In my life as a brand consultant, I spent many an evening in the back room of a research firm listening to consumers debate which newly redesigned packaging concept stood out more on shelf. In the world of consumer packaged goods, shelf impact is king. Just think, shopping lists are a thing of the past. Instead, shoppers walk down the supermarket aisle making spur of the moment decisions on what products to buy. Standing out in a sea of products can make or break your brand.

In my opinion, Twitter isn’t much different. Think of your viewing platform (i.e. TweetDeck) like a supermarket aisle. Thousands of tweets from the hundreds of people you are following are calling out at you: “Read me!”. “Click on my link!”. “ReTweet me!”. It’s human nature to filter out the noise and try to find a way to identify what’s important. Virtually impossible to read each and every tweet, over time, we learn who pumps out the most value and recognize those people by their profile pictures.

Just like packaging, our profile pictures should have shelf impact. There’s a skill and a strategy to designing the optimal package. Good designers realize that humans are visual beings. Before we read the word Tide, we recognize the shape and colour of the red and yellow bullseye. The same should hold true for our Twitter profile pictures. This leads me to my latest development…

My Twitter profile is a visual link to my blog…which uses the same picture as my Facebook profile, LinkedIn profile, EventPeeps profile…well, you get the picture (ha, ha). The problem is that my black and white photo no longer has ‘shelf impact’. In fact, it gets lost in the crowd.

Under the Direct Messages column you’ll see 4 different profile options. The bottom picture was my original profile.

So my challenge was: How do I retain the picture that everyone uses to identify my brand while gaining more shelf impact. My answer was to develop 3 new options that focus on colors relevant to my ready2spark brand and shape.

So my question to you is: