The most common marketing mistakes brands make and how to avoid them

Brands mean business. But that’s only if you’re able to strengthen the connection between the brand’s purpose and the experience every day by avoiding these marketing mistakes. That way, your brand can help make your business not only more purposeful but also more profitable. 

If that sounds too good to be true, then I’d suggest that either you’re operating in the small minority of sectors where branding has a less meaningful role to play – it’s true, it can happen – think bulk chemicals, for example. Or, you might simply be doing it wrong.

If you’re a big business, doing it wrong can often get buried in bureaucracy and it may well be that nobody knows enough to notice.

If you’re a small business, you don’t have that luxury.

You need to make every decision count and that includes investing your marketing to make a return. And if the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer – hat tip, Peter Drucker – then the task for the brand is to create that demand and nurture that loyalty.

So what are the three big mistakes that I see businesses make? And more importantly, how do you avoid them?

Your brand is not a one-off, it’s always on

Firstly, your brand is not a one-off project.

Your brand is not something you set and forget — once every year, once every five years, or once every decade or so.

Just like your business, your brand is happening every day, and it needs to be managed with the same dynamism. That means understanding your brand’s performance – quantitatively and qualitatively, formally and informally – so that you can surface relevant insights that you can use to inform and improve your brand experience for customer acquisition, retention and loyalty.

It’s an all-too-common affair to see a brand that has remained the same for many years while the business has changed and evolved. When managed properly, your brand should be a leading force for your business, generating demand for your products and services. Treated as a one-off project, however, your brand will inevitably lag behind your business, its role marginalised to sales support and its value reduced to a cost centre.

Invest in your brand on an ongoing basis – with a view to both short-term and long-term horizons – and your brand will pay you back in sales and growth.

The best number of brands is one

 If that sounds like a lot, that may be because of the second mistake I often see businesses make. Treating everything as its own brand with its own logo and so on and so forth, so much so that any marketing budget you do invest is quickly diluted through having to support so many different brands.

Not everything needs another brand. Nor its own unique name, or its own bespoke logo.

In fact, for most businesses, the best number of brands is one.

This naturally makes whatever investment you make all the more meaningful.

What makes this viable is the understanding that your brand is not simply your logo. It comprises a range of component elements, including flexible elements like language and colour, that enable the versatility to use the one brand in many different ways.

Yes, you might feel like you’re putting all your eggs in one basket, but that’s better than having no basket at all, given that eggs tend to roll about the place and crack quite easily.

Best – if you can – to invest in the one brand that can flex in order to connect all your products and services with your various customers.

Brands build from the inside out

Thirdly, connecting your brand with your various customers is critical, but you may well struggle if you don’t first make the connection with your own employees. Because if your own people don’t believe in your brand, what makes you think your customers will?

This is not simply a matter of sharing information to ensure understanding but also fostering inspiration that builds belief. Without this kind of employee engagement, your brand risks being superficial at best. Conversely, positive employee experiences convert into profitable customer experiences when everyone in your business can deliver the brand in their own words and actions for a cumulative effect, inside and out.

An investment in your brand is an investment in your business. When you strengthen the connection between your brand’s purpose and the experience every day, your brand’s return on that investment is to give your business a measurable competitive advantage. 

Any small business needs to ensure its brand can make a big difference. Avoid these marketing mistakes and you can maximise that competitive advantage for yourself.

Rich Curtis is the CEO of FutureBrand.