Is your branding sh*t?
- 4 hours ago
- 6 min read
Short of asking for tough love, what are the tell-tale signs your branding might be the weakest link of your business?
Branding should be an objective task to identify an effective strategy, identity and manner in which you develop your brand over time with marketing efforts. Though it’s often seen subjectively, especially with the look of a brand being the most considered part of branding. Where we get stuck on colour choice that we vibe with, rather than colours that would make us stand out from the crowd. We get fixated on how perfect the logo should be, when the most successful brands in the world have the most simple logos. But the one thing that often gets missed is a self-reflection to assess whether your branding is actually working for your business. In other words, is your branding shit?
Now you might think, well, is it shit because it just looks shit to someone based on their opinion? And hey, it might, because you’re not going to appeal to everyone. But short of asking people for some tough love in the form of feedback, you can still self-assess whether or not your branding is doing what’s it’s made to do (as the conduit between your company and customers to give them confidence and connect each other), or if it might be the weakest link of your business.
So here are 6 ways you can self-assess your branding efficacy today, to identify anything that might be caught in your blindspot.
Is it too obvious?
If your brand looks exactly like what you do, you’ve probably said the quiet part out loud and so has everyone else.
The problem with “obvious” branding is that it trades distinctiveness for clarity. Yes, people can quickly understand what you do, but they can’t remember you specifically. A house icon for a real estate agent, a tooth for a dentist, a leaf for anything “natural” it all starts to blur into one big category mess.
Your logo ends up doing all the heavy lifting, trying to communicate your entire business in one glance instead of acting as a shortcut to everything your brand stands for. And when everyone looks the same, customers don’t choose based on brand, they choose based on price, convenience, or whoever shows up first. That’s a race you don’t want to be in.
This is why we invest heavily in developing a brand, so that it creates these easy associations and added value in our offering, instead of taking the easy road initially just to communicate what it is we do. Create intrigue and encourage people in to discover what your brand is all about.
Is it too complicated?
If your brand needs a paragraph to explain itself, it’s already losing. Too many colours, too many fonts, too many messages, too many ways of saying the same thing.
What might have started as “flexibility” quickly turns into inconsistency. Your team isn’t sure how to use it, so they improvise. Your marketing looks different every time. Your customers can’t quite pin down what you stand for, so they don’t remember you.
This is even a pitfall of those in branding and marketing, where good branding is made, but consideration for how it will be easy to use and easy to apply, it becomes a hard-task for teams within the business to use when branding and marketing is not their schtick. The yard-stick here is that if it feels hard internally, it’s probably even harder externally for your customers to understand, recognise, connect with and feel confident in.
Is it stuck in the 90s?
Some brands don’t age gracefully, they just stay frozen. Gradients from a different era, outdated typography, layouts that feel like they belong on a CD-ROM. It might have worked once, but now it signals something else entirely. Not established, not heritage, frankly, just out of touch. And whether that’s a fair assessment or not, people do indeed use visual cues to judge credibility, just like the cover of a book.
So if your brand does look dated, people assume your thinking, your service, and your business might be too. You don’t need to chase trends, but you do need to show you’re still relevant and it’s often why many businesses strive to refresh their brand over time to align with the times and even refine the way they communicate, rather than drastically changing the whole identity and direction of their brand.
Is there a high churn rate?
If people are constantly leaving, your brand could be part of the problem. Customers who don’t come back and staff who don’t stick around are often signs there’s a disconnect between what your brand promises and what the experience actually delivers.
Because branding isn’t just about attracting attention, it’s about setting expectations that start from the inside with a strong culture built on clarity. So if those expectations aren’t clear, consistent, or believable, people come in with one idea and leave with another. And when that gap is too wide, how can we expect them to stick around or return? High churn isn’t solely a branding issue, but it can often be connected to it.
Has it changed several times in the last 5-10 years?
If your brand keeps changing, it’s not evolving, it’s drifting. A new logo here, a colour tweak there, a “refresh” every couple of years because something feels off, and nothing sticks around long enough to be effective if you keep lobbing your branding into the trash every couple of years. It’s not to say you can refresh your branding over time, but several times in a short space of time is less effective than just keeping things the same for longer.
Doing this usually means the original foundation was never solid to begin with. Instead of building memory over time, you keep resetting it. Customers don’t get the chance to recognise you, remember you, or build any familiarity. Consistency is, in part, what helps create brand equity. If you keep changing your branding without changing the thinking, you’re just starting from zero over and over again, and it may as well be a whole new business starting from scratch.
Did you just make a logo and that’s it?
A logo is not a brand, it’s an identification label. If everything else has been stitched together as you go, like your messaging, tone of voice, visuals, offers, then your brand isn’t really a cohesive system, it’s a collection of decisions made at different times for different reasons. And for some businesses, that really shows. It feels inconsistent, it feels unclear, and most importantly, it doesn’t give people enough to latch onto. Strong brands build associations over time, not just with how they look, but how they speak, what they stand for, and how they show up and engage with customers. If all you’ve got is a logo, you’ve given people nothing to remember when they see your logo.
Does your brand need an independent audit?
The saying “it’s hard to read the label from inside the jar” applies to businesses that can struggle to identify weak spots and unidentified strengths and opportunities. Effectively you’re too close to it, that’s the reality. When you’re inside the business every day, everything starts to feel normal, the gaps, the inconsistencies, the missed opportunities. You stop seeing them.
That’s where an independent audit comes in. Not just a surface level review or a box ticking exercise, but a proper objective look at how your brand shows up across strategy, identity, and marketing. What’s working, what’s not, what’s being wasted, and what’s being missed entirely. But to go beyond a standard SWOT chart (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats exercise), an independent objective audit of your brand efforts across branding and marketing could be the shot in the arm your brand needs to find clarity and lead it forward with an effective brand strategy as a result.
Because sometimes the fastest way forward isn’t doing more, it’s finally seeing clearly what’s already there and what needs to change.
So if a few of these hit a bit too close to home, good. That’s not a problem, that’s clarity. Because once you can see where your brand is falling short, you can actually do something about it instead of guessing or patching things together. Give your brand a shot at better branding to create better business success, because the right strategy and identity doesn’t just make things look better, it makes your brand easier to recognise, easier to trust, and easier to choose.
