repetition

After finishing a rebrand project, I used to caution clients against using their new logo on everything, warning them about the dangers of "brand fatigue." I've changed my perspective on this now. It feels counterintuitive, but your brand should be 99% repetition and 1% novelty. As a ministry leader, you'll get tired of hearing your core values long before your audience even remembers one of them. You'll be dreaming in only your brand colors before anyone even notices that there's an intentional palette. In fact, there was a study done to see how well regular people could recall major brand logos from memory. The results were pretty shocking. If regular people struggled to remember the TARGET logo, then your church probably doesn't have to worry about "over-branding." That said, there's a simple principle that can help you give your church more brand "touchpoints" without going overboard and getting on anyone's nerves. I’ll talk about that in the next one. See you there!

Last time we looked at how most churches and ministries are probably not over-branding. People are forgetful and have lots of other things going on. To cultivate a brand that bears fruit, we have to cut through the noise repeatedly, with clarity and consistency. But how do we repeat ourselves without being annoying? The last thing you want to do is give people a negative feeling when they interact with your communications. The key to this is to say the same thing in different ways, over time. If your church has a tagline, or a "thread" like Mark MacDonald outlines in his book Be Known for Something, then you have your message - what to say. Now the trick is to repeat that message in different ways and in different places. Let’s say your tagline is “Alive To Christ.” First, you can put this tagline on your social media banner, website, and logo placeholder slide. These are semi-permanent places where new visitors and members will be introduced to that phrase. One Sunday a month, take 60 seconds of announcement time to explain what it means to be “Alive to Christ” and connect it to a ministry opportunity your church has in the upcoming month. If you livestream your worship services, you can even turn that clip into a social media post or a short reflection for community groups. Next you could design “A2C” mugs or a t-shirt that says “Dead to Sin” on the front and “Alive to Christ” on the back. These are just a few examples, but I think you get the idea. There a million different ways to say the same thing. Do you have a tagline or thread at your church? Reply here and let me know what yours is :)

Love it or hate it, social media is the perfect place to communicate about the life of your church. Your church isn’t a museum and you probably want people to know that. An active social media profile indicates an active church. But posting photos, going live, and answering comments is something that a lot of companies have an entire team for. Thankfully, it’s not as hard as it sounds. Here are two guiding principles for a vibrant, flourishing church social media presence. 1. Consistency over Quantity How often you post is far less important than how regularly you post. Whether it’s once a week or every day - it doesn’t matter! What matters is that you set expectations and then meet those expectations consistently over time. This creates familiar patterns of communication that give people a sense of belonging and connection. I saw a church do this exceptionally well, and their engagement was off the charts! They posted a short video every week with an elder or staff member giving a 5 minute devotional (they’ve been going for 2 years now!). It’s not anything fancy, but it serves to publicly show the church’s long-term focus on discipleship. 2. Substance and Relevance over Aesthetics The truth is, almost no one is scrutinizing your images, videos, and text. While it’s good to pursue excellence, nobody is going to pay much attention to how professional your photos look or how good the lighting is in your videos! They’re giving you a couple seconds of their attention and then they’re back to scrolling. Making your content substantive and relevant is going to give you way more engagement than making it look and sound pretty.

Lifting weights has been one of my regular activities since college. I train hard, but I’m under no delusions that I could be a power lifter or body builder. That hasn’t stopped me from getting extra motivated every couple of years and starting to train like an Olympic athlete. Deep down I think I’m secretly hoping for some kind of miracle muscle growth spurt. What happens? Reality kicks in and reminds me that I’m not going to the Olympics - I have other priorities, a job, and family. My goal isn’t to be an elite-level athlete. The thing is, when you’re building a brand, the best approach is the one you can do consistently, week in and week out, over years and decades. You don’t have to be the church with a dedicated media team and a $100,000 logo and website. It all comes down to consistently tending your brand.

This week we did our 2024 taxes. I mixed a protein shake, opened my laptop on our kitchen island, and braced myself. I always finish filing with a terrible taste in my mouth… and you can bet it’s not the protein shake. This year we got hit with an underpayment penalty. We hadn’t let Uncle Sam withhold as much as he needed, and he punished us for it. As much as I hate taxes, the experience wouldn’t be so bad if there were regular communications from the IRS throughout the year. I want to know in August if I’m on track to have my taxes paid in full. I want to have deductions top of mind so I remember to save documents and receipts. Here’s the point: Regular, substantive communication is key if you want to build a healthy brand. Nobody wants to be the IRS, but without communication, you increase your risk for leaving a bad taste in someone’s mouth.

Brands are like bodies. Everybody has one, but it takes discipline and consistency to build a healthy one. I recently saw a 15 second video that highlighted how simple something like getting in shape can really be. The three steps he lays out are: Eat 2 meals a day with 100g of protein in each. Don’t eat other stuff. Lift 3 times per week and add weight or reps over time. Put in those terms, getting in shape is simple - just eat right and exercise. Creating and cultivating a brand identity is a lot like that. It’s simple in theory, but it takes consistency and effort.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.