What’s in a brand?
There’s more to building a healthy brand than you think.
Remember that scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Luke Skywalker senses the dark side coming from a cave, and he asked Yoda “What’s in there?” Yoda replies, “Only what you take with you.”
In the movie, the encounter between Luke and Darth Vader is a cautionary tale about hubris and overconfidence. I like to think of this scene as a metaphor about branding in that it’s far more than a simple logo, and how failure to nurture the entirety of your brand can lead to the dark side of brand awareness.
So, what goes into a brand and why should you continue to monitor and grow your brand at every opportunity? Let’s first look at the elements that make up a brand identity:
Logo
Consistency of style
Consistency of message
Employee buy-in
Customer experience
Patience
Active promotion
Let’s take a brief look at each of the above items and how each must receive consistent attention to achieve a healthy brand identity.
Logo: A logo is the identifiable symbol you present to the public to represent your brand. I often have customer come in and said they want a ‘Nike’-style logo; meaning they’re looking for an image that has instant recognition on the level of the ‘swoosh.’
Unfortunately, the logo doesn’t work like that. One can’t just design a logo and put it out into the world and have that image instantly equate that symbol to your company.
A logo is the visual embodiment of everything about your company, including your reputation, quality of product, ease of purchasing, and support experience. For better or worse, your logo will come to represent everything else about how you conduct business.
Consistency of style: The way you present your brand to the world is incredibly important and one way a business can cause market confusion is to change the visual elements of its marketing and promotion.
Successful brands are very diligent about maintaining consistency of brand style, including the position of a logo, typeface selection and size, color palette, and general layout of every piece of communication that is created. They do not reinvent the wheel each time they create advertising instead. They start with a set of standards that guide development and work within those standards, and for instances where a new agency or employee manages outreach, this style guide establishes the guidelines for them to get up to speed quickly and understand the mission of your organization.
To support what can be a complicated effort to maintain a consistent visual style, do:
Develop a style guide with the help of a professional designer (usually the person who creates your logo) to define the use of various elements of your brand image. This is your design bible and everything you build in the future must satisfy the requirements listed within.
Avoid free design services offered by publications or online developers. You will most likely encounter difficulty in maintaining visual brand integrity, as these services are often loss-leader enticements for cost-conscious businesses, staffed by entry level staff with assembly-line production quotas to hit.
Hire a marketer you trust to help you maintain the entirety of your brand image. They serve as guardrails to help you create effective communication strategies that reinforce messaging, design, and audience targeting.
The consistency of brand identity, over time, creates a visual standard that your potential customers come to recognize. This is an area where smaller businesses struggle to maintain because of cost constraints, or simply do not recognize the importance that consistency plays in a successful brand image. If you want that Nike-level logo, it’s this area that will help you get there.
Consistency of messaging is another area where businesses struggle to build their brand value. Imagine if Yoda, while teaching Luke about what it means to be a Jedi, said one day, “Anger leads to hate and hate leads to the dark side,” and the next day said, “Channeling anger is a great way to get ahead in a lightsaber fight,” the mixed messaging would understandably confuse Luke.
Your brand identity depends upon delivering a value-driven message to customers day after day after day. If you cannot consistently tell customers the reasons doing business with you benefits them, they will not associate you with any advantage over a competitor.
Be specific. Be targeted. Be consistent. That’s the recipe to introduce your product or service successfully to eager customers.
Employee support is the easiest way to build a great brand reputation. If your employees understand the messaging goals and what they need to do to support those objectives, it’s an easy way to influence customer perceptions. After all, they (not you) will probably be the primary point of contact with your clients.
As an example, some years ago, I had an auto dealer as a client. We built a campaign that promised a free movie rental from Blockbuster for a test drive (back when movie rentals were a big thing). The campaign was successful in sending hundreds of potential clients to the dealership for test drives.
However, the salespeople didn’t live up to the promises made in the campaign. Instead, they provided certificates only to those who bought a car, not simply test drove. The dynamic between the salespeople and the public went sour quickly, and word got out that the dealership reneged on their promises. Sales declined for several months until customer frustration abated.
The dealership’s brand identity suffered because their staff didn’t live up to the promise established in the marketing campaign.
Get your employees to buy into the message or mission and then help them live up to the standard you establish.
Customer experience is hard to quantify in a brand standard, but it’s easy for customers to identify when it’s good or bad and these encounters build the public perception of your business. If you promise 5-star service and your staff doesn’t live up to that standard, your reputation will take a hit. Seems obvious, right?
Patience is a critical component of building a brand. Building successful brands doesn’t happen overnight. It takes months, even years, to create a brand identity that becomes ingrained in your targeted customer market.
Trust me when I say that you will grow tired of your brand messaging long before your customers, so resist the urge to make change for change’s sake.
Every time you introduce a new or refreshed brand identity to the market, you negate all the brand equity you’ve built within the market. I don’t recommend resetting a brand unless A) the change represents a tactical or strategic business need to do so, or B) you need to shake off the ‘stink’ of a poor reputation.
Otherwise, continue to build consistency across your brand at every opportunity.
Active promotion is perhaps the one area that affects brand awareness the most—and it requires resources of time and money. It’s not enough to build a logo, create consistent styles and messaging, achieve employee support, and create a good customer experience if you don’t tell your community about what you’ve built.
Consistency has been a foundational component in every aspect of your brand identity thus far, and the principle extends to promotion as well. One common mistake smaller businesses make is to invest in A) short-term advertising blasts when they first open or B) when some advertising sales rep offers a deal to have an ad appear in a publication or as a banner on a website (and related media). These businesses erroneously believe that word of mouth will continue driving business—and that may be to an extent. The hard truth is that any silence between their promotional campaigns erodes the value of a brand and allows competitors to leverage your absence in the market to gain a foothold among your customers.
In short, you need to establish a marketing budget that allows you to promote your business consistently—during both slow seasons and high-traffic sales cycles. The public is exceptionally fickle and forgetful. If you are not top-of-mind, you’re out-of-mind. Your silence is an opportunity for your savvy competitors to swoop in and steal your customers.
Promote your business actively and consistently. Ways to accomplish this include:
Create a content calendar that identifies seasonal trends
Work ahead to create content and plan for placement
Leverage multiple media to reach more people (social, email, print, etc.)
Allocate the resources to deliver on the potential of your promotional goals
Luke Skywalker became a powerful Jedi because he learned from his failures and drew strength from the consistent application of the principles taught by Yoda. Similarly, brand identity is more than a logo; a living entity that requires constant maintenance across multiple disciplines to be effective and healthy. Be deliberate when growing and adapting your brand to meet changes in the market (don’t take shortcuts). Be proud of your brand, what it means to you, your employees, and your customers, and show it off at every opportunity.
