Some brands get off to great starts. Some are wobbly from the get-go. Others start well and then lose their way through lack of focus, discipline, and follow-through on brand strategies, brand promises, and reliably consistent brand experiences.
This article describes ten branding mistakes to steer clear of, and provides tips to keep your brand moving continuously in the right direction, constantly gaining esteem and equity as a result.
Thinking of Branding as a Quick Fix
The mistake: When business is down, when consumer interest falls, or when competition surges, the idea of branding pops up as some miracle cure for transforming product perceptions and jump-starting success. In the heat of the moment, otherwise cool-headed professionals begin to believe that a new logo — and maybe even a new name, a new tagline, or a new marketing message — will serve as a remedy for all that ails the bottom line.
Those who look at branding as a marketing quick fix make the mistake of thinking that a brand is just a cosmetic application. They think that a new and improved brand identity will be the formula for a new and improved brand image. It doesn’t work that way, though, because a successful brand has to go all the way to the core of an organization.
The remedy: Before you create or alter the face of your brand, be sure you’re creating an accurate reflection of what’s at the base of your brand. The part of your brand that rises into public view — your name, logo, and marketing materials — must mirror the mission, vision, values, culture, leadership, and management that lies at the heart and soul of your organization. Otherwise, a credibility crisis looms large.
Starting with a Weak Identity
The mistake: Weak identities reveal themselves on first sight. They appear in the form of names that limit the scope and success of the brands they represent. Or they’re displayed as logos that, at-a-glance, convey that they were created on shoestring budgets by organizations with little chance of competing with big, established businesses.
As long as the businesses represented by weak names and logos are satisfied to remain in the confines that their identities dictate, all’s well. But if they want to expand into new product lines, new market arenas, or new competitive spheres, their weak identities are heavy anchors dragging down their success.
The remedy: Invest the time and money required to develop a strong name and logo design when you first establish your brand. Remember these points:
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In most cases, your name will live as long as your business does, so choose, register, and protect a name that you can grow with over years and decades. Great brand names travel through time, trends, markets, and even strategic redirections. Settle on a name that conveys your brand promise, supports your brand image, and that’s unique, pleasant to say, and easy to recall — all without confining your brand to a specific product or market area.
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Your logo will become the identifiable face of your brand. Make it a strong, simple, unique design that reproduces well in all forms of communication and scales up and down in size to look good on anything from business cards to giant signs.
Forgetting the Rule of One
The mistake: Businesses that barely have the budgets and marketing staff required to build one brand try to build two or three or more. In doing so, they dilute the expertise and funding they can devote to any one and build brand strength for none.
The remedy: Unless you’re sure that you have the marketing budget and expertise required to build and support multiple brands, stick to the Rule of One: Build one brand for your business rather than a business full of many brands.
Apply the Rule of One by following this advice:
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Build a single brand that can preside over all your offerings.
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Introduce each new product or service as an offering under your one and-only brand. This strategy allows each new product to capitalize upon the credibility of your brand while boosting the strength of your brand through the success of each new offering.
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Wipe the term sub-brand from your branding vocabulary. Turn to Chapter 16 for information on how sub-brands confuse customers and weaken brand management.
Tip: If you decide to create separate brands for individual products or services, build a separate business unit for each new brand. Separate business units allow each offering to stand on its own, drawing on its own resources and building independent value that you can spin off or sell in the future.
Failing to Differentiate
The mistake: If you can’t tell customers what you do best, they have no reason to choose your offering. If you don’t give them a clear reason to choose your product, they opt for a different, more distinct solution. And if they think that all available offerings deliver the same value and quality, they simply buy whatever’s available at the lowest price.
The remedy: Find a distinguishing characteristic that causes your offering to excel over available alternatives, and build your brand around that point of difference. To differentiate your brand
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Determine unique aspects of your offering that address genuine market interests or needs.
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Develop a brand identity and brand message to achieve awareness of the unique values consumers receive only when they work with your business or buy your product.
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Reinforce your point of difference every time consumers come into contact with your name, your product, your staff, or your brand experience.
Failing to Launch
The mistake: Even business owners that love groundbreakings, ribbon cuttings, grand openings, and lavish celebrations underestimate the importance of staging a brand launch. Either they simply start using a new brand identity and call it a launch, or they invest in a formal marketplace launch of the brand before they take the time to gain brand understanding and buy-in within their own organizations.
If you fail to launch your brand, you lose a great one-time opportunity to make news with your brand identity, point of difference, promise, and message.
If you fail to launch internally first, you lose the chance to unite your team behind the brand. As a result, you almost certainly set your organization up for lapses in delivery of a great and consistent brand experience simply because a good many of your employees don’t understand what in the world your brand’s all about.
The remedy: Launch your brand from the inside out, bringing every aspect of your business into alignment with your brand promise, personality, and character before you raise the curtain and introduce your brand in your marketplace.
Failing to Protect and Defend
The mistake: Brand owners get complacent. They think that ironclad protective measures aren’t necessary to protect their brands from infringement or misuse, so they fail to obtain or defend trademarks, lock up domain names, write brand usage guidelines, or enforce their own brand usage rules when they’re broken. Before long, brand names are in jeopardy, brand consistency is at risk, and brand value plummets.
