1. No Brand Consistency
Are you feeling like your product is not there yet? So you keep tweaking and changing colors, fonts, and graphics? Purchased a pre-made product and have been piecing other elements together yourself? Tried creating a cohesive marketing only to find yourself completely lost?
You’ve spent countless hours browsing Pinterest, asking people what their favorite things are and monitoring them when they’re talking about their favorite products, but even though you found some designs your online community has loved, how do you know which one is best for you? Do you follow your own personal style? Or do you choose the color of your product packaging based on what your audience will love to see? If the latter, how do you find this out?
When you start piecing together ideas from other places, chances are your end product isn’t going to be very strong or cohesive as a brand because you’re not clear about what your true strengths and focus should be at this point. Your brand is likely just a reflection of this.
To create a strong brand, you need to do your homework first:
- Get clear on your brand values, mission, and vision
- Create your brand story
- Discover your brand personality and vibe
- Figure out your ideal client
Once you do that, you then are able to create a brand identity (the visuals) to reflect that strategy. Right visuals can:
- Subconsciously send your brand message to your ideal customers within a fraction of a second to make the BEST first impression,
- Help you build the like and trust factor that you absolutely NEED to sell anything,
- Make building a relationship with your target market super easy and natural,
- Make selling a breeze, because you’re simply the perfect choice for your audience
2. No Brand Clarity
Feeling like you’re walking around in circles? Not knowing how to present your brand perfectly? Wondering how attract the right people to both benefit you and your business? You’ll also begin to see this lack of direction creep into your marketing too. This is not a good thing as it will make it difficult for you to connect and even attract your ideal customers, much less serve them in a way that will garner repeat business and cause them to recommend you to others.
If you’re not completely clear who your target audience is and what they would like to hear, your communication efforts are going to end up scattered and confusing. You have to have the right messaging match up with your audience if you want them to take the time to read, watch or listen to anything you have to say. Even the most beautiful design won’t be of much use because it will seem empty and meaningless.
3. No Brand Strategy
Said yes to the first two points? This means you probably didn’t have a chance to work with a professional brand identity designer who understands how important strategy is.
What we’ll say here might be a bit controversial, but actually, design is a commodity. It means it’s cheap and easy to buy beautiful designs.
You can find beautiful brand identity designs all over the place. Browse Creative Market or Etsy and you’ll find countless beautiful logos just waiting for you to take them home.
The problem with that is – these logos and websites were created to look beautiful, not to work with YOUR brand.
They were NOT created to reflect your unique brand personality and values.
They were NOT created taking into account who your ideal client and customer are and what they respond to.
Although beautiful, they leave you in a place where you eventually struggle with the first 2 points of this blog post and end up being here again – the unprofessional design problem. So you need to throw even more money at it to fix it (yet again).
A strategic brand identity designer will not jump to design right away, or will not ask you to create your inspirational Pinterest board for them. It’s their job.
The branding process should go like this:
- Deep discovery process to figure out your brand mission, vision, values, vibe and ideal customer,
- Diagnosing any problems that need fixing (especially important when you’re re-branding existing business),
- Creating visual solutions to represent the strategy of your brand (choosing perfect colors, fonts, photography, etc)
- Creating a cohesive, consistent design to all brand touch-points (where your customers get in contact with your brand)
Brand identity designers who understand strategy is key, will not start designing anything before they go through this process with you. You also will not be asked to choose your brand colors and create your mood board.
There’s an entire science behind colors and you should pick the perfect shades to send the right message to the subconscious mind of your customers.
If you didn’t have a chance to go to that process, consider it before spending any more money on design alone.
It’s Important to lay a good foundation so you ultimately won’t risk building something that will be structurally unsound and won't last. We can understand that finding the time, energy and capital required for hiring experts and investing in research is difficult. Focusing on giving great service will ensure customers have a memorable overall experience and are excited to recommend your brand to colleagues or friends!
