Architectural Branding: Facade Design as a Marketing Tool for Your Brand

When you first catch a glimpse of a building, that immediately gives you an impression of the business inside.

Branding is one of the most crucial marketing strategies for any business. From business cards to website design, keeping a brand’s theme, colours and styles consistent helps a brand become recognisable and trusted among its market. Façade design can be just as important in modern branding strategies as other marketing. The building where your client’s business is located is a huge business card, it’s the first impression many people will get of brand personality and identity. Choice of colours, styles and materials goes beyond mere aesthetic appeal – façades themselves are a valuable marketing tool that can serve powerful branding purposes, helping markets build familiarity with, and trust in, a brand.

The wide range of façade cladding available from Fairview assists architects and developers in designing and creating a façade that speaks to the identity and values of a business or brand.

Turning Facades into Brand Billboards

Façades are known for making a statement, speaking to an architect’s vision or capturing the essence of the community – but they can also be effectively utilised as large-scale advertising mediums. Incorporating architectural elements such as digital screens, strategically placed logos or innovative lighting can transform a building into a live advertisement. These are often aligned with passing traffic viewpoints for maximum effect, capturing the public attention with a video, flashy display that draws their attention to an idea, or a very visible reminder of the brand and what it can offer.

Utilising façade cladding can also add significantly to a building’s branding.

Our extensive range of cladding styles allows architects the perfect opportunity to create a truly branded façade, offering custom colours to match brand palettes, as well as custom finishes to recreate specific designs, such as logos.

Architectural Branding: The Power of Place

What makes brands iconic? Creating iconic architecture to go along with them. Some of the world’s best-known brands have showcased their attributes with a grand and prominent structure, that passersby and customers alike have come to associate with their company and identity. Studies have also shown that ‘place branding’ – that is, associating specific spaces and places with a local or creative identity, can have a profound impact on a community. Branded areas within CBD suburbs can help businesses create and cultivate a certain image, that they can share with their clients through the visual displays on their buildings.

Physical spaces will always influence consumer perception, so leveraging them to reinforce brand values is a clever marketing move. Buildings (facades especially) are the ‘face’ of a company and can be used to immediately communicate values to their target market, such as innovation, stability or luxury – in short, to tell their ‘brand story’ to the market just from one glance.

Using Facade Cladding to Make a Statement in Architectural Branding

One of the most effective ways to transform a building into a brand statement is to utilise its cladding. Fairview has worked with numerous clients to transform an architectural project into an effective marketing tool.

Southport’s Jaguar Land Rover facility is an example of using brand colouring to make a statement. The project utilises 950m2 of Vitracore G2 engineered aluminium panels matched to the corporate colours of the high-end dealership. The result is a solid statement to all passers-by conveying the brand’s identity of being sleek, sophisticated and luxurious.

Optus Stadium built by Brookfield Multiplex in Perth, combined branding with space and place associations, choosing Stryüm interlocking aluminium panels in a variety of bronze tones linking to Indigenous culture and to reflect WA’s unique geology. The popular sport and entertainment venue is not only an example of branding on a facade, but of the way connecting brand to place can strike a chord in the market on a deeper level.

Corporate companies with highly recognisable brand colours such as Chemist Warehouse, which features vibrant yellows, or Kennard’s Self Storage, with its signature bright orange, have benefited from colour matched Vitracore G2 panels, which allow passersby to immediately spot their most notable brand elements even from a distance.

Enhancing Brand Through Architecture: Fairview Corporate Partnerships

Our extensive experience in bringing corporate branding to life has helped transform many businesses. With corporate partnerships, we collaborate with businesses to embody and broadcast brand identity through building facades.

Colour-Matched Cladded Facades

With an almost limitless range of colours, plus the flexibility to create new shades or even customisable graphic panels, Fairview can work with you to create the right colour scheme for your brand. With contemporary metal cladding available for modern urban brands, and natural materials that speak to the natural elements of your brand, we can help you create a facade that suits the image, personality and values of your business.

Sustainability Focus

How your brand performs is as important as how it looks. With energy-efficient rainscreen systems available, we help your brand not only showcase its values visually, but through the overall efficiency of your company building. Our Ecoloop recycling program also helps you embody sustainable values during the recladding process – while customising your building, you can know (and promote) that your old panels are being repurposed.

Bring Your Brand to Life with Fairview’s Product Range

Our portfolio is developed to provide our clients with a wide range of products, each with unique features to suit different architectural branding styles.

Contemporary Aluminium Cladding: Vitradual, Stryüm and Vitracore G2

Aluminium cladding panels are popular across a range of contemporary designs. Vitradual solid aluminium panels, Stryüm interlocking aluminium cladding and Vitracore G2 engineered aluminium panels offer a range of customisation options. Featuring a heavy-duty PVDF finish in a range of colours, including woodgrains, metallic colours and vibrant solid colours. Fire resistant and compliant with a range of non-combustibility standards, all these panel options are ideal for creating a personalised facade that also meets the updated NCC requirements for fire safety.

Bespoke Customisation: VitraArt

To truly reflect an authentic and distinctive brand identity, VitraArt is a comprehensive, custom graphic cladding solution. Applied to Vitracore G2 or Vitradual panels, VitraArt brings inspiration to life and can be applied to an entire façade or as a small feature. The design options available to architects is endless.

Modern Metallics: Vitraloc

Customising your metal cladding to suit a brand aesthetic does not stop with aluminium. Fairview also offers a range of metal cladding choices, in the form of interlocking roll-formed steel Vitraloc. For metallic aesthetics that suit different compliance and weatherproofing needs, this metal cladding option can be customised to suit different colour and design needs.

Natural Style with the Fairview Naturals Range: Smartbric Cladding, Genesis Cladding and Clayton Cladding

Choosing a natural cladding material for your branded facade can tell its own story about your company. Natural materials, textures and colours can highlight a brand’s connection to the earth, or a commitment to being sustainable and eco-friendly. Our eco-friendly brick-slip cladding, Smartbric, brings the beloved brick aesthetic to new heights. Using brick slips instead of heavy bricks and mortar, and featuring a variety of natural colours, Smartbric can be installed on high rise facades, and can bring a rustic, industrial chic or homely feel to a brand, while also embodying sustainability and durability.

For an even earthier vibe, Clayton, terracotta panels uses clay formed from the earth, in a wide range of natural colours, to bring high-performing natural aesthetics to a wide range of brands. With different textures and glazes available, Clayton can bring home the natural essence of a brand or combine biophilic design with an on-trend new brand using vibrant colours.

For brands seeking to embody true sustainability, Genesis fibre cement panels offer a range of artistic finishes and natural textures, while also being thermally efficient and durable.

Empowering Your Brand Through Innovative Facade Design

Façade design is a valuable marketing tool – it is the face of a brand, and a billboard through which a company can showcase its style as well as its values. Choosing the right façade cladding to represent a brand can not only reinforce familiarity with brand aesthetics and colours, but showcase values associated with a brand, such as sustainability.

Incorporating brand elements into building design can foster a connection between a market and both the brand itself and a place. Iconic buildings and facades can tell a brand ‘story’ that becomes instantly recognisable by the public and cements that brand in the popular imagination.

With customised finishes for aluminium, natural materials and a vast range of colour options, Fairview provides innovative façade branding solutions. Corporate partnerships with Fairview allow businesses to recreate their ideal brand personality on their building for all to see, enhancing their physical presence.