You feel different when you receive a letter from an organisation that is important to you. Amongst the bills, advertising and newspapers that come through the door, you know instinctively which envelopes are important and how they are important.
If something relates to your finances, it’s intellectually important. If it’s a magazine you love to read, it’s emotionally important. If it’s from your child’s school, it’s both.
All companies realise this, and push the branding very hard. They compel you to invest emotionally in their brand. And, actually, this does work. This is also why emails are no longer written in plain text, and have the company’s branding, colours and signature at the end.
When it comes to something as important as your child’s education, the emotional connection is already there from day one: it’s is both intellectually and emotionally important. You are already invested in the school’s ‘brand’. The letter from your child’s school takes priority in your mind even if you haven’t opened it yet.
Messenger app companies know this, too, which is why you get a very different interaction from Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, where the colour scheme and lay-out is carefully designed to be recognisable as part of the platform’s brand. You are already emotionally invested in the person you’re talking to, so if you see a screen-shot of the pale green and grey WhatsApp communication, or the blue bubbles of Facebook, you are recognising the ubiquity of the platform itself.
Knowing of all this is why our school apps excel.
If you were to use an ‘ordinary’ school communication app, you would have some sense of connection with it because of its function, like Facebook or WhatsApp.
But our apps go one step further: we are the only app company that uses your school’s branding, logo and colours throughout the app.
In other words, we understand your emotional connection with the school, through branding, and think of this as an integral part of our app design.