10 Worst Branding Mistakes To Avoid
- Not defining your brand strategy first
- Starting with a cheap brand identity
- Failing to differentiate your brand
- Not connecting with the right audience
- Stretching your brand too far
- Not providing great brand experience
- Failing to protect and defend
- Not being consistent
- Ignoring the brand aging signs
- Not leaving up to your promise
I see it time and time again — many startups make branding mistakes in early stage and sabotage their growth.
Even established companies with bigger budget have made disastrous rebranding failures that cost them a lot.
Many entrepreneurs don’t quite realize the real potential of having a good branding and therefore make a lot of costly mistakes.
What is brand?
To set it straight, a brand is more than just a logo and other visual artifacts.
Branding is about seizing every opportunity to express why people should choose one brand over another.
Hence, all forms of communication — not just visual — are key in reinforcing this trust and making your brand top-of-mind with your customers.
Learn how to avoid making branding mistakes, whether it be a strategic or visual aspect of your brand.
First things first, let’s start with the strategy that is so often overlooked.
1. Not defining your brand strategy first
You need to get deeper into the category to understand the landscape including the competition and their strategic positions, then define your brand, and who the customers are.
You need to develop a brand strategy, and understand your business objectives and shift focus to that instead of designing a beautiful logo that won’t work.
After all, an argument based purely on aesthetics is doomed unless it can be tied to accomplishing a business objective.
Remember it’s about the big picture and aligning an organization’s vision with its customers’ experience is the goal of brand strategy.
When you understand the objectives you will see that it’s less about the typeface or color you like and more about what is more persuasive to the target audience.
Being on the strategy and on message with every element of the work is what makes it viable.
The best brand strategy is developed as a creative partnership between the client, the strategist, and the designer.
Together, we need to determine the business and marketing objectives that should guide the way forward.
Start by crafting a creative brief.
[Continue reading this article on my blog…]
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