The impact of visuals on the brain is much more than people realize. This is mainly because the effect is felt at a subconscious level.

This means that creating and maintaining a strong visual impression is crucial to the success of any business. A business is first and foremost a visual thing in the minds of your customers.

What a business looks like – both physically and virtually in the form of a website – communicates more about its thoughts, feelings, philosophy, attitudes and intentions than almost anything else a business can do. The visual impressions that businesses make on the minds of their customers are immediate and lasting.

It is virtually impossible for anyone to see anything without drawing an instantaneous conclusion about it. The human brain is wired to do this …

… because each of us possesses a vast unconscious ‘images and videos storehouse’. This ‘picture book’ is like your own personal version of Google Images or Google Video.

And whether you realize it or not, your brain has labelled all of those visuals with associations, interpretations, judgments and feelings. They all work together to form conclusions when we are greeted by a new image.

So what it comes down to is this – the management of impressions is the management of people. The problem seems to be that the vast majority of businesses simply don’t get this message.

What visual impressions does your business project out to your customers? We’re not just talking about things like logos here. The different aspects of the visual impression are as follows.

• Colour is the first thing that people see – what colours best communicate the purpose of your business?
• Design includes things like logo, how products look and the dress code adopted by staff.
• Feel includes things like whether the place where people work feels welcoming or not.
• Order has to do with organisation, tidiness and whether things have a place to be put and are put there.
• Detail is the small things such as whether things are kept clean and in good working order and it indicates the level of care that people take.
• Information has to do with the visual ways in which messages are put across to staff and customers – for example, signage.

So the visual impression your business is leaving on your customers is almost certainly more profound and long-lasting than you realize.