Bad Branding: How To Avoid The Worst Branding Mistakes

Chelsea Greene
4 min readOct 21, 2022

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If your business’s branding isn’t good, it will have difficulty succeeding and achieving its goals. Bad branding had caused the failure of many companies before they even had a chance to show the world what they have to offer, and we want to help your business avoid this.

Successful branding isn’t easy; much work is required to reach that point. We want to tell you about the biggest branding mistakes people make trying to get there, so you can avoid them and not damage your brand and chances of success.

Photo by Daniela Holzer on Unsplash
Photo by Daniela Holzer on Unsplash

Bad Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is vital if you want your website to be found and visited by many people. If you don’t use SEO, you could lose out on your competition because people will have a more challenging time finding your business and learning about what you can offer them.

Many businesses leave SEO until the end, thinking they can easily add it after everything else. This is not a good idea. It would help to think about SEO when you start building your brand, products, and services like your website.

No Consistency

Branding needs to be consistent throughout all of your products and services. Businesses that don’t have consistent branding will likely fail as their branding sends different messages to people and causes misunderstandings.

You must create a style guide for your branding and follow it. If you hire a brand design company to help with your branding, you need to give them a style guide. If you haven’t created one, you can ask them for help.

A consistent brand will help increase brand recognizability and make it more memorable for everyone interacting with it.

Not Being Authentic

People can tell when a brand isn’t being authentic with them and is hiding something. If your brand is transparent and honest with your customers, they will quickly stop interacting with it and find a different company.

You must be truthful with customers and tell them everything they should know. If you do, you can create a relationship with your target audience and build brand loyalty. If you don’t, you will lose them, and they will likely not return.

Do not follow trends that go against your brand’s values. This will send the wrong message to your customers. It would help if you were consistent with all parts of your branding.

Not Being Unique

Photo by Noah Näf on Unsplash

If your brand is confused with the competition, you are doing something wrong. Make sure your brand is unique and memorable. Brands that don’t differentiate themselves are lost in the crowd of brands that fail.

It would help if you did something that would get people’s attention. Look at what the competition is doing with their brand, and then build one that will be different and memorable. This will attract people to your business and make them want to keep coming back.

Bad Expansion

Expanding your brand can be a good thing, but usually, businesses start developing too soon or too much. This causes them to stretch themselves thin or expand into new areas with which they are not familiar. This leads to wasted time and money and nothing coming out of the expansion.

If you are going to expand your brand, then you need to know what you are doing. Why are you expanding? Do your customers want this? Are you trying to reach new customers? If yes, who are they? There are tons of questions that you need to answer before deciding to expand.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Negative Brand Experience

The brand experience you give to your customers should be a positive one. Many brands make the mistake of not focusing on their brand’s perception thoroughly enough, which causes them to be caught by surprise when people leave their business and stop using their products.

This experience doesn’t stop at your website. It needs to be the same for your products and services, social media accounts, and how you communicate with customers. All of this is important and deserves your attention.

Being Cheap

Not every business has money to spare on branding, which is understandable. But you can’t rely on cheap branding strategies and design components, as they can fail you. It would help if you used an online logo generator or used lots of stock images to create your new logo.

It would help to balance saving money and to spend it on your branding. If you don’t know how to find the right balance, hire a brand design agency. Tell them your budget and what you are prepared to spend it on. They will help you assign enough money to important branding areas.

Conclusion on Common Branding Mistakes

You need to avoid making these lousy branding mistakes if you want your brand to succeed. Learn from the mistakes of others and build a strong brand that your customers will love and want to interact with.

Good luck!

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Chelsea Greene

I’m a designer that loves UX, fonts, and sunny beach days