Keep Your Church Brand from Being Memory-Holed

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.

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