Vehicle branding can rapidly increase the rate of enquiries you’re used to by increasing your brand awareness.
If done correctly, your wrap will not only pay for itself in a matter of weeks or months, but you also stand to save money, as the vinyl protects your vehicles from nicks and scratches. This not only saves you the cost of repairs, but also increases resale value and minimises end-of-lease charges.
In this guide, I will cover the factors that contribute to effective vehicle branding, including impact, colours, fonts, captions, imagery, brand relevancy, contact information and service.
Impact
Impact is one of the most important factors in determining how effective your vehicle branding will be. The blander and more generic your design, the smaller the impression you make. Don’t be like all the other forgettable vans out on the road.
If you really want to maximise your brand awareness, you need to invest time into creating an eye-catching design that sticks in people’s minds. This requires the use of vibrant colours, contrast and some artistry.
The best designs literally disrupt you from whatever you're doing – they demand your attention. A recent example I saw on the road had even wrapped the roof rack. This seemingly small attention to detail made their wrap stand out because it was unexpected, maximising the design's impact.
Colours
Less is more! Just two or three strong colours are enough for a great design, and many successful wraps use just one!
It’s best to steer away from dull or neutral colours, particularly colours used by most vehicles on the road. Black, white, and grey should never be used uniformly, only contrasted, or you risk looking like every other vehicle on the road.
Well Known Brand Examples:
Client Dominoes branding is extremely memorable because they use bright colours that contrast with the natural landscapes of the UK.
Deliveroo above is another great client example: that unique shade of blue and pink makes the brand instantly recognisable and doesn’t look like typical brands you see on the road.
Fonts
Use no more than two fonts. As with colour, too many fonts cause confusion. Keeping things clean and simple is the best way to impress.
Your choice of fonts should match the overall style and tone of your brand. For a professional and sleek look, opt for clean and modern fonts. If your brand has a more playful and informal vibe, choose fonts with more personality.
Legibility is crucial. Fonts must be easily readable, even from a distance. Avoid intricate or overly decorative fonts that can be difficult to decipher. Instead, opt for bold and clear fonts that can be easily seen and understood by passers-by.
Captions
Keep it short and sweet! Say as much about what you do in as few words as possible.
Often potential customers will only have a split second to read and absorb your message if you are driving past them, so clear and concise is the way to go.
A catchy phrase or slogan that encapsulates the essence of your brand is ideal. Easy to digest, easy to remember. What sets your business apart and how can you communicate that in a concise but captivating way?
For example, if you're a landscaping company, your caption could be something like "Transforming Outdoor Spaces" or "Bringing Beauty to Your Backyard." Short but impactful, these phrases convey the essence of your services in a way that sticks with potential customers.
Ultimately, the goal of your caption is to spark curiosity and leave a lasting impression. Keep it short, sweet, and memorable, and you'll have a powerful tool to enhance the effectiveness of your vehicle branding.
Imagery
Imagery is extremely important in broadcasting your ad to potential customers with your vehicle. A picture tells a thousand words and helps leads understand your services more quickly as you pass by them.
High resolution imagery makes images pop, high image detail is literally pleasing to the eye, making people more likely to take a second look and investigate your vehicle.
JB Sales
A good example is client JB Sales who supply survey and safety equipment. Just look at that aesthetic design and imagery!
We advised them to display product images in their design to broadcast a message that the right people would instantly understand. We combined this with a high-contrast white/black partial wrap to maximise their impact.
Brand Relevancy
Any vehicle branding effort must reflect the image you normally present to customers. This heightens brand recognition and helps new customers learn a bit about you before they even think about visiting your website or taking down your contact details.
Think about who are you as a brand, how you interact with customers, what is your tone, reputation and presentation like etc. Don’t try and pretend to be something you're not, you only risk alienating your existing customers or causing new customers to disassociate your vehicles from your business.
Having a solid set of brand guidelines in place makes this process easier, allowing your designer or design service to extrapolate who you are onto a vehicle wrap template.
Big Wipes
Take a look at recent client Big Wipes for example. Big Wipes goes BIG, standout colours, maximum impact, maximum fun!
That’s exactly the result they achieved. The use of font sizes in particular is great on this van, You can read the words Big Wipes even if you’re quite far away or the van is speeding past you. This covers the most important part of brand awareness… getting your name out there!
After becoming aware that Big Wipes exists, you can now focus in on some of the product details on the van. Understandably not all that information can be in a large font size, but going back to what I said earlier about imagery, Big Wipes got around this with a high resolution image showing their product in action.
Contact Information
Easily readable contact information is essential to effective vehicle branding. Too many vans go big on the design and then forget the actual purpose of the wrap. Whilst contact information shouldn’t necessarily interrupt the flow of your design, it should be clear and obvious.
Contact information could include, your business telephone number, email address, website or social media. Including a QR code is also a good idea as it provides a convenient way for leads to quickly reach a landing page.
Use unique contact information on your newly branded vehicles where possible. This allows you to track wrap related enquiries and thus your return on investment. You can analyse this data to hone in on areas that are providing you with the most high value leads and enquiries too.
You can then factor this information into your route planning for example, if you are trying to raise brand awareness in a particularly profitable location.
Service
Having an experienced service on your side will make a huge difference to the effectiveness of your vehicle branding. It’s easy to just submit your own design to a wrap installer, but you won’t get great results.
You need a wrap company that also has experience in brand production, the balance between practical and creative experience will maximise the potential effectiveness of the final wrap.
A professional service will work with you from the beginning, assisting and advising you with the design process, until you have not only branding that looks incredible on a template, but branding that looks incredible in practise.
If you are working with designers, printers and installers separately for example, designs often get ‘lost in translation’ from template to vehicle. This can lead to expensive errors you might not spot until after your wrap is printed and installed.
With an all in one service, quality control is taken care of in house, so you don’t have to worry about design flaws, and any reputable service will be happy to work with you until a final design is approved and passed quality checks.
With no quibble aftercare and personalised warranty, you don’t have to worry about anything going wrong post investment either. You can just sit back and let your high quality vehicle branding pay for itself, over and over again.
What are my next steps?
If you prioritise impact, imagery, brand relevancy, contact information and finding a professional vehicle wrapping service, you stand the best chance of maximising the effectiveness of your vehicle branding.
Why not try out a design yourself? Just hit the button below for a free template that matches your vehicles make and model.
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To learn more about vehicle wrapping, check out our Ultimate Guide to Fleet Branding.
You will learn the benefits of branding your fleet, how fleet wrapping works, how much it costs, how to maximise the effectiveness of your branding, different types of fleet wraps, how other companies use vehicle wrapping and frequently asked questions.