The hardest part of branding is maintaining your brand

Building a brand at the start is the exciting part. Maintaining it is where the hard work begins…a bit like marriage.

The headline act of the work I do with clients is to help set the foundations of their brand. To develop a clear strategy and an identity to help them captivate and connect with a target market that chooses them over another, a bit like building a relationship if you will. But the other half of what I do to help my clients is the gritty maintenance part of branding. To maintain and grow its presence in the market which is a long term labour of time, effort, money, understanding and perseverance until proper value is created. Which is why if I had to compare maintaining a brand over time to anything, as a married man myself, it would be marriage. Because you could say it similarly takes things like a commitment, shared values, alignment, and a common goal to succeed and succeed over a sustained period of time. 

But what’s more interesting is that the more I thought about this idea, this process of maintaining and growing a brand over time does play out like many marriages do between spouses. I get that this is probably going to be a bit of a laboured metaphor, but stick with me here, as I start with the typical phases many businesses go through over the course of a brand’s lifecycle. 

The Honeymoon Phase

This is where everything is fresh, exciting and you can’t wait to tell people about it. The social media posts are flying, emails are being sent out left, right, and centre and there’s an internal energy to get everything out there faster than humanly possible. This is why people find branding and even rebranding so exciting, just like that honeymoon holiday bliss.

The Reality Phase

Daily business operations, routines, and minor flaws set in as that initial rush of excitement fades. Reality sets in that this is harder than it looks and you wonder how you’re ever going to compete with these big brands. Even after 3 months of posting on social media, writing up 15 blogs and sending your 5th email campaign, the commitment to the cause starts to dwindle, especially when other priorities pick up within the business because of expansion or other issues that pop up from new customer interactions. This is why many businesses hire external help to manage branding and marketing efforts or hire dedicated teams to manage this. Rather than dropping it onto the plate of people within the organisation whose job descriptions are far removed from customer acquisition, let alone maintaining the brand’s presence…oftentimes it’s the office receptionist.

The Power Struggle Phase

This is where disappointments surface and deeper disagreements emerge between different departments as the team battles autonomy in their own team silos versus togetherness to reach that shared goal. The finance team, the sales team, the customer service team, the distribution team, the product/business development team, and the marketing team, all duking it out to meet their own KPI quotas and budget prioritisation. The idea of finance, sales, customer service, biz dev, distribution and marketing not all working together to perform the same outcome of generating profit while ensuring customer satisfaction is lost on everyone, when the brand has the potential to be that unifying thing that helps each team succeed by working together. Instead it’s fallen by the wayside and deprioritised as just “looking and sounding nice” or simply consistent enough.

The 7 year itch

Ever wondered why so many brands rebrand and we all wonder why everyone gets upset about them on social media? It’s this perpetual urge of businesses that believe they need to reinvent themselves to possibly get out of their dissatisfaction by remaking the logo above the door that signals that change. It’s often when a new CEO, or a head of marketing, or creative director comes in as a new participant to the relationship. Change is sought after to band-aid fix the issues, or hopefully act as proper deep rooted fundamental change across the business. The least effective is the change in branding just because the people within the business are sick of it, when it’s more likely that keeping it would have been more effective for customers who engage with the brand a hundred times less than the team behind the brand ever will.

The Stability Phase

This is where acceptance of what the brand is, what it stands for, how it looks and sounds is now locked in. There’s a collective realisation that you’ve got something now and we dare not change it because you know what it should and shouldn’t do. This is what you are known for and this is how you should maintain your brand position. You learn to respect the guardrails of your brand’s guidelines. You instinctively know how and where it should show up, behave and what’s best for it as it grows. This should lead to confidence in creating more opportunity to go bigger, with bigger budgets, greater capacity to do more and potentially see exponential growth in the value of your brand beyond your product and service utility, because you see your brand as an investment now, rather than a cost. 

The Mature/Legacy Phase

At this stage, this is where brands transcend the products and services that helped create their legacy. This is why, after 30-40 years of maintaining their brand into maturity, they can start pushing the boundaries with their brand assets like McDonald’s does in advertising that never says or shows their logo, let alone their products, because they have utilised their branding so deeply that it has created vast and fast recognition with minimal communication. This is where total acceptance of the brand puts it in a higher tier within the business as the connection point centred between finance, HR, sales, business development, customer service, legal, distribution, administration and marketing.

