How to build unrivaled trust and brand recognition with beautiful forms

What’s one of your favorite brands? Close your eyes and think about how it feels to interact with them on their website and social media channels, and throughout the entire purchase process. 

Do they make you laugh with a witty, sarcastic tone, like Morning Brew? Maybe they give you a sense of comfort and familiarity. (We feel right at home with Cabana’s warm, wandering website.)

Now consider how your go-to brand creates that distinct customer journey. They might use playful fonts, muted colors, bold shapes, or a perfectly placed gif—Et voilà. This is how cohesive, consistent creative elements come together to foster a memorable brand experience. 

Effective branding sparks instant audience interest and leads to long-lasting connections.

We surveyed Typeform customers about why branding matters to them. They said that staying on-brand adds value by

• building brand trust;

• improving brand recognition and

• elevating brand perception.

Want your audience to know, like, and trust you? A bold brand is the way to achieve that goal—and Typeform can help. Let’s explore the power of a beautiful brand and how Typeform helps you develop, deepen, and display your brand through every form.

The biggest branding challenges

Nike, Slack, and HubSpot have created iconic brands that everyone knows. But building a brand is only as good as the customer experience. Each touchpoint and interaction, however small, either delivers value or fails to resonate. If staying on brand was as easy as checking your email, everyone would do it. 

In the long run, staying on brand demands consistency and commitment, and not just from the marketing team, but everyone at the company. 

These five challenges are some of the most common obstacles standing between companies and their visions of on-brand grandeur.

1. Limited resources

Whether it’s because of layoffs or tight marketing budgets, many teams face branding challenges because they don’t have a dedicated designer to lean on. This leaves design efforts under-resourced and unsupported.

We’re living in an era of democratized design, where strapped marketers turn to third-party tools like Canva or Figma to scrape by. Those tools can be helpful in a pinch, sure, but they’re not ideal if your aim is to implement a consistent brand on an ongoing basis—especially if you aren’t a designer.

2. Time and budget constraints

More often than not, marketers have so much to do and so little time to do it all. You might not feel you can set aside time or resources to establish branding guidelines for fonts, colors, and other creative elements. 

Without documentation, time-pressed teams may inadvertently vary look and feel from one asset to another. This haphazard approach lacks cohesiveness and fails to mark a distinctly on-brand experience.

3. Lack of access to the relevant assets

Consistency is key for staying on brand. But many companies—particularly large enterprises—struggle to establish a central location for approved assets that they can then encourage everyone to use.

Let’s say a customer success manager wants to create a satisfaction survey but they struggle to track down an up-to-date logo or brand guidelines. When teams can’t find what they need to create on-brand materials, they often default to what’s easily accessible (even if incorrect) or create something new. This, though proactive, perpetuates the cycle of non-cohesive branding.

4. Customization complications

Most DIY design tools don’t offer enough flexibility to project the ideal on-brand image. In a form, for example, elements like button size and shape or background images go a long way in creating a look and feel that matches your brand. 

But if your tool of choice doesn’t offer the option to adjust those features, your forms and other assets will feel generic or disjointed. And off-brand interactions limit your chances of wow-ing and connecting with your audience.

5. Lack of stakeholder buy-in

Executives might look at fonts, shapes, and colors and wonder, “Is branding actually that important? Does the shape of our buttons or the placement of our logo truly matter?” The answer is absolutely—and leadership support can make or break branding efforts.

An off-brand color here or a misplaced shape there quickly adds up to an unpolished or unprofessional experience. When a prospect sees assets—from one-pagers to forms—that don’t feel like your brand, they tend to doubt your credibility. They feel less trust and connection to what you have to offer, and they’ll be less likely to recognize your brand the next time they encounter you.

Good news: These challenges have a solution

On the flip side, a little bit of creativity and intention go a long way toward building consistent brand experiences and deepening customer loyalty. 

Every day, Typeform customers protect and elevate their brands by putting great care into every aspect of their forms, from logos and brand voice to colors and shapes. Here’s how they do it.

Typeform: the key to consistent, beautiful brand experiences

With Typeform, marketers build people-friendly forms that their audiences love completing. From product quizzes to surveys, typeforms keep their brand front and center with ease—and it’s why many customers turn to us in the first place.

We asked our customers why they tried Typeform, and nearly half of respondents said that a key reason is that we make it easy to build beautiful experiences without designers. These on-brand experiences go a long way.

Branded typeforms support our customers:

• Project legitimacy. Fitness brand Barry’s strives to stay on brand in every interaction with customers—and Google Forms wasn’t cutting it. Switching to Typeform allowed them to project a consistent image through every branded form.

• Show off their brand’s personality. Playful, bold brands need a form experience to match. Sustainable deodorant brand Nuud found that in Typeform. The ability to add gifs to their forms? Check. The option to change colors as needed? Check. Customizability to create forms that don’t feel corporate or clinical? Double-check

• Set apart their marketing from the competition. Unique brands like Beardbrand aren’t afraid to put in the extra work to stand out from the generic marketing of other companies. Luckily, Typeform makes it that much easier to make a splash with a branded beardsman quiz that entertains respondents and suggests products to match their lifestyle. 

