What do you think brands like Target, Nike and Coca-Cola have in common? A carefully-crafted customer experience, which is significantly enhanced by faultless branding efforts, visible throughout their online presence, including in their official website, marketing materials and social media accounts.
Your brand serves as a window to your business’ heart and soul. Hence, it should be dealt with great seriousness. Branding isn’t just a buzzword to get that one-time campaign right; rather it encompasses anything and everything that you wish to communicate to your clients. Towards that end, below we will acquaint you with the top 5 branding mistakes you must avoid at all costs. If you want to hand it off to a San Francisco branding company that would eliminate making the mistakes that one is more apt to make.
Messing up your Logo
A logo tells plenty about your brand. However, you must get it right early in the game, else it can get very difficult to make changes later. This is all the more true if you don’t have the stubbornness to execute such changes without worrying too much about losing valuable ground. There have been brands in the past whose logos were held at the mercy of font creators, and they had to eventually alter them after long legal battles.
Leaving out the value proposition
Whatever it may be – your mission statement, tagline or even that homepage headline, you cannot do without effectively communicating things that differentiate your brand, to your customers. This is one of the many things that makes a brand great. Avoid this aspect and you will notice your website’s bounce rate hitting through the roof. You should outline exactly what you do as well as why it’s important. Make sure that you avoid vague terminology and extensive use of buzzwords. Furthermore, don’t fly too close to things that your competitors are also saying. Lastly, always communicate the problems your business solves.
There is nothing as forgettable as a business whose identity hasn’t been established well. Brand guidelines help in communicating the things you represent, and how you are different from the competitors. Veer away even a bit from these guidelines, and there’s a high chance that your customers will quickly gravitate towards competitors who have their act together. Avoid the below listed brand guidelines at your own risk:
- Fonts and typography
- Visuals and imagery
- Logo usage
- Voice and messaging
- Colour schemes
Not adapting to the changing demographics
Sometimes you will notice a change in your customer demographics, which is alright if your branding is well-aligned with this new set of customers, and you are able to connect with them well. To give you an example, Lord & Taylor had to put in plenty of efforts to rebrand itself for its millennial clients, while maintaining its appeal for its original clientele, comprising mostly of older women. Needless to say, it wasn’t easy for them.
Neglecting public opinion
It could be that the public’s opinion of your brand might not be all that rosy. However, rather than attributing it to bad luck and/or pointing fingers, you should get serious about working on your brand. Conduct research, run public polls, gather feedback, work up some positive media, create a new campaign idea with  or simply brainstorm to come up with some solution. The onus is on you to put things right.
