Beyond the Logo: Your Brand is So Much More Than Eye-Catching Design

Thought-provoking trademarks and slogans, well-designed logos and websites, and sophisticated-looking marketing materials tell the world that your business is official and ready to provide services or products. These elements indicate that you are both professional and successful enough to invest in important assets. Still, your brand identity is so much more than just a snazzy logo and complementary color scheme.

David Ogilvy described a brand as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.” 

When thinking of your company, have you created a brand promise that resonates with your stakeholders? Are you reinforcing this promise at every touchpoint to help guide your customers’ (potential customers) perception? Are they emotionally connected to your brand enough to motivate them to purchase your solution and tell their friends and colleagues to do the same?

If you can’t answer yes to all of these questions, I’d recommend you implement some of the below strategies.

Develop your brand identity

The essential first step is to outline what you want your brand to be. Whether you are building a brand from scratch or relaunching your existing one, start by answering several questions:

• Who is the target customer for your business, what matters most to them, and what do they expect from you?
• What promises are you making to the customer and are they easily understood?
• What ultimately do you want to do for your customers that other organizations don’t (differentiators)?
• What are the current perceptions of you? How do you want to be defined?
• How do you want people to talk about your organization (internally and externally)?
• How do you want existing customers and prospects to feel when they have experiences with your business or brand?

Answering these will help you flesh out how to present your brand to the world and form the foundation for your value proposition, messaging, operational strategies, and culture.

Live the vision

Once you have a sense of what your brand identity currently is or what it should be, it’s time to start reinforcing that vision in everything you do. If you’re not, you are just making empty promises and when that happens, your stakeholders will create a different brand for you through social media chatter, reviews, word of mouth, etc.

Fulfilling your brand promises involves every aspect of your business, so as you strategize how to move forward with your branding or rebranding plans, keep the following in mind:

• Take an honest look at your current situation. Do you have the technology, capabilities, resources, and qualified people to fulfill your promises? If not, you have two choices: shore up those areas or scale back your promises. It’s not always easy to admit that your culture, processes, or people need an overhaul, but for many organizations, it is necessary to turn things around or continue to grow. Engage various stakeholders in these discussions to ensure that you have a complete analysis before launching the brand internally and externally. Be willing to make changes, even sweeping ones.
• Ensure internal audiences understand the plan. Every employee, contractor, investor, or anyone else who represents your company should know your values, mission, and messages and understand exactly what they should be doing to support the brand. If you promise “We’ll treat you like family,” and your customer service reps are curt and impatient, you’re breaking a brand promise, and people will lose confidence in your brand. Offer plenty of ongoing training to ensure stakeholders can consistently support your branding. When onboarding new employees (no matter their title or role), ensure that they understand the messages as well.
• Unify sales and marketing. In many corporate cultures, the sales and marketing teams work in silos. Or worse, they see one another as competition. As a result, there isn’t enough collaboration and cooperation. Every salesperson in your organization should view the marketing team as an asset and resource (and vice versa). Bring the groups together to discuss how well the organization is doing at fulfilling your promises. Ask them to work together to find ways you can do better. Ensure that your sales team understands how to fulfill the promises the marketing team is issuing and ensure the marketing team understands what the sales team needs to achieve their goals. And when you’re fulfilling your brand promise, celebrate successes through case histories, press releases, social media posts, etc.
• Engagement is key. In today’s world of social media and online reviews, if your company isn’t engaging with customers when they have positive or negative things to say about you, your brand may be tainted. Have a plan in place for addressing criticisms and execute on this plan professionally and quickly. Just deleting negative comments won’t make the problem go away. When you receive positive reinforcement, share these both internally and externally to remind everyone who you are as an organization.
• Don’t stop striving for perfection. Will you ever reach it? Probably not. However, you can continuously work to improve. Talk regularly with staff to ensure that everyone plays a role in fulfilling your mission. Survey customers for feedback on how well you are meeting their expectations. Measure and monitor performance, such as customer complaint metrics, and be quick to respond to negative trends. The most successful organizations proactively seek out potential issues and work to prevent them before they impact the bottom line. Ask for employee feedback on how the company can better live the brand and try to implement these ideas to keep everyone engaged. There’s nothing better than employee brand ambassadors who live the dream everyday.

Ultimately, your logo and design choices are the icing on the cake, the visually appealing part of your brand, but not the substance.

Are you feeling stuck about where to go with your branding strategy? We can help. Contact us today so we can discuss your business goals and vision.