7 Branding Mistakes
Today, we’re tackling 7 common branding mistakes small businesses make. If you’re interested in a more detailed look at how you can avoid some of these common mistakes, check out our post on breaking down branding!
1. Not Understanding Branding’s Significance
When you’re just getting started with an exciting new idea or even if you’ve been running your business for years, It’s easy to glaze over the importance of touchy-feely things like “mission statements”, “vision” or “corporate values”, or even breaking down the importance of why you selected the colors or fonts you did; but it’s all vitally important to understanding who you are as a business and how you’re going to communicate with your customers. If you haven’t gathered by now. Branding isn’t a thing, branding is everything.
Column Five Media packages up the idea of branding so beautifully with the process they call searching for your “brand heart”:
What you stand for: Your purpose, vision, mission, values.
How you communicate: Your voice, personality, messaging, etc.
What your brand’s products, services, and content look like: Your logo, colors, fonts, etc.
It’s also easy to confuse marketing as branding.
It’s all catchy copy full of buzzwords and pretty graphics, right? Wrong. Simply put, “marketing” is what you’re going to say and branding is how you’re going to say it. What’s it going to look like, sound like, mean? It’s easy for these two ideas to get blurred. Just know that you can have branding without marketing, but you can’t have any marketing without branding. Marketing is the output of your branding.
2. Skipping professional help
Marketing in general is one of those funny things where literally everyone thinks they can do it. Every one of us is influenced and impacted by marketing on a daily basis. Studies have shown that the average American is exposed to more than 5,000 brands and ads each day (logos, labels, commercials, etc…) and that we actually notice and ingest somewhere between 150 and 360 of these advertisements daily. That being said, since everyone has personal experience and being sold to and knows what impacts them personally, they feel inclined to think they “get” marketing. It’s funny because we all have checking accounts and spend and earn money, but we would all consult a CPA for serious accounting matters. Why doesn’t the same logic seem to apply to branding - the literal lifeblood of your business?
3. Lack of Consistency
Every single piece of paper, e-mail sent, ad created, and interaction had from every single person that’s a part of your organization is a touchpoint and opportunity for your brand to shine through to your customers. Once you’ve done the hard work of crafting your brand, it’s all for naught if you don’t put standards in place to ensure it’s adhered to. If you want to make sure every person you employ and every vendor you partner with knows and understands who you are as a business and how you want to communicate those things, then it’s important to lay out the roadmap for them via your brand guidelines. We call this your Brand Toolkit - what are the essential branding resources you want to be able to refer back to ensure clear, concise, and consistent messaging at a moments notice.
It’s easy to remember your branding guidelines when the big things happen and you’re pausing to reflect on them; but it’s a lot easier to stray from the standard on little things - invoices, receipts, a real-time social media response, etc. Make sure everything you do as a business is just as on-brand as your perfectly curated Insta-feed.
4. Being too trendy
It’s important to know when and where your business has a place and voice to chime in in the social landscape, in particular. For instance, look at the great “chicken sandwich” saga of 2019 between Popeye’s and Chick-fil-A. It wasn’t long before everyone was trying to get in on the chicken sandwich craze. However, just because something is making a splash on Twitter doesn’t mean that your brand has to insert itself in the conversation when it doesn’t make sense. Do you sell shoes? The chicken sandwich beef is not for you to capitalize on. You’ll look, how to say...thirsty? Nobody likes thirsty.
5. Not being trendy enough
To the contrary - there’s absolutely a time and a place where it makes perfect sense to step into the limelight provided by trending hashtags and pop culture events and your brand has to be ready to strike!
Take the notorious power-outage in Super Bowl 47 in New Orleans. Social-savvy brands were poised to jump on the opportunity to be a part of one of the most talked about moments in sports history. Strong branding guidelines allowed for quick thinking and reactions to the event. Make sure it makes sense for your brand to be contributing, but when the opportunity is right - strike!
6. Inauthentic voice
Knowing your target audience and having a firm grasp on your brand voice are almost more important than what you’re actually saying! It helps to create brand personas, a sort of bitmoji of your ideal customer (more on that in a future post) so you can always picture that person when talking to them. If you’re an edgy music festival, you wouldn’t communicate with your customers the same way a corporate banker may.
SEMRush put together a super helpful and cute puppy-centric take on narrowing your brand’s tone of voice here. The long of the short of it? There’s 4 main “dimensions” you have to figure out when determining your brand voice: formal vs. casual, serious vs. funny, respectful vs. irreverent, and enthusiastic vs. matter-of-fact.
Finding the right mix for your business, and of course, for your audience is key to impactful copy and communication!
7. Attempting to appeal to everyone
Repeat after me: you can not be all things to all people.
You CAN NOT be all things to all people.
Do you sell gourmet coffee as your core product? Great! Maybe you want to add a few pastries for hungry customers. Super idea! Wait. What’s that? You also have a killer burger recipe? Oh, and hot dogs too? STOP.
In line with staying “on-brand” and being authentic, we always stress to our clients the importance of self-awareness. Know what you do well and DO IT. Only it. Don’t try to be a jack of all trades. Don’t try to appease the margins. Understand your core audience, your core product, and your core vision and lean in to it. Do what you do well and nothing else. Let the guy who makes the best burger in town handle the overhead costs, inventory, marketing and headaches that come with running a burger shop. That’s not your lane. He probably doesn’t know anything about gourmet coffee and would be in over his head trying to do so. You can get yourself in a world of trouble when you venture outside of what you know well and what makes you special. The chances are your coffee shop’s burger recipe isn’t what’s going to put you on the map, so it’s more likely that it’s only going to waterdown your real message and opportunities. Avoid the margins!
If you’ve fallen victim to any of these common mistakes, don’t worry, it happens to the best of us! Step back, refresh, and revisit your brand toolkit and get back on track. If you need help creating or refreshing your brand toolkit, drop us a line and say hello… we’d love to help!
