5 Errores Que Destruirán Tu Branding portada

5 Mistakes That Will Destroy Your Branding

/ Branding, Rebranding / By

Business failures and branding mistakes have existed in the business world for a long time. However, there are several key mistakes, which can completely destroy your branding or the perception that potential customers have of your brand.

If you do NOT want your business to be involved in it, then keep reading because we are going to see what these 5 branding mistakes are and how you can avoid them

Before going on to see the 5 mistakes, let's see what is considered a brand failure.

Table of Contents

Brand Failure Definition

According to Berry, T. (2019) We can say that a brand is a commercial failure when its presence in the market leads to:

  1. “The inability of a product to achieve the market share required to maintain its market presence;
  2. The inability of a product to reach its intended life cycle as defined by the organization due to any reason.
  3. The ultimate failure of a product to achieve profitability.

In business, profitability is not negotiable.

- Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

What is the main mistake in branding

In general, all branding errors lead to the same consequence; The inconsistency.

A brand must be felt, seen and communicated in a consistent way. You can't get your customers' trust without credibility, and you can't get credibility without being consistent.  

If your branding is inconsistent; consequently, your audience will not be able to understand the value of your proposition, trust your brand or memorize the product or service you sell.

Therefore, it is essential to take care that our brand is maintained consistently in all the media with which it comes into contact.

#1 Ignore the brand category

In 1982, Colgate introduced "Colgate Kitchen Entrees," a new line of frozen food products. This line was introduced with the reasoning that their dental cleaning products were so well known to their customers that the connection between food and teeth was simply a natural next step for the brand. Unfortunately, Colgate experienced a sharp drop in sales after introducing this and was deemed a business failure.

What happened?

Colgate, I completely ignore the category of the brand, under which it had been building its position for years. Many brands, like Colgate, make the mistake of ignoring what makes them different from others in the market, that is, their specialty or also called their brand category.

They typically make this mistake when the idea of extending the brand to "new horizons" arises in a board of directors, offering new lines of products or services to offer the consumer a broader range. Which, counterproductively, only confuses the consumer when it comes to determining what the brand is and what differentiates it from others.

How to avoid it

Make sure that if your brand specializes in one type of product or service, it doesn't overextend itself into other categories that have little or no relationship to its parent category. The extensions of a brand to new lines of business must function as complements to the main service or product, not as another separate service. For this, it is more reasonable to create a new brand that is positioned for that new product or service that the company proposes.

#2 Imitate competitors

Imitating the competition can be beneficial at the beginning of a venture, because it allows us to understand the field in which we are working, take advantage of the structure and use the fundamental offers that other companies similar to ours offer.

However, applying this strategy in the medium and long term will end up doing more damage to the brand than any other marketing decision will do.

Think about it for a minute, if two brands are very similar and you have to choose only one, which one do you choose? With the one that has the lowest price or is most available, right? This is because when a brand imitates its competitors, it stops becoming a differentiable option. And it happens to be one of the bunch. Therefore, the potential client will not invest much time or effort in choosing one option or another using the simplest parameters available, such as price or location.

#3 Not being clear enough about the unique selling proposition

Linked to the previous point (to imitate the competition too much) NOT having a clearly defined unique selling proposition or USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is such a serious and undervalued problem that many businesses have been dealing with for years.

When we do not have a unique selling proposition or we are not entirely clear about the benefits that the product or service can offer to the end user, but rather a vague idea in our heads of "why they should buy from us" we fall into writing unpersuasive sales texts. generic and full of empty promises that no buyer is going to believe.

Examples of generic sales proposals are:

  • Quality Products: “Our products are of the highest quality, ensuring that our customers get the best value for their money.”
  • Competitive prices: "We offer competitive prices for our products, making them affordable for everyone."
  • Customer service: "Our top-notch customer service team is always available to help with any questions or concerns our customers may have."

Interesting aspects to take into account: The approach

Mack, S. M. (2017) Explains in his article "The disadvantages of the unique selling proposition" that one of the many aspects that characterize a successful unique selling proposition is that "it must focus on a limited aspect of your product to be concise and convincing."

Although Mack, S. M. makes it clear in his research that having a highly focused sales proposition can delimit the brand and make customers not realize the many other benefits it can have, this does not mean that we have to work on the fog around what our brand offers uniquely from the competition.

On the other hand, according to Bautista, I. (2021) “Realign and recalibrate your messaging on online and offline platforms. Whether it's your About Us page or your LinkedIn account, your brand needs to be consistent and show your USP. Get rid of jargon or generic language. Use powerful words that inspire confidence and action."

