What’s a Brand Mood Board and Do B2Bs Need It?
Your visual identity is an important contributor to your ability to win new business and establish a strong brand perception with target audiences. Brand mood boards are a powerful tool for building this identity and aligning your teams around it. And while mood boards are sometimes considered a B2C strategy, B2B brands also have much to gain from using them.
Read on to learn more about what brand mood boards include and the benefits of using them for your B2B business.
Quick Takeaways
- Brand mood boards represent a brand’s visual identity, and include a collage of different images, colors, patterns, textures, and other visual elements.
- Mood boards help companies maintain consistency across teams and branding efforts.
- More than half of all brand first impressions are visual.
- Cohesive visual marketing creates a strong brand perception and builds trust, two key components of B2B buying decisions.
What is a Brand Mood Board?
A brand mood board is a visual tool used to build your brand visual identity and personality. It’s a collage or composition of different images, colors, patterns, textures, typography, and other visual elements that capture the desired mood, style, and personality of your brand. Its purpose is to convey a specific aesthetic or feeling that aligns with your values, audience, and strategy.
Brand mood boards serve as a reference point and source of inspiration for your designers, marketers, and any other stakeholders involved in creating various brand assets such as logos, website designs, packaging, advertisements, and social media content.
These visuals are carefully selected to represent the brand’s desired attributes and identity—for example, traits like professionalism, playfulness, elegance, or innovation. The mood board provides a visual direction and ensures consistency across different brand touchpoints, helping to create a cohesive and memorable brand experience for consumers.
By visually representing the brand’s intended mood and style, a mood board also helps designers and marketers to better understand and communicate the brand’s visual language and aesthetics.
It serves as a starting point for discussions and collaborations so that stakeholders can align their creative efforts and ensure that final brand elements accurately reflect the desired brand personality.
Here’s an example of what a brand mood board might look like for a B2B organization:
5 Reasons for B2Bs to Have a Brand Mood Board
Visual Communication
More than half of brand first impressions are visual, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That means the quality of your visual branding could be what makes or breaks a buyer’s decision to purchase from your business.
Consistency and Coherence
B2B brands often have multiple touchpoints—websites, marketing materials, presentations, social media profiles, and more. A brand mood board serves as a reference point to maintain consistency in visual elements.
For buyers, this kind of cohesive visual brand is an indicator of professionalism that fosters trust and confidence in purchase decisions.
Differentiation
B2B spaces are more competitive than ever, as buyers have a plethora of information and options at their fingertips as they research potential providers. When competition is intense, a strong and distinctive visual identity can help your brand stand out.
By developing a brand mood board, your teams can explore unique and creative visual directions to make your brand aesthetically unique. It allows them to establish a visual language that aligns with their brand positioning and appeals to your target audience.
Collaboration and Alignment
B2B brands often involve multiple stakeholders in the internal brand development process, such as designers, marketers, executives, and other team members.
A brand mood board serves as an important collaborative tool, enabling stakeholders to align their creative efforts and ensuring everyone is working towards a shared vision. It facilitates discussions, feedback, and synergetic decision-making, leading to more efficient and effective brand development.
Brand Perception and Trust
Even more so than in the B2C space, B2B buyers often rely on trust and credibility when making purchasing decisions. A well-defined and visually appealing brand identity enhances the perception of professionalism, expertise, and reliability. A brand mood board helps B2B brands shape their visual identity to create a positive and consistent brand image, which helps to establish trusting long-term relationships with clients.
Closing Thoughts
In summary, brand mood boards are valuable for B2B brands as they enable strong, intentional visual communication and help brands maintain consistency, differentiate from competitors, foster collaboration, and enhance their overall brand perception. They provide a foundation for memorable brand identity that resonates with the target audiences.
Michael Brenner is a keynote speaker, author and CEO of Marketing Insider Group. Michael has written hundreds of articles on sites such as Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, and The Guardian and he speaks at dozens of leadership conferences each year covering topics such as marketing, leadership, technology and business strategy.