So many offices look the same, indistinguishable from one another. You don’t want your organization to be like everyone else’s, so why would you want your office space to be?
Environmental branding emphasizes integrating your brand into the physical spaces that your organization occupies. That means ensuring that your space reflects and reinforces your brand, creating a distinctive space that is as unique as your organization is. At Fryed Egg Productions, we help organizations consider how to ensure their brands are always put in the foreground of what they do, including in their physical spaces.
Here’s why environmental branding often plays such an important role for today’s top organizations.
Making a space your own
You should be proud of every physical space that your organization occupies and demonstrate that pride by making it your own. Truly making a space your own doesn’t mean simply putting a logo and some artwork on the wall. It means imbuing the space with your brand, finding a way to reflect who you are in the space itself. That means incorporating your brand messages and visuals as appropriate, but it also means striving to create spaces that demonstrate an awareness of your mission, purpose and values. Bells and whistles aren’t required. Think of restaurants or hotels that manage to distinguish themselves from their competitors, creating compelling, comfortable environments without overwhelming visitors with wall-to-wall marketing messaging.
An immersive approach
Environmental branding can require the creative input and expertise of professionals from a variety of disciplines, particularly architecture and interior design. It means considering everything from the layout of the space itself to lighting, furnishings and decorations. Details such as open-floor plans, conference room designs, and the location and design of offices for management can express who you are as a brand. Your marketing team, meanwhile, can be involved in how to integrate key elements of your brand into the space, ensuring that your space is every bit as effective a branding tool as your ad campaigns.
Inspiring your employees
At the top of the reasons to embrace environment branding is that it can help to inspire your staff. They are the ones who will occupy the space day after day, and well-targeted environmental branding can help to make them feel continually engaged with your organization and to make them feel proud of the work that they are doing. Workers want to feel as though their efforts matter and tying their daily activities to the larger success of your organization can help to do that. A skillful approach to environmental branding will give your workers the kind of positive climate that helps with employee retention and productivity, while also aiding recruitment of new employees by making a favorable first impression when job candidates visit.
Impressing clients
When you bring clients or prospective clients into your space, what kind of impression do you want to make? Everything they see and experience inside your facilities will affect how they view your business. You will want to consider your space from their perspective, particularly those areas where they will likely spend time -- such as conference rooms, lobbies and reception spaces. These spaces offer opportunities to show off your brand and your work. Awards and successful projects or products can have a place in environmental branding. However, you will want to take a discerning approach and avoid transforming your space into an environment that feels like an advertisement -- you want to give the impression of a place where exceptional work gets done.
At Fryed Egg, we help organizations build brand identities that reflect who they are and then develop comprehensive marketing strategies to protect and advance those brands in everything that they do. If you want to see if Fryed Egg is the right agency for your marketing needs, contact us at (813) 478-0494 or [email protected] or visit www.fryedegg.com.