How Your Business Vehicles Can Elevate Your Brand

For many businesses looking for ways to boost their brand and their marketing efforts, vehicle signage may not be the first item on the idea list.

However, a company that already owns and operates one or more business cars, vans or trucks may be missing a major opportunity to spread its name and message to a wider audience if it hasn’t invested in vehicle graphics. After all, it makes good sense for the public to see your logo and your branding wherever your vehicles are present.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at the different types of vehicle signage and how you can use it to further your business branding goals.

What is vehicle signage?

There are a few different types of signs that can be applied to vehicles. These options can include:

• Die-cut decals: These are usually smaller designs such as logos or text applied to a particular area of a vehicle. These are generally the cheapest and most basic option, and can be cut to any shape with the help of specialised computer cutting. However, these smaller decals may prove to be less eye-catching than some of the other signage possibilities.

• Full body wraps: For a really striking “wow” effect, you can use a full body wrap to completely envelop the vehicle with a bold and attention-grabbing design. This can cover windows, too, using a perforated one-way vinyl design substrate such as Contravision. This type of extensive vehicle signage is great for really turning heads, as well as including a lot of branding information (as you have a much larger canvas to work with).

• Partial wraps: As the name would suggest, a partial wrap job is a halfway house between a single spot decal and a full body wrap. This can be used to apply graphics only to certain key areas of the vehicle – creating a good visual effect while simultaneously keeping costs down.

These types of decals and wraps are durable and can last for many years if looked after correctly – but can also be removed with relative ease any time you wish to update your branding or refresh the graphics.

How can vehicle graphics elevate your branding?

One major advantage of using your business vehicles as opportunities for branding (especially when compared to other media such as traditional advertising and digital marketing) is that vehicle signage carries an innate implication of demand and customer endorsement.

That is to say, if somebody sees your branded vehicle out and about around town, they not only know that you exist – but also that other people are using your services.

For example, if you have a plumbing business and a passer-by sees your van parked in a job location, they will intuitively know that your company is somebody else’s trusted choice for plumbing work.

This plays into a psychological theory known as social proof. This describes the natural tendency of people to assume that if a lot of other people are doing something, it must be good (hence anybody who needs to enlist the services of a local plumber is likely to think first and foremost of the name they have seen on vans around town).

By letting people see your branded vehicles everywhere they go, you can make it abundantly clear to everybody that your services are in high demand – and what could be a better branding effect than that?

Another major advantage of vehicle graphics is that you can display advertising messages in places where this is not generally possible.

How else can you display a large, colourful advert on a quiet residential street with no pre-existing billboard locations? How else could you put your branding in front of a commuter stuck in a traffic jam in the middle of a featureless motorway?

Vehicle signage can allow your branding to reach eyeballs that may be untouchable by any other marketing medium. Your van will essentially become a branded billboard on wheels, and you can put it wherever you like.

What makes for good vehicle signage?

As with any form of visual branding, the right design for vehicle signage can make a big difference.

For one thing, clarity and legibility are particularly important. This may sound obvious – but most other forms of visual advertising aren’t intended to be seen going past at speed! You should bear in mind that your designs will be installed on something that may be moving, seen from a distance, or viewed at a strange angle.

This clarity can be ensured through a few common-sense design practices such as:

• Using high-contrast design elements to ensure that letterforms and iconography are clearly delineated from each other (and from the background colour).

• Employing clear and readable typography (and avoiding highly ornate, ‘swirly’ lettering that is hard to understand, for example).

• Keeping the design simple and uncluttered – don’t be tempted to take a ‘kitchen sink’ approach and cover your vehicle with a very large number of clashing design elements.

• Be mindful of your other, existing branding materials and strive for consistency. If your website and Twitter account use a particular font or colour, for example, your vehicles should ideally look that way, too. This helps ensure that customers experience a unified branding effect across all of your platforms.

• Don’t forget to check out the competition – if other businesses in your niche have got branded vehicles, it makes good sense to ensure that yours have a unique and distinctive look so that you can stand out from the crowd.

Ultimately, if you aren’t making use of your existing business vehicles as canvases for branding and marketing, you could be seriously missing a trick.

With different options available for all budgets, investing in vehicle signage is almost universally a great idea.

If your vehicles are going to be out and about around town as a matter of course, it just makes sense to get them kitted out with your brand assets – and then they can be generating solid local brand awareness for you all day, every day.

Medash Signs have been making and installing vehicle signage in Kent for many decades, as well as other types of business signs. At their 10,000 square foot factory in Ashford, the Medash team manufacture a wide variety of signs for clients in all sectors.