Your business can live or die by its brand, which means you need to pay special attention to the health and wellness of your brand strategy. Most branding experts heartily recommend utilizing a reputable service for brand analysis, which should provide you with actionable information about your brand performance. Then, you can make branding decisions that have a positive impact now and into the future.
Yet, if you have not yet implemented any kind of brand analysis strategy, your brand could be suffering in several ways. Here are a few signs that your brand is in desperate need of help:
Customers and Clients Don’t Understand Your Brand
This is not just a warning sign that your brand needs help; it is a giant red flag, a blaring siren, and flashing lights telling you that the end of your company is nigh. When clients and customers are unclear about your brand’s messages, they probably do not know what your business does, and when that is the case, they will not come to you for solutions. If you do not fix your brand immediately, you will struggle to see success ever again.
Your Team Doesn’t Understand Your Brand
Your employees are like the shepherds of your brand, but if they are not totally clear on your brand strategy, they might herd your brand right off a cliff. Whenever you make changes to your brand, you need your team to be on board. You might also integrate brand education into your onboarding process, so that new hires do not muddy the waters of your brand messages.
There Is Inconsistently Amongst Your Brand Materials
You can take a break from reading this article to perform the following test: In separate tabs, pull up your company website and several of your social media pages. If you struggle to find similarities in the visual language of your branding across your web locations, you are demonstrating a level of inconsistency that is bound to confuse and turn away customers. Every component of your business should have coherent branding, which means you might need to redesign seemingly small materials like business cards, document headers, email signatures, and more to achieve brand consistency.
You Place Design Over Experience
Some companies work hard to differentiate themselves with a highbrow brand aesthetic that seems at home in an avant-garde art gallery. Unfortunately, many companies that opt for this brand strategy fail to invest adequately in the user experience. If your brand is utterly beautiful but your app is buggy, you will lose customers. Similarly, if your aesthetic is next-level but your customers don’t understand what your company does, your business will fail. You might need to dumb down your design to achieve effective branding.
You Haven’t Updated Your Brand in Decades
There is a difference between classic design — which attractively harkens to the design trends of an earlier era — and outdated design — which looks old and unappealing. If you can’t remember the last time you updated your branding, or if you have never embarked on a brand redesign, it is incredibly likely that more than a few components of your brand are looking dated and dull. Simply put, it is time for a refresh, at least.
Your Brand Is Indistinguishable From Your Competition
Because you are developing your brand using the same demographic data as your competition, it is understandable if certain details of your brand strategy are common in your industry. However, you should work to differentiate your brand sufficiently to ensure that your customers don’t get confused between you and your close competition. A change in color and logo should be enough to keep your brand separate from others in your marketplace.
Your Brand Doesn’t Reflect Your Values
More and more, customers are choosing to buy from businesses based on the values that drive business operations. If you are committed to an eco-friendly business strategy, your brand should reflect that. Then, you will attract the attention of consumers who share those values, and you will develop loyalty, community, and other powerful behaviors from your target audience.
Your brand matters — and if you haven’t put any effort into tracking brand performance, your brand could be holding your business back. By looking for any of the above signs of brand failure, you will start on a journey to brand reinvigoration that should lead to better brand analysis in the future.