5 Branding Do’s and Don’ts That May Surprise You

1. Making it all about your product or service.

• Don’t focus on the features and benefits of your product or service
• Do: Focus on the customer’s transformation thanks to your offering

When I’m in the market for buying a new phone, I’m aware of the features I’d like it to have. Some are crucial (like being able to make a call), and others are nice-to-haves (like being able to shoot portrait mode).

In reality, I will almost always buy an iPhone because I have built up a certain brand affiliation with it. I identify as a creative person who likes to ‘have nice things’ – and buying Apple’s products tends to reinforce that image for me.

The main takeaway here is, when branding, and then marketing your product/s or service/s, make sure you paint the picture of the transformation the customers could have. To them, it could be about status, achieving their potential, simplifying a complex process, connecting them to a like-minded community, or something of that nature.

2. Thinking of branding as a dash of paint.

• Don’t think that a good brand identity will ‘fix’ poor brand experience
• Do: Make every interaction customers have with your brand consistently amazing

Branding can certainly help to shape perceptions. But only if that message is being consistently backed up with your superior customer service and brand experiences through all of the brand’s touchpoints. It ultimately comes down to over-delivering on customers’ expectations.

Branding won’t help save a poor service/product.

3. Moving too fast without a roadmap or a goal.

• Don’t assign budgets for marketing or branding without a strategy
• Do: First, formulate your brand goals, customer acquisition strategy, channels etc.

It’s unusual to become an overnight success. More often it’s a set of small, incremental steps that get you there. And you can only follow through on those if you have a roadmap and strategies of how to get there.

Things like defining your ideal target audience are a no-brainer. But you will also need to have in place a toolkit you can use when you launch, which might be email templates, artwork assets, messaging examples to invite influencers to spread the word, a specific schedule for your marketing campaign/s, and a way to measure all of it to make sure you’re on track.

4. Thinking of branding as a one-off thing.

• Don’t assume what once you have a new brand identity, the work is done
• Do: Think of branding as a continuous evolution, consistent with your strategy

Branding is not something that you can turn off, once you’ve started. It happens whether you influence it or not. And you need to continue to influence it. Otherwise, customers and outsiders will do it for you.

Remember, once you have a plan, a strategy, a direction, and a goal of where you want to be with your brand, you need to be intentional as to how you get there.

5. Being disruptive with your brand, because you can.

• Don’t only consider branding as a way to disrupt, or differentiate
• Do: Align branding with your strategic goals, aiming for brand salience

Differentiating your brand from competitors is a key priority in many contexts. Especially if you’re a newcomer to the industry and would-be customers have zero to little awareness about your offering. But few people seem to understand that the decision to differentiate should be the result of careful consideration – not the default action.

Consider instead brand distinctiveness (different to differentiation), to achieve brand salience.

That usually means creating something you can ‘own’ – a image, a color, a shape, a tagline, a jingle, or any other number of distinctive brand assets that can help would-be customers to recognise (and later recall) your brand.