Whether you’re launching a new company or rebranding an existing one, your branding plays a crucial role in shaping how your customers perceive your business. At its minimum, branding is your company’s visuals: logo, colour palettes, and font styles, plus its messaging and tone of voice. However, it’s much more than just that. Here are some common branding/rebranding mistakes to avoid and ways to avoid them.
1. Inconsistency
One of the most common and significant mistakes a business can make with its branding is inconsistency. Inconsistent branding can confuse your customers and erode consumer trust in your brand.
With the sheer amount of platforms brands need to be across these days, it’s easy to send an inconsistent brand message across platforms, and even well-established brands suffer from these inconsistencies between channels.
When branding or rebranding, you must make sure your branding is consistent across all platforms: your website, your socials, your physical store, and all other materials. Ensuring your logo, colour palettes, graphic styling, messaging, and tone of voice is consistent will help ensure your brand identity and make it easier for customers to recognise your brand.
2. Lack of differentiation
Another common mistake is failing to differentiate your brand from your competitors. If your brand looks and sounds like everybody else, it’s not going to be memorable or stand out.
When building new brands, it’s important to have a unique value proposition and a clear brand personality that differentiates your brand from its competitors.
With established brands that are rebranding, revisiting and refining your brand’s unique value proposition and brand personality as a part of the rebrand may be necessary to ensure brand evolution.
Differentiation is key to creating strong brands that resonate with their audience.
3. Ignoring your target audience
Your branding should always speak directly to its target audience. Failing to understand your audience’s needs will lead to a disconnect between your brand and its customers.
In order to make informed branding decisions, new brands should conduct market research into their ideal audience. After launching, customer feedback can be used to inform future branding decisions.
For established brands, this is a little easier. Use what you already know about your customer base, then conduct additional customer research on how your customers feel about your brand and use this feedback to inform your branding decisions.
Ensuring your branding resonates with its target audience is crucial in building connections with them.
4. Focusing too much on the visuals
It’s easy to get wrapped up in the visuals, colours, fonts, logos; let’s be honest it’s the most fun part of branding and rebranding. Visuals are important, but shouldn’t be your only focus.
Getting your brand’s messaging, tone of voice, and customer experience just right is also a critical component of branding. It’s important for your brand to speak consistently to its audience in a way that conveys its values.
Make sure your branding strategy includes all aspects of your brand, not just the visual elements. This will help create a holistic brand that resonates with customers and builds long-term loyalty.
5. Rushing the process
Branding takes time and consideration, and it can be a completely overwhelming part of setting up any new company. Rebranding, while slightly less time-consuming, also takes a considerable amount of time and resources away from an already operating company. Rushing the process will lead you to poor decisions that harm your brand.
Take the time needed to research, strategise and test your brand before launching it. This will help ensure that your brand is well thought out and well-executed, leading to a more successful launch.
Your branding plays a crucial role in shaping how your customers perceive your business, and it’s important to get it just right. By maintaining consistency, differentiating your brand, understanding your target audience, focusing on more than just the visuals, and taking the time to plan, you can create a successful brand that is visually powerful, that lives its values, and is actively engaged with its customers.
Branding Agencies
Branding and rebranding isn’t cheap, so it may seem counterintuitive that involving a branding agency can save you money. The purpose of a good branding agency is to help you improve your business and your bottom line.
At Pink Dog Studio, we can help you with your branding or rebranding needs, taking out the legwork for you and letting you focus on the other aspects of your business.