Your Brand Can Have a Smell

Especially in the ministry world, we tend to think of a brand as a logo, color, or font... something flashy and new to get people's attention. But this is completely backwards. Brand is the gut feeling people have about your organization. Branding is how we shape and cultivate that gut feeling. By being intentional with your look, feel, and tone, you're associating those things with your church: everything it does and stands for. Hopefully, that association is one of trust and goodwill. Your logo, colors, and tagline are just a few of the ways that association can be made, but these things are not inherently a “brand.” They're tools for the purpose of making a repeatable association. That's why its so important to regularly tend your brand. With patience and intentionality, eventually you will see progress. Your church will start to identify with your brand because it signifies their shared history, values, and purpose. That’s when you can start to reap the benefits of your people’s trust, unity, and zeal.

Last year, my wife started selling old-fashioned lye soaps and shampoos made from goats milk. To distribute and label them, she had to make some decisions about packaging. Clear plastic shrink wrap is easy and practical. It turns each bar of soap into a self-contained unit that wont get damaged or worn, shows the entire bar, and makes shipping so much easier. Makes perfect sense, right? After selling countless bars and getting a lot of customer feedback, she realized that her packaging was actually working against her. People were buying her soap because they wanted a more home-grown, organic, less commercialized experience. She was using packaging that was plastic, shiny, and sterile. It was communicating the opposite of her brand! When she made the switch to brown craft paper, she immediately saw a positive response from our customers. “It looks so eco-friendly!” “I love that I can smell it in the store!” Is there anything you’re doing that’s unintentionally sending the wrong message?

These days everybody and their dog are expected to have a website. Why is that? The reality is that it’s hard to exist without a digital presence. Tending your brand in the real world is only half the battle. Some churches will leverage social media platforms and tools like Church Center to do their basic functions of event planning, send emails, and make announcements. This can check off the basics, but there’s a critical way your website can make your brand truly galvanizing and memorable. Done right, your website is where your logo, photography, color, and copywriting tone of voice intersect with and reinforce your vision, mission, values, and origin story. I’ll go deeper on these in future posts. The point is: all those things become missed opportunities if you don’t have a digital hub for your brand. Tend your brand digitally too.

Energetic logo = energetic church? Not necessarily. Strong stable logo = strong stable church? Maybe sometimes. This is an easy, one-dimensional way to think about church branding. Here’s the problem: Logos aren’t supposed to speak for themselves. The purpose of a logo is to identify; not explain. If your logo is recognizable and memorable, it’s done its job. The explaining part is up to you. Thankfully, you can use other elements of your visual brand to help you do that explanation. The purpose of having colors, fonts, photography, and everything else in your branding toolkit is to flesh out the ideas that don’t fit inside your logo.