When Branding Goes Wrong: 4 Brand Mistakes To Avoid At All Cost

The importance of a strong brand cannot be overstated. When branding is done right, it improves recognition, creates trust, and expands your customer base. 

However, when branding goes wrong, it can go really wrong and have severe consequences for your company.

It can dry up your funnel of new customers, drag down your profitability, fracture your relationship with key business partners and, in the digital marketing era, when you make a brand mistake, you can expect your customers to voice their opinions about it in the form of a comment on your social feed, a Google review, a tweet, email, or even a phone call. It’s estimated there are over 2.1 million negative social media mentions about brands daily in the U.S. alone.

Based on our over 20 years as a high-performance branding company, here are our four embarrassing (and all too common) brand mistakes to avoid: 

1. Too Much Self Promotion

Branding is about a lot more than self-promotion. However, too many companies shamelessly self-promote at the expense of communicating more effectively with their customer base. Strong brands understand the importance of uncovering insight into their customer’s problems and talking to them. Work toward establishing your brand as an industry expert by keeping the consumer need in mind. Ensure the content you share aligns with that need, don’t just spam your promotions. If you spend too much time touting your brand, you’ll lose people. It’s estimated that 45% of people will unfollow a brand if they are too self-serving. 

A little self-promotion is okay (think of it as a trust bank where you make the occasional withdrawal), just choose the right time and place to do it. 

“Nobody wants to work with a self-interested, self-absorbed, self-serving self-promoter.” – Steve Tobak

2. Really Bad Content

In the digital marketing era, everything you publish online has an impact on your brand. The information you develop and curate is all part of your brand story. Webpages, landing pages, blogs, product pages, infographics, social media posts, press releases, radio and TV ads, YouTube videos, podcasts all matter. 

If you think “oh, it’s just for SEO purposes, it doesn’t matter what it says”, think again. As a digital marketing agency that specializes in mashing the best practices of branding and digital marketing together, we know that if you create bad content, it will devalue your brand both in Google’s eyes and your potential customer’s. Just think about your reaction to a bad webpage. What do you do? You leave. And you probably will not be so trusting of that company. In fact, 63% of people said they have encountered sub-standard content. 23% of them said they would not engage with the brand after that experience. 

Not sure how to create high-quality content? Go back to step 1: Understand what your customer’s problems are and have your content solve them. If you have got a clear picture of your customer and their problems, learn how to develop customer personas here.

3. Cutting Corners on Brand Design

Would you rather have a bad burger, one made in a factory, or one from a king?

People are not going to take you seriously if your logo or website looks like it was designed by your teenage nephew. Branding elements like your logo, website design, graphics, and even colour selection all matter. 

There is a lot to consider when creating the visual elements of your brand:

• What does your brand represent? What information does it convey or connote?

• Does your brand package stand out? Or is it too similar to other companies in your field?

• Does your brand infringe on other trademarks or copyrights?

• Is your branding in alignment with your company’s core values?

For example, this re-brand we did for an IT consulting company…

Before and After

…we created a name and brand identity that not only looked a lot more professional but:

• Conveyed their unique quality of getting projects forcefully back on track and on budget
• Stood out versus the ‘alphabet soup’ names of all their competitors e.g. XYZ Partners
• Prevented them from getting confused with EA sports
• Aligned with their high-performance, no ‘BS’ values

We take a fairly unique approach that blends the test & learn of digital marketing with the time-proven principles of good brand development – read more about our data-driven branding process here – but regardless of who you use, hire a professional. You only get one chance to make a first impression.

4. Lack of Branding Consistency

They say in real estate the 3 most important words are location, location, location.

In branding, it’s consistency, consistency, consistency.

Your branding needs to be consistent. A uniform voice across all marketing channels. You need to use the same language, communicate the same messaging, the same colours, and your brand promise needs to be reflected in how your employees interact. Inconsistency can send mixed messages to your customers. In fact, as a branding company over the years we’ve learned, that every time you communicate inconsistently you’re not only not adding to the equity of your brand in the marketplace but, in fact, you’re subtracting equity as you’ve sent confusing signals to the marketplace.

The simplest way to do this is to establish a set of guidelines and educate your employees, at all levels, about what is expected when representing the brand.

Examples of Brand Identity Guideline documents we’ve created.

Ask yourself: “If I can leave only one thought in the mind of a prospect, what thought will most compel them to action?” Keep your brand proposition, content, and messaging consistent with that thought. Develop ideas, scrutinize them, review them, and make sure they are rock solid before launching, or you could find yourself on a viral list of embarrassing brand mistakes.

The Marketing Garage is an award-winning Toronto digital marketing agency that has developed a unique approach to better brand performance through Brand Engineering. Our data-driven approach combines traditional proven brand development techniques with the test & learn capabilities of today’s online marketing.

The Marketing Garage is an award-winning Toronto digital marketing & branding company that takes the guesswork out of brand-building with a unique data-driven approach. The result is you know it works before investing most of your marketing dollars.