June 5, 2015
When you think of great branding, would you think of Coca Cola, Nike and Adidas? Small businesses always see branding as a high cost investment when they imagine their initiatives with these iconic brands.
Sometimes, it is just your imagination that scares you. Make sure you avoid these critical mistakes, and your branding success will be just a few steps away.
Mistakes #1: Contempt of Branding Power. Branding is an ascendant for customer relationship. For example, when customers think of online fashion shopping, they think of Zalora, that’s the kind of immediate branding power happens to your customers. From SEO perspective, it is a valuable asset for your company. Why? Do you know that Google likes to prioritize branded listings in its organic search results by visitors’ favorable site? Your website traffic and brand awareness could come from your strong brand building; more clicks mean more happy customers.
Mistakes #2: Go without Branding Guidelines. It is very important and essential to establish well-defined guidelines, and make sure you have proper check on your logo, branding colors, tagline, font and typography, voice narration, imagery as well as mascots or spokesperson when creating a brand identity. Feel free to do some necessary add-ons to define your branding characteristic, but remember to file all these important documents altogether. Your branding efforts would need them to keep up the consistency and direction needed for branding success.
Mistakes #3: Being Too Complicated. The Coca Cola branding is a classic example, its typical scripted logo has few slightly changed since its first usage way back in 1887, let’s see figure below. Here at GE Consult, we observed that when a branding process first started, it is quite tempting to add more varieties than a logo truly needs. Frankly your logo doesn’t need to have eight different colors, or have individual graphic elements to represent each value proposition. Simple and clean are more likable, memorable, and easier to recognize. So stay away from overcomplicating your branding.
Mistakes #4: Being Vague in Branding. Being genuine is good! Go straight and develop your branding guidelines and elements that reveal truly about your company and its value. Try avoiding marketing jargons that could be alienating your customers and more importantly hurting your sales. It’s time to consider eliminating made-up words like “”No. 1” company, “best-selling” author, and “award-winning” agency etc. that are meaningless to your customers. According to GE Consult’s branding expert Fred Wu, “wallpaper copywriting” branding seems ubiquitous and irrelevant nowadays, and what’s worst, it generates no value to the customers or the society”.
Mistakes #5: No Routine Infringement Check. Ask yourself if you have regular trademark infringement check? Bear in mind that developing and implementing your business branding guidelines is only half of the beginning, you have to be proactive in monitoring if there is a “likelihood of confusion” caused by two branding marks at issue. But how do we analyze the similarity or dissimilarity of branding marks (or trademarks)? In general, a court considers appearance such as common letters, pronunciation, connotation as well as commercial impression. After all, if the marks are not similar, it is considered no infringement.
