Top 7 Branding Issues in Marketing
If you're a business owner, you know branding is important, but the road to developing a strong brand can feel fraught with obstacles without the right guidance. At Quill Creative Studio, we've helped create effective brands for organizations big and small, from hometown family businesses to multi-million dollar enterprises, ranging across industries from aviation to taverns to florists to healthcare and everything in between.
We've seen it all when it comes to brand strategy and design and know how to navigate the challenges that come with the branding journey. Check out the top 7 most common branding issues in marketing we see and learn how a good branding agency solves them for businesses like yours!
1. Businesses don't have a unique brand position.
We know there are a lot of awesome things about your business, which is why it can sometimes be difficult to zero in on its essence. Still, if you can't easily and simply articulate what makes your business unique, chances are your marketing efforts are leaving something to be desired. Too much complexity leaves room for confusion and when you confuse your audience with over-complication, you lose customer loyalty.
At Quill Creative Studio, our branding strategy is to simplify and amplify. As a creative branding studio, we want your brand to be a straightforward and effortless message you share with the world.
That’s why a critical part of our branding process is spending a significant amount of time uncovering the core features of your business. We need to understand your business so we can create a simple but powerful positioning statement for your brand.
2. Businesses have no brand strategy.
Even if you have a solid brand or corporate identity, on-point visuals, and a message that makes you stand out in a crowd of competition, you've still gotta know what to do with it all. Without a well-planned brand strategy, it can be easy to shoot from the hip when it comes to executing your brand. Marketing efforts can end up as a mish-mash of unfocused visuals, and messaging unleashed into the world with no direction.
When you work with a branding agency, you won't just be handed a fully built brand without a road map to go with it. At the end of the branding process, you'll come away with a fully realized plan for your brand - not just visual identity and buzzwords, but the message at the core of your company and the guide to implementing it throughout every area of the business, from that first customer touch point and from the mailroom to the CEO.
3. Businesses have no consistent visual identity.
Inconsistency is one of the most common branding issues we see at in marketing, and it can truly make or break a brand. Without a visual identity that's informed by your unique brand positioning, you can't expect customers to get on board with your brand.
Many people believe branding begins with the visuals - the colors, the fonts, and the logo - but a quality branding agency knows that your brand's visual elements are simply the end product of discovering your company's essence.
Before you get your look and logo, the right creative studio will get to know you, your customers, and your competition and find out what makes you stand out. We want to know who your brand is - what's their personality, what's their draw, what makes them different from the competition - then we build the visual identity to embody those characteristics.
4. Businesses don't know what's next for their brand.
One of the biggest problems clients come to Quill with is a lack of brand management. Good brand management can be tricky because it's about maintaining a dynamic brand that grows with your business while preserving your brand's integrity with consistency so that your customers stay emotionally connected and loyal.
Your organization may be continually evolving, but that doesn't mean your brand identity needs to change with every new development. Brand management needs to be innovative but consistent, always looking for new ways to leverage your brand while keeping messaging and visual identity dependable.
Without a dedicated person or team of people providing continued brand management, your branding efforts might go to waste. When you're going through the rebranding or brand development process, look for a creative branding agency that not only can create brand identity and strategy but can offer ongoing support for your brand.
After all, who better to continue with the implementation of your brand strategy than the team who created it?
5. A business's brand needs a refresh.
There are many reasons why your brand may be ready for an update. Maybe the company has changed hands, maybe the branding hasn't been updated in sixty years, or maybe you need to do some reputation damage control.
Whatever the reason, updating your brand can feel like starting over from the bottom floor. Will you lose all that brand recognition you've built up over the years? Will your customers like your new brand? Will you have to change everything about your company?
These questions may seem daunting, but if your current brand identity isn't serving your interests anymore, it's time to rebrand.
At Quill, we get many clients who know their brand has plateaued but don't know the next step for leveling up their brand game. This is where a discovery process again becomes key to building (or rebuilding) a brand. A creative branding agency can take the stress out of rebranding by breaking down the branding process into simple steps, building your brand from the ground up, and breathing new life into your business.
6. A business isn't reaching the right customers.
Customer loyalty makes or breaks a business, so you want to be sure that your brand resonates with the right people. Working with a branding agency will help you identify your audience on a deep level and across many different facets. You'll get new market and competitor insights and discover what differentiates you from your competition, which then informs you how to package that unique position in a way that speaks to the right customers.
Consider your brand a promise to your customers. You want to be able to effortlessly communicate with them what they can consistently expect from each interaction with your brand. That means figuring out the ideal customer at the beginning of your brand strategy and design process is crucial to creating that perfect harmony between customer and company.
7. Businesses need everyone on board with their brand.
Branding isn't just for your customers. If you aren't leveraging your brand across all areas of your business, then you're not using it to its full potential. That's why communicating your brand across all the internal structures of your company should be part of your brand strategy. Employees who understand your brand and know how to reliably deliver that brand messaging through their work is part of a brand's overall success.
Plus, you'll be more likely to attract the right new talent to your company. Research shows that Millennials and Gen-Z care more about the brand and authenticity of a company than any of the previous generations. If your brand speaks to someone as a customer, it's more likely they will be the right fit for your company as an employee.
Let Us Solve Your Branding Issues!
At Quill, we've seen the most common branding issues in marketing across all sizes of companies and types of industries and have become experts in solving them with our straightforward, tried-and-true creative branding process.
When you work with a creative branding studio like Quill, you'll get the support of a fully-equipped branding agency to identify and tackle any challenges, including brand positioning strategy, the creation of a brand identity, plus design support, strategy support, ongoing brand management, and regular check-ins to digest and investigate where your brand is going.
Ready to take your brand to the next level? Let's talk.
