8 Branding Mistakes You’re Making Right Now

If you’re running a business right now, you should understand the importance of building a solid brand. What you may not realize is how many branding mistakes you are making that could affect business success.

We’ve witnessed our fair share of branding mishaps, from a lack of vision and poor brand leadership to unrealistic timelines, skimpy branding budgets, and other brand-inhibiting mindsets. Branding is not something you do once; it’s a long-term commitment, perhaps even a labor of love.

Here are eight branding mistakes you’re making right now and what to do about them:

1. Your brand is thrown together, and you don’t want to invest what it takes to fix it correctly.

Many companies operate with a piecemeal approach. This is fueled by disparate thinking, erratic decision-making, and poorly executed materials. Simply put, the brand is sloppy. You cannot build a strong brand without a thoughtful strategy and sound brand foundation. Some companies rush into the design without defining their purpose, vision, and values or creating a system that directs their actions and why. Your branding efforts should be well orchestrated where every detail and choice matters. If a poorly executed brand enters the world, it becomes harder to recover.

2. Your brand does not reflect your culture.

We are often brought in to help with a branding problem and soon realize it’s a culture issue. Most often, there’s a disconnect between what’s happening inside the company (culture) and what’s being reflected on the outside (brand). At that point in the business, the air might be brewing with frustration, morale is likely down, and the brand’s identity and direction are confused. Your company culture has a powerful influence on your brand. In the perfect brand and culture symbiosis, each would support the other to create a unified internal-external brand experience, where what you say, how you act, and what you do all align. The new normal for successful branding depends on how authentically your culture and brand mirror each other.

3. You’re unrealistic about how much time it takes and what it costs.

Are you that company asking for a comprehensive rebrand and building a custom e-commerce platform in less than four weeks with little to no budget? Rome was not built in a day, and neither will your brand. Those who support their brand by valuing the branding agency relationship and giving it the proper time and money have far superior business outcomes than unrealistic, cheap, and demanding companies. It’s the difference between feeding your body fast food daily or eating healthy. Yes, it’s more expensive and might take longer to prepare meals, but you won’t feel or look bad in the long run. Think of your brand as a body that needs good nourishment.

The infamous lines “I just need to get to market” or “I need to do this fast and cheap” are the worst mindsets you can have. If you want to craft a strong brand, be ready and willing to invest a minimum of $150,000. Allow your branding team the time, resources, and support to do their best work. If your agency tells you it will take six months to do the job, you should listen — they’ve built enough brands. You can always do it cheap and fast, but as they say, “The bitterness of poor quality lingers long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”

4. You’re not vetting the people working on your brand.

Who you work with on your branding efforts can make or break your brand. From freelance designers, videographers, and photographers to branding, digital, and marketing agencies, anyone who touches your brand should be vetted wisely. We wrote an influential article on how to interview brand partners here. We’ve also seen brands fall apart at critical executions, like video work or photo shoots because the partners chosen to do the work did not understand the brand fully or were not appropriately guided. Spend the time to find the right talent.

5. You lack vision.

Every excellent branding effort starts with a clear articulation of vision, so things get messy if you don’t have it. Having a big, bold, clear vision can mean a difference in the long-term trajectory of your organization. But having a vision is only half of it. The other half is the execution of your vision. Many think it’s just about sharing your vision and helping others see what you do. As the leader at the helm, you have to set the vision for what you see for the business and the brand and enforce those ideas so that the people around you can believe in them too. Without a greater sense of vision, the brand becomes wobbly, making it hard for your team to do an excellent job.

6. Your brand lacks brand personality and doesn’t tell a compelling story.

Stories inspire us. They are the emotional glue that creates meaningful experiences between brands and their audience. Stories speak directly to the human condition, to our hardwired emotions and instincts. Of all the essential ingredients missing in most brands, it’s a great story wrapped in an engaging brand personality. When we talk about a brand’s personality, we describe how it expresses itself — how it speaks and behaves, its character traits, attributes, and tone of voice. Imagine meeting your best friend for a drink, and she announces that her co-worker Ryan will join you. You’re excited to meet Ryan, but Ryan has nothing much to say. He rarely laughs, has no stories to tell, and has an air about him that leaves you with a question mark. Now, are you looking forward to Ryan turning up for the next potential meet-up? No, not really. Why? Because Ryan lacks personality and isn’t interesting. The same thinking should apply to your brand.

7. You’re obsessed with your competition.

Some of our clients are so focused on their competition that they put themselves into brand paralysis. It’s wise to do a competitive brand audit and look at the image your competitors are putting out. For our projects, we analyze 5-7 competitors. That might not be necessary for you, depending on your space. 3-6 is usually a good number. Check out their websites, read through their content, take snapshots of noteworthy items, watch their videos, and analyze their visuals, messaging, and social media. Collect it all and put it all together in a document. This provides a good foundation for visualizing your competitor’s brands. But be careful with too much market research; it can backfire. If you want to be noticed, ask, “What makes me unique? How can I build on that?”

8. You are ignoring fundamental shifts within the business.

Businesses are in perpetual beta. They are constantly evolving and moving forward. In some cases, business models change, and product focuses pivot. This fundamentally impacts the brand. When shifts within the business start, you need to determine how the brand needs to be adapted or reinvented to accommodate a significant contextual change. Do you need to go through a rebranding? Does the culture need a refresher? Have you lost some passion for the business and brand? Some business leaders put off looming branding issues, despite the pleas of their internal team. If your brand managers tell you there’s a problem, you must listen. If your employees are taking liberties with the brand because they don’t know any better, the business you’re in now is not the same business you started in, or your brand image has not caught up to where you’re at, then you need to act now.