What is a brand?
Marketing experts have struggled to wring every nuance from the word for nearly a hundred years — stretching definitions and expanding materials from a logo and a slogan to personalized pens and fully branded Twitter feeds.
But simply put, your brand is what you tell your customers you will do for them. It’s what you are about.
Your brand is a holistic amalgamation of your business goals, your products and services, your mission statement, and how your customers and clients perceive you. It can be overwhelming — especially when branding goes awry. But it’s part of contemporary business practice and is too important to be ignored.
It’s all well and good to have a mission statement, but the practical needs of business sometimes get in the way of maintaining it. It’s never intentional, but we all know it happens.
So what do you do when your brand veers off the road or gets caught on an exit ramp that’s heading away from your business’s stated brand?
Brand Reboot
Why not? Hollywood does it all the time.
There’s some aged thinking about the permanency of logos — “Don’t change the logo, people won’t know who you are!” That may have been true 30 years ago, when brand impressions were much harder to come by.
Back then people might see a direct mail piece, a billboard, and maybe an ad in the newspaper or Yellow Pages. That level of brand exposure was nowhere near the potential for saturation that we have today.
Consider all the ways you can communicate your brand now:
Print
Direct Mail
Web
Social Media
Email
Apps
…and the list goes on.
This saturation of contact points makes branding changes much easier. They can be deployed subtly and gradually, or all at once — really whatever you, as the brand owner, are comfortable with.
Re-Evaluating Your Mission
Within a brand reboot might be a re-evaluation of your mission statement.
As businesses evolve, society grows, and technology and practices change, your original mission may not reflect where your business is today. Maybe your mission statement was spot-on when you started fifteen years ago — but how does it fit into today’s fast-moving information age?
If you think it’s a bit outdated, it probably is. And that’s okay.
Take some time to rethink why you’re in business and write it out — plain and simple. Too many companies believe their mission statement needs to be ten pages long and explain every decision the CEO or board ever made.
The reality is that a simple, single line is often preferable. Support it with some explanation if needed, but get to the point in the first line.
If you’re going to define a new brand, make sure that brand is truly you. Don’t stretch it to sound nicer or more community-oriented than you really are.
Be what you are.
Say what you do.
The Power of a Logo
Perhaps the biggest piece of brand identity is the logo. Like everything else, times have changed. Modern logos are simple, sleek, and colorful. They are memorable, but not goofy or cartoony. They are trendy, but timeless.
Sound like a challenge? It is. But it’s a challenge that should be fun and help renew your passion for your business and industry.
Need Help with Your Brand?
At Tingalls Graphic Design, we work with branding and brand materials every day. We’ve seen it all — t-shirts, business cards, websites, brochures, trade show materials — the list goes on and on.
If you think you might need new branding, or maybe you’re just running low on branded materials, send us an email and we’ll see what we can do.