• Create and scale brand messaging. When done right, a single form goes a long way. Down & Feather Co. uses its Perfect Pillow quiz to generate leads and do so much more. Every question helps define customer segments in their email marketing tool for better targeting, more relevant discounts, and clearer messaging across channels.

Case in point: One Typeform customer—an international meal kit company—didn't want its audience to wonder why a billion-dollar company was sending generic Google Forms instead of forms that offer memorable, unique experiences. Instead, they wanted clean, professional, and responsive forms that felt like their brand and gave customers a good impression. Typeform offered them the form customization they needed to stay on brand in every interaction. Typeform can help you build on-brand experiences through forms. Audiences will love completing them, and your team will find it a breeze to create them. And it’s all thanks to features like Typeform’s brand kits.

Build detailed, eye-popping forms with brand kits

You can make sure every form is 100% on brand—all from one place. With brand kits, you can access whichever kit you need right in the form builder experience:

First, you’ll create a library of assets, such as logos, color palettes, fonts, symbols, and other media that are approved for use across your organization.

Next, you’ll create a theme to assign certain design elements for use across entire typeforms. A theme includes:

• A designated color palette for questions, answers, buttons, button text, and backgrounds

• A font

• An optional background image, including brightness and scale

• An optional brand logo

Once you’ve created your theme, you’re all set—now you can use your brand kits to stay consistent with every form.

If you have multiple products or brands with distinct design needs, that’s not a problem. You can even create distinct workspaces to make sure everything stays organized.

You can also adjust your meta description, subdomain for the typeform URL, and form ID. Soon, with the help of AI, you’ll be able to get on brand in seconds through automated branding. We’ll do the heavy lifting, take a cue from your website, and build an on-point form every time.

How to use market research to build a stand-out brand 

Customized forms—complete with just-right shapes, colors, and fonts—reflect your existing brand. But to develop your brand, it’s essential to conduct quality audience research via those beautiful forms to deepen your understanding of your audience.

Get to know your audience

Before you can create a brand that resonates with your audience, you need to know them deeply. So, research your target market, and you’ll unlock a crystal-clear picture of the individuals in your audience so you can shape your brand just for them.  

We recommend using surveys to learn about your customers on two levels: demographics and psychographics. 

• Demographic research shows you who someone is on paper. You should seek to capture things like a potential customer’s age, gender, and location. Learn about their income level, education, and job title, too. These details shape your knowledge of exactly who'll be buying your product.

• Psychographic research helps you understand the minds and hearts of your audience. To build a brand your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) loves to engage with, you need to know what they value and how they think. Craft forms to learn about the attitudes, interests, values, and lifestyles of your target audience. The more deeply you know someone, the better you can brand your product to resonate with them.

As any market researcher knows, no audience is one-size-fits-all. Unique subsets of your target market have different needs, priorities, and even language to describe their pain points. 

Enter segmentation. Consider surveying your audience to learn what sets their behavior and preferences apart. Then, organize those results into separate personas to tailor your branding and messaging to best appeal to each one.

SparkToro used Typeform as its secret weapon for segmentation. When Rand Fishkin and his team were beta-testing, they used typeforms to collect information from 5,000 people. This data helped them ‌clarify their ICP. Based on customer feedback, the SparkToro crew improved their product, honed in on their core value, and launched admirable brand positioning.

That’s the power of brand research.

Double-down on what matters, toss what doesn’t

Do you already have a well-defined brand? Market research helps you polish and update it over time. Whether you sense that your brand isn’t resonating with your audience anymore, or you just want to be proactive about gauging its effectiveness, forms can help. 

Start with brand awareness surveys to see whether you’re the first solution that comes to mind to solve a problem. See how you stack up to the competition by surveying for brand perception, and learn about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (usually called a SWOT analysis).

Even the best branding can’t hold up to the weight of unhappy customers. Make sure your brand is the best it can be ‌by asking your audience repeatedly over the years how your product is doing and what it could be doing better. 

Some brands even run consistent customer satisfaction surveys using Typeform to learn how their product and brand are performing. The same goes for Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys that gauge how likely someone is to recommend your product to others and how loyal they are to you.

Armed with the right customer insights, you can turn a good brand into a great one and offer something truly valuable grounded in data.

A memorable brand stands out—and keeps customers hooked

A hundred years ago, the average consumer was only familiar with a small handful of brands. Today, from our inboxes to our Instagram feeds, customers encounter countless brands at the speed of sound. These include your direct competitors and anyone else who’s vying for your audience’s money and time.

Brands simply can’t afford to blend in.

You need a distinct look and feel that stops customers in their tracks. Every interaction should lead people to learn more about you and create a cohesive experience over time. 

A defined brand is table stakes now. The companies that stand out document their voice clearly and arm themselves with the tools to infuse that brand into every touchpoint with their customers. 

To create surveys that sparkle with your branding or quirky quizzes that no one else but you could craft, start (and end) with Typeform.