A potential customer has started the search for your
particular product or service. They land on your your website, check out your
logo and then take a look at what your competitors are doing. Then they come
back to you. And they keep coming back. Why?
Great branding.
Branding is powerful tool. It conveys your unique story, instills a lasting impression and maintains consistent connection with your audience.
It is a tool to be used wisely.
So take heed and steer clear of these five common mistakes:
#1. Redoing your brand out of boredom.
Bottom line?
In order to build and maintain a strong brand, there has to
be consistency. But in this world of constant change and short attention spans
(Look! A shiny pony!), it’s not unusual for brand owners to get bored and want
to give their brand a makeover.
To be clear, a working brand is not something to redo, like
your kitchen or bathroom. When you start messing with your brand simply because
you’re tired of it, the first thing to go is consistency and thus, the strength of your brand.
Maintaining a strong brand means staying consistent. This is not to say that a brand that’s
become irrelevant or a logo that’s outdated shouldn’t be updated. It should.
(More on that later.) But if your brand is performing well, then follow this
sage advice - “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
And if it’s not, consider enacting the following:
•
Defining your brand character and
staying true to it.
•
Keeping a uniform presentation of your
logo across your branding.
•
Stating your brand promise clearly and
ensuring it’s kept at every point of encounter with your brand.
•
Creating brand-usage guidelines to be
followed by all.
#2. Relying on shock value.
You want your brand to be noticed. Of course you do.
So in an effort to stand out, you may be tempted to brand
yourself as shocking and controversial. And it may work. But it’s a huge
gamble. And if it backfires, as it often does, you’ll be spending time and
money backtracking and apologizing.
Take it from British fashion brand Harvey Nichols. In 2012,
they went down in history as making one of the biggest branding mistakes after they
tried to visualize the catchphrase ‘try to contain your excitement’ with ads
showing models who had peed themselves.
Not a favorable image in an industry that is all about image.
Suffice it to say, it didn’t go well.
When you want your branding to show how you’re different, a
good place to start is to look at your strengths and your competitors’
weaknesses. What do you have that will sway your target audience? Make that
a part of your branding.
It’s not a standout quality or mind-blowing business
practice, but rather a reasonable goal that positions you as knowledgeable and
trustworthy.
#3. Playing it too safe.
This is the other end of the spectrum. It’s a milquetoast
strategy and it’s lazy branding.
There’s no point in developing brand guidelines that reveal
absolutely nothing about your company. The dead give away? Generic logos and
marketing language you’ve read a million times. Terminology like “number one” or
“award-winning” or anything in that vain is unconvincing and (almost) no one is
buying it.
Such catch-all
phrases have been repeated so often that they
have no meaning. Daniel Burstein, director of editorial comment for MECLABS,
calls this “wallpaper
copywriting”. It’s vague language that sounds good at first, but actually says
zilch about your brand.
Your language, imagery and logos need to be simple and
clear.
Take the company Square, for example. The mobile-payment
processor has a logo that
mimics the product in an unforgettable way. And their tagline? “Start accepting credit cards today.”
It doesn’t get any clearer than that.
#4. Getting lured by the latest design trends.
Your brand’s standards are demonstrated by everything from
logo usage to color schemes, layout configuration to typefaces. And then some.
How your business represents itself visually cannot be
underestimated.
So you might be inclined to incorporate all the newest
flashes and whirly-gigs. Fight that inclination. Particularly when it comes to
your logo and brand identity collateral.
Generally speaking, once you’ve established your company
logo, don’t change it. Ever. The exception to this would be if your company
REALLY needs a complete rebrand or your logo design fell prey to a previous trend and now looks
outdated. Any changes should be subtle, based on tried and true design
principles and carefully implemented to avoid confusion with your audiences.
Other brand identity collateral like your business card,
letterhead, envelope, etc. also need to be consistent with the logo in order to add brand
recognition and help to build your brand’s equity.
Interestingly, one of the most crucial aspects of your
website design is also the largest part of your website - the background color.
No matter how the dark the times (or the mood of your
website designer), the rule of thumb toward keeping your website design
timeless is to avoid backgrounds that are really dark. Text is harder to read and navigating is
more difficult since links are harder to decipher.
Stick with a light background. If you prefer to use an
image as your background, keep it simple and clear. (Picked up on the “be clear
in your branding” theme yet?) You want visitors to execute a certain task, not
get distracted.
#5 Going MIA with your social media involvement.
Isn’t social media awesome?
Well, it can be. Regardless of your opinion of social
media, it IS awesome for starting conversations and building awareness of your
expertise and your brand. According to Forbes, 82% of people trust a company
more if they are involved with social media.
Of course, you have to be involved in social media management in order to be
part of those conversations. If you’re missing in action, you’re missing the
action.
It’s important to pay special attention to people who
may not have had the best experience with your company and left a comment on
your social media. Responding to these comments and finding resolution at this
point is crucial. Ignoring them could cause these dissatisfied customers to go
on to leave nasty reviews for everyone to see on sites like Yelp.
That’s not the sort of attention you want for your brand.
It would be nice if these were the only five mistakes to be
made in branding and that to avoid them would brand you golden.
Then again, gone would be the moments like this, provided
by Spy Optic in California while attempting to brand their line of ‘Happy’ lenses
.
The billboard was up for less than a day before the company
was forced to take it down.
Ready to take your branding to the next level? Connect with LeDuc Creative to get started today.
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