 50% selection and 50% repetition. In other words, your color choices for your brand only matters to the extent that you use it repeatedly and consistently over time. You can organize a committee. You can get swatches from Sherwin Williams. You can look at what’s trending. You can browse Pinterest. You can research color symbolism. You can have your congregation vote. None of it matters if you don’t use your colors (or use them sporadically without patterns). This should be freeing! While selection is important, the knowledge that repetition matters more should take some of the pressure off. Picking “wrong” or “suboptimal” colors isn’t the end of the world. Just commit and use them consistently.

If you’re a church that does sermon series graphics, then you might have struggled with how far to push the envelope in those visuals. Do you download the latest free template from Free Church Media or Ministry Designs dot com? Do you design them in-house? For us creatives, it’s enticing to explore and use new visuals every few months. But I want to encourage you to curb that impulse. Here’s why: Those unbranded templates and graphics can ultimately work against your brand. But wait, they’re not permanent - what’s so bad about them? Over time, these graphics become part of your brand, whether you like it or not. Using templates that are fun, fresh, and modern might feel like a good way to keep things interesting, but over time that variety adds up into noise. Over time, too much variety accumulates into noise. Instead of your sermon graphics reinforcing your brand, they can start to pollute it. They start to appear disjointed and random when you sample them as a whole. To protect your brand, you need a common thread woven throughout. This is why brand guidelines are so important. They provide a fixed scope for visual styles. Robust brand guidelines will tell you not only what that common thread is, but how it should be integrated in different contexts. If you’re worried about your sermon graphics polluting your brand rather than reinforcing it, check your brand guidelines to see if there’s a way to bring that free template into alignment. If you don’t have brand guidelines, consider having some created. It’s a great way to get the most out of your existing logo and can help you add variety to your church’s communications, without feeling random.

In the age of the internet and now of ChatGPT, our memory muscles are getting weaker and weaker. I’ve felt the effects, and I’m sure you have too. Wade Stotts had a recent episode of the Wade Show with Wade where he highlighted how short and shallow our memories really are these days. Why does that matter for effective branding? Your audience has the memory of a goldfish. If your branding consists of disjointed visuals or too much information, it’s not going to stick. And if you haven’t thought through templates, words, and images that are going to help you repeat that message, your brand message will slide into one ear and out the other (My dad said that happens because there’s nothing in between to stop it). It’s an important reminder that I’ve preached and will continue to preach: Repetition is persuasion. You cannot repeat your messaging enough. You cannot integrate your branding into enough of your church’s life. It also got me thinking: How have I handicapped my own memory for creative and branding work? How could I fix it? Those are questions I’m going to be answering this year.

For the last 8 years, my go-to work, church, and lifting shoes have been some variation of white Adidas sneakers. I replace them once a year because I have to: I take close to a million steps a year in those shoes. I didn’t do this intentionally, but those white Adidas have become core to the Braden East “brand.” Whether I chose it or not was irrelevant, white sneakers are now a part of how many people recognize me. Here’s the lesson I learned from this: Anything you say or do repeatedly will eventually become part of your brand. Once you understand this, you get to influence what your brand looks like, by choosing a message, choosing how you want to say it, and repeating it over time. Do anything consistently for 8 years, and I promise it will become part of your brand.

Let’s Imagine a young couple building a house. They’ve worked with a builder and picked a colonial style for the exterior. It has the white columns and the wide porch with two rocking chairs. It has the tall windows and the warm wood trim. But suppose this couple is handy and has decided to finish off the interior on their own, with the help of YouTube University. They browse Pinterest for inspiration and find a style of rustic modern kitchen to set their hearts on (you know the kind I’m talking about - with the subway tile, white marble countertops, and stainless steel accents). Then, in their hunt for inspiration, they come across those industrial living spaces with exposed brick and black steel. They haven’t begun to feel overwhelmed yet, and so they save this style for their living room. One Pinterest board at a time, they add layers of paint colors, textures, and styles to the interior plans. Before they know it, the inside of the house looks like a Picasso: an uncomfortable collage of pieces that would otherwise be beautiful on their own. It’s easy to fall into this trap with any kind of design, and branding is no exception. Before someone starts piecing together visuals for their church, the smart thing to do is to consult a designer who specializes in brands and get a set of guidelines nailed down. We have names for styles because certain textures, colors, and shapes work together to create a particular curb appeal. Switch it up too often, and curb appeal turns into confusion.

Last weekend I decided to finally clean the garage. It was dirtier than I thought - filthy, actually. That’s why I was amazed when I finished the whole project in under 3 hours. When it comes to your church branding and design, there are probably some things that you’ve thought about cleaning up but have been wary of starting. What if it takes longer than you thought it would? What if it’s going to cost you money to fix? It can be easy to ignore these minor issues until they turn into bigger ones. The problem is that we often underestimate how bad things really are. If you looked into it, you might find that your website actually doesn’t work on certain browsers, or that there are 7 different versions of your logo floating around. This spring-summer season is a great time to clean up those divergent designs and maybe even do a light branding refresh. Tending your brand means addressing problems before they accumulate for too long, or it will quickly get out of control.

For the last 8 years, my go-to work, church, and lifting shoes have been some variation of white Adidas sneakers. I replace them once a year because I have to: I take close to a million steps a year in those shoes. I didn’t do this intentionally, but those white Adidas have become core to the Braden East “brand.” Whether I chose it or not was irrelevant, white sneakers are now a part of how many people recognize me. Here’s the lesson I learned from this: Anything you say or do repeatedly will eventually become part of your brand. Once you understand this, you get to influence what your brand looks like, by choosing a message, choosing how you want to say it, and repeating it over time. Do anything consistently for 8 years, and I promise it will become part of your brand.

Building a brand isn’t as hard as you might think. When you boil it down, all you have do is decide what you want to be known for and work backwards from there. If you’re in ministry, you already have a “why,” but your core message (“what”) is the first building block. To turn that core message into a brand, you need two more ingredients: A communication plan (“how”), and consistent repetition. Distilled into three steps: Choose what you want to say Choose how you want to say it Say it over and over again in different ways Summed up in a formula: Brand = Message + Delivery + Repetition