The remedy: Protect your brand in three important ways:
1. File your name with appropriate government offices, and obtain brand trademarks if your sphere of business crosses state or national boundaries.
2. Establish, adopt, and enforce usage guidelines so that those within or outside your organization don’t tamper with your brand identity.
3. Enforce your rules by following up on every brand usage infraction, without fail.
If you don’t follow up on infractions, the least that can happen is erosion of the strength of your brand presentation. The worst that can happen is loss of your trademarks due to your own abandonment or complacency.
Believing That What You Say Is More Important Than What You Do
The mistake: Even with the best name and logo, the most awesome brand launch, and brand marketing materials that win best-of-show in all creative competitions, brands suffer if they don’t live up to their promises and deliver the kind of products and service that create loyal and passionate consumers.
The remedy: Realize that your brand is either made or broken not by what you say but by what you do. Consumers base their brand impressions upon the caliber and consistency of their experiences with the brand.
1. Identify every possible point of contact between your brand and your consumer, from pre-purchase encounters through the purchase experience and product usage, to lost-purchase communications and customer service.
2. Evaluate each point of contact to see that you present your brand message, promise, look, and tone without fail and with total consistency.
3. Identify and correct any points of contact where the brand experience falls even slightly short of your brand promise.
4. Regularly audit your brand experience to insure against branderoding communication or service lapses.
Underestimating the Value of Consistency
The mistake: Brand owners get bored. They get tired of their looks and messages, so they start improvising. They fiddle with their identities, putting some additional color here or there, adding a new tagline, maybe even embellishing their names or revising their logo designs. They try out new personalities in their marketing messages, sampling humorous approaches when they’ve always been staid and serious in the past, or trying to look or sound hip instead of keeping their usual conventional tone.
Just like that, consistency goes out the window along with the ability to convey the brand’s identity and promise with the kind of clarity that inspires confidence in everyone from employees to consumers to investors and others.
The remedy: To build and maintain a strong brand, you have to be consistent, and to be consistent, you have to:
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Insist that your logo appear exactly the same every single time it’s reproduced, with no exceptions in type, style, color, design, placement of the tagline, or presentation of every other element that contributes to the brand identity consumers know and count on.
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Put your brand promise into words and then make sure it’s kept at every point of encounter with your brand, whether with customers, employees, suppliers, associates, or prospects. Only by staying true to your word and consistently upholding your promise can you build trust and loyalty.
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Define and stay true to your brand character, which is the look and tone that conveys the personality of your organization.
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Create a set of brand usage guidelines to be followed by everyone who produces marketing materials for your business, and then name a brand cop to keep everyone’s efforts in line.
Asking Your Brand to Stretch Too Far
The mistake: When a good brand extends its name to an iffy product or to a product that contradicts the brand message and promise or that erodes the emotional connection that the brand enjoys with consumers, the brand ends up hurting itself in the process of trying to help the launch of the new offering.
The remedy: Leveraging a brand name is a smart, lucrative action as long as the new offering is consistent with your brand message and promise and capable of deepening the emotional connection you’ve established with your customers.
When extending your brand, stay within your established product category or only move into categories that are very compatible with your established offering. Extend your brand only to new products that match up with consumer expectations of your brand in terms of quality, market position, and brand promise.
Be careful that your new offering isn’t so similar to an existing offering that it confuses consumers, causing them to buy your new product instead of your established product or leading to selection dilemmas that result in no purchase at all.
Leveraging your brand into new product or market categories is one of the most valued perks of brand development. It allows you capitalize on the reputation you’ve built over time and apply it to new ventures that benefit from instant awareness and competitive advantage.
Ignoring Brand Aging Signs
The mistake: Some brands get stuck in times past, and the brand owners are the last ones to notice. They’re so busy fending off competitors and working to attract and keep business that they fail to notice when their brand identities no longer reflect the essence of their businesses, when their brand identities become out of step with current tastes and trends, or when their brand experiences become outdated, erratic, or otherwise unable to compete well in the contemporary environment.
The remedy: On a regular basis, a great brand undergoes the equivalent of a doctors checkup to see if it’s experiencing any early warning signs that its age is starting to affect its health. Watch out for theses signs that your brand is starting to age:
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Major ownership or leadership changes that affect your mission, vision, values, or strategic direction
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Major changes to your product line or distribution channels
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Major changes to your market situation, including significantly increased competition or major shifts in consumer preferences and behaviors
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A merger or acquisition
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A brand that no longer reflects your changed business and market
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A brand message, experience, or identity that’s become dated and out of ynch with cultural trends and consumer interests and tastes
Some brand situations benefit from minor cosmetic repair and message realignment, whereas others require more significant revitalization or even total rebranding.
So there are some of the most common mistakes in branding your organization, and ideas on how to avoid them. To establish and maintain the kind of brand experience that builds passion, loyalty, and brand value, take formal action, following our design & branding advice posts, or by subscribing to SEO & Marketing Tips for Webmasters
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