#4 Only create a logo and not an identity with well-defined brand guidelines

According to the article by Allen, A. (2022) “A brand must be consistent, and the easiest way to achieve this is to take the time to develop a style guide and keep it up to date. A brand style guide is a document that tells anyone within or working with your organization how to implement your logo, font types, images, messaging, and other components across different platforms. The lack of a style guide has the potential to lead to disharmony and confusion as your brand grows.”

#5 attract too many audiences at once

Probably the most brand-breaking mistake that can exist is trying to attract too many audiences at once. If we were to exemplify this, it would be like trying to kill flies with a cannon, you just can't.

Attracting too many audiences at once can dilute your brand message and make it less attractive to any one group. Ultimately damaging your branding. It's important to identify your target audience and create a brand that speaks directly to them.

A healthy rule to follow is to have a very clear segmentation of the type of ideal customer that the brand is going to speak to and not have more than 3 customer profiles for said market segmentation.

An example of brand inconsistency

Imagine that you are walking into a bar and a person in a suit and tie approaches you to speak for the first time.

At first, he is quite polite and formal, and tells you that he is an entrepreneur from Port X, that he has a hostel on the beach and wants you to be his partner.

However, as the conversation progresses, this person begins to change his speech and reveals that his hostel is not actually on the beach but in the mountains, and on top of that, he is not an entrepreneur but a salesman who comes from the hostel, and if this were not enough, he goes from being polite and formal, to being quite informal and confident, drinking alcohol more and more intensely.

The next time she meets him, he is no longer wearing a formal suit, but a clown suit. He proceeds to speak to you now with a southern accent and reveals that his multi-million dollar hostel went bankrupt, but that he now has a better business on his hands, a colorful balloon store.

The question is: would you trust this curious entrepreneur? Why yes or why not?

For most, giving money to this person is seen as a risk

And the reason is due to lack of consistency. If a brand approached you by changing its pitch or value proposition or appearance every time, surely that would not build you enough trust to invest your money in it.

Brand positioning errors

Brand positioning is, roughly speaking, the “place” that a brand is going to occupy in the mind of an individual. Brand positioning is influenced by the audience the brand wants to sell to, its category as a brand, and its most relevant features such as price, product, appearance, location, or promotion. The worst positioning error that a brand can have is NOT having a clear positioning or directly trying to position itself for two different brand categories at the same time, which, ultimately, only generates confusion for potential customers.

Common Brand Positioning Mistakes

Among the most common positioning errors we have:

  • Over-positioning: When a brand places too much emphasis on a very specific differential in its products or services, attracting only a small portion of the market that does not generate sufficient profitability.
  • Under-positioning: When a brand fails to convincingly and persuasively communicate its positioning and benefits to potential customers, resulting in them not fully understanding the value of brand benefits
  • Confused positioning: When a brand makes numerous communication efforts that are loaded with contradictory, erroneous or confusing information. Generating in your potential customers or target group a distorted perception and confusing image of the brand and its products/services.
  • Double positioning: When a brand makes branding efforts and fails to position its product in two or more categories simultaneously, and consequently; customers do not believe or accept the claims of the brand.

References

  1. Allen, A. (2022, 5 agosto). 10 common branding mistakes to avoid when starting a business. namecheap.com. https://www.namecheap.com/guru-guides/branding-mistakes-and-how-to-avoid/
  2. Bautista, I. (2021, 27 septiembre). 14 Crucial Branding Mistakes to Avoid. Growth Rocket. https://www.growth-rocket.com/blog/14-crucial-branding-mistakes-to-avoid/
  3. Berida, J. (2020, 19 mayo). 9 Crucial Branding Mistakes to Avoid. Growth Rocket. https://www.growth-rocket.com/blog/9-crucial-branding-mistakes-to-avoid/
  4. Berry, T. (2019, 10 septiembre). Product and Brand Failures: A Marketing Perspective. Bplans Blog. https://articles.bplans.com/product-and-brand-failures-a-marketing-perspective/
  5. Mack, S. M. & The Houston Chronicle. (2017, 21 de noviembre). The Disadvantages of Unique Selling Proposition. Small Business – https://smallbusiness.chron.com/disadvantages-unique-selling-proposition-65589.html
  6. Marq. (2021). 2021 Brand Consistency Report. En info.marq.com. https://info.marq.com/resources/report/brand-consistency
  7. Miller, C. (2022, 20 julio). 9 Huge Branding Fails From Famous Companies. Tailor Brands. https://www.tailorbrands.com/blog/9-huge-branding-fails-from-your-favorite-companies
  8. Voxco. (2021, 16 diciembre). Brand Positioning. https://www.voxco.com/blog/brand-positioning/
Oliver Puente
Oliver Puente
Freelance brand identity and UI/UX designer based in Guatemala, Oliver Puente helps companies modernize their brands.
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