How much do people trust brands? Unfortunately, not a lot. Consumer skepticism across all markets is high, with over 50% of consumers raising an eyebrow when they hear sustainability claims from businesses. Many of these same buyers find the company’s intentions, especially concerning cause-related marketing, to be less than sincere and, sadly, self-serving.

In a world where people don’t trust brands, businesses must prove that they authentically and accurately illustrate the issues they care about.

To do this, brands have to express this through their messaging, actions, and visuals to regain the trust they’ve lost. Since we specialize in the latter, let’s explore how to show brand authenticity visually so your business can talk the talk and actually walk the walk.

What is at the core of brand authenticity

At its core, brand authenticity overlays what a company says through its messaging and marketing with the reality or truth about its products, values, and mission. If everything goes well, the company’s actions align with what they show the world.

Three visual attributes you can find in authentic brands include:

• Consistency throughout its visual elements
• Realistic portrayal of the brand’s audience(s)
• Cohesive pairing of messaging and imagery

Buyer distrust creeps in when there’s a disconnect between one or all of the bullets above. It affects how people think of the brand, which impacts whether they decide to part with their money with your business or another.

The above attributes work together with your business’s actions and products. They help convey that your company is worthy of their trust, and here’s how each one works towards delivering that message.

Consistent visual elements solidify your brand

We’ve discussed logo symbolism, how color influences purchases, why typefaces matter in the past, and how every part of your brand plays a role in building—or tearing down—people’s perception of it.

In the Journal of Marketing Communications, researchers found the more exposure people have to a logo, the more positively they feel about it, especially when it’s intricate in design.

Maintaining consistency throughout your brand elements means people can pick it out of a lineup because it’s recognizable amongst a sea of competitors. It makes your brand stick in buyers’ minds and begins to lay the groundwork for them to trust it.

Realistic imagery represents your audience

Showing an image of your target audience in an ad doesn’t immediately mean that you’re authentically representing them. True representation signifies that you’re speaking to a person’s self-image or the mirror in which they view themselves.

It’s tempting to rely on stock photography as a cost-effective way to produce marketing materials. Heck, we even use them for our clients.

But using real photos of the people who buy your products, as in the case of period underwear company Thinx, humanizes them. Showing diverse people with “normal” body types wearing a product often spoken about in hushed tones makes it more accessible and relatable.

Imagery that creates an authentic connection uses real people in unpretentious settings doing real things, leading to higher engagement and a positive association with the brand.

Brand imagery and messaging bring everything together

The visuals shown, along with the marketing and sales messaging put out by a company, have to do a lot of heavy lifting to ensure that they align with the brand’s core values, products, and mission.

People use what they see to guide their perceptions about how well a business’s actions match theirs.

Your business is promoting a product and telling a story. For this story to resonate, people have to have an emotional connection with it.

Practical tips for businesses to gauge their authenticity

Does it feel like you’re building the plane as it flies? Many companies’ brand identities are in flux, thus creating conditions that lead to people not taking them seriously. Vague mission statements, unclear principles, and an undefined visual identity don’t give people the greatest confidence in a business’s ability to deliver an authentic experience.

To begin working through whether or not your brand is sending the right signals to its customers, start by:

• 1. Stating what your company embodies
• 2. Conducting an audit to assess the current brand’s internal and external positioning
• 3. Produce brand guidelines encompassing your values and mission, how your company intends to act, and how it should appear in your advertising and marketing
• 4. Periodically, assess and reevaluate your visual brand to see if it still matches your company’s actions

As you strategize and create your future marketing plans, they’ll be more concrete because you won’t have to guess at how the brand should look or sound. You’ll have a style guide that serves as the final word on the company’s identity. If you need help, a design partner, like our agency, can work with you to figure out your brand’s identity and how to present it to the world.

Turning doubt into belief

In today’s world, with so much messaging full of empty promises, businesses need to prove that they live up to the values they talk about.

When you take a genuine position on your company’s values, you can develop a brand that communicates authentically with its audience, which can begin to turn their skepticism into belief.