Branding Mistakes That Can Impact Your Company’s Image
- Brand Consistency
Firstly, it is important to ensure your brand is consistently presented across any digital or print medium. This is super important, and consistency not only looks professional, but it offers a sense of trustworthiness and feeling at ease with the brand. This matters as this can help the brand to build upon recognition in the market.
The danger of appearing inconsistently online is that your business can come across unprofessionally, and the lack of consistency can also come across as unreliable and untrustworthy.
How do you coordinate consistency? Simple, you just need to put all your ducks in a row. Create a file or folder with all the relevant brand elements or create a document (brand style guide) with all the components. A style guide essentially has the right fonts, colors, images, logos, and anything else associated with the brand. This can then be shared across the business and these assets can be used as needed.
- Inaccurately portraying your brand
It is important that when talking about or writing about your brand, you maintain the voice and tone. Anything that is under-represented or over-inflated can create inconsistency in the overall brand message.
Part of positioning your brand is understanding your brand voice, what you want to say, and how you want to say it. Once you have a firm understanding of this, you will be able to use that tone and voice to communicate your brand messages.
This is important as this will enable you to differentiate from competitors.
- Brand positioning
So, what does brand positioning mean? Essentially this is how, and why you are sending out your message (voice). You need to establish a buyer persona – this will help you understand your target market easier.
You will be able to develop promotional, recognition, or awareness messages with the voice in mind, thereby positioning relevant products or services to the relevant buyers.
You will need to ensure that any brand positioning activities are consistent with the overall brand, and the brand direction. Across any digital platforms, print, radio, etc.
- Re-branding
If you decide that you would like to re-brand, you may decide to do this to keep up with industry or marketing changes, or you may decide to do this because your current branding is not representative of your product offering, or where you would like your brand to be positioned.
There are some considerations that you need to have front of mind when undertaking a re-branding change. Firstly, you will need to establish your buyer persona, you could use historical buyer information to help you develop this. Or you may need to carry out some research, such as competitor analysis.
You will also need to understand the impact of re-branding – re-educating your existing clients, and understanding the time involved and cost to promote the re-branding. As well as ensuring that the re-branding is implemented across all your online and offline channels.