So it’s safe to say that it’s not smooth sailing for any business to create what ends up being a mature legacy brand the likes of which we see in brands like Coca-Cola, Virgin, McDonald’s OR Nike. And yet there are no doubt a great deal of things you can do within your business to help it along its way so that you create a great relationship bond between your brand and your team, not just with your customers. So here goes, some brand relationship advice, if you will:

1. Strategy first, strategy always: set the foundations, and come back to it to form new plans of attack to achieve the strategy. The strategy is what helps you win, not just the execution. It’s all fun and games to try new ads, new products, hire a new agency or create a new logo. But if there’s no strategy or if it’s ignored, you may as well throw darts at a dart board with your eyes closed and face the other way. Market orientation, segmentation, targeting, positioning and objectives, that’s your strategy. All the tactical stuff to do your branding and marketing is the plan, they are the fun bits that you’ll eventually get bored with and run out of ideas without the strategy in place and the discipline to follow through with it and maintain it.
   

2. Marketing isn’t just about promoting your brand: Marketing is 4 key principles - product, price, placement and promotion. This means in your board room or weekly WIP meetings with different departments, marketing has a role to play in helping with the products and services you develop, how they can be priced, where they can be found/purchased and then how they can be promoted. Silo this role/effort to just promotion and watch your brand become irrelevant and severely undervalued or disconnected from what you sell. To do branding (maintaining your brand to help it grow, not just design a logo) the role of marketing needs to be taken seriously and implemented more vigorously.

   
   

3. Stop dicking with your brand assets: Don’t bloody touch ‘em… for years! Refresh as necessary for functionality reasons, like better legibility, or easier colour reproduction, fit it into an app icon, or just so you can embroider it on a shirt better. Your assets like a logo, colours, fonts, patterns, mascots, sounds, packaging. If they were designed well to begin with, keep them. And the longer you keep them, the more valuable they become as true assets of value to your business beyond product and service utility. If anything, add to them over time where it makes sense to help improve wider brand recognition and memorability. Because here’s a big point to remember, most customers aren’t frequent customers. They may only buy once in blue moon. They may also not need your brand at the time they see your brand. But in those times they do, they will search for what comes to mind. Change that moment of connection they had with what they remember your brand for and you’ve shot yourself in the foot.

4. Hire outside help to get out of your own way: This isn’t a point to sell my own services, as much as it is to say that branding is going to be done more effectively by the people that specialise in it. Be it marketers or branding specialists like strategists, naming experts, copywriters and designers, these are going to be the people that live and breathe the brand maintenance stuff for you as their one prerogative to help your brand grow. Even if you say you can do it yourself to begin with, the reality of the day-to-day maintenance will take its toll as other priorities take hold and it becomes one of these “I’ll do it later tasks” and opportunity cost is knocking on your door.

5. Protect your brand: When it gets to that stage of stability in knowing how your brand operates and how it should and can show up, this is the stage of maintenance I believe requires protection at all costs because it now has proper value. Be it protection of your IP against copycats who smell blood in the water, or ensuring it’s not steered off course because of trends or new blood coming into your team that have their own subjective ideas for what the brand should do entirely different. Maintaining that course of success you’re on can still be a tightrope for many brands and it might even be something as simple as dusting off that brand guidelines document in your bottom drawer, or having mandatory brand strategy meetings to review it every quarter, half year or year.
   

6. Branding is more than just the assets, it’s your team: There are many overlooked parts of developing and maintaining a brand, but one in particular I bang on about a lot is team culture as being one of the fundamental factors of brand success. The people behind the brand being on the same page and rigorously fighting to maintain a common, collectively understood idea of success is what forms a great internal brand identity. One that you can hire and fire by and set the tone for a particular personality and experience that you deliver and customers engage with. Because a brand needs to be a shared belief in something more than just your product or service. It’s a captivating moment of connection between company and customers. If there’s not that shared belief that for your team the brand they manage is the one for your customers, and for your customers that this is the brand for them, then we don’t have a brand. There’s a disconnect and no compelling reason to choose your business offering over another.

So that’s my spiel on brand maintenance. Sure it’s fun to work on branding at the start of things to create a new name, or a logo, or new packaging. But without some of these fundamentals in place, that honeymoon phase doesn’t last long and you may as well have not forked out the time, effort and money spent on setting your brand up for success if we can’t follow through with it by maintaining it effectively to help it grow. And if you’re not convinced, this is what the big brands spend an inordinate amount of time on maintaining when it’s helped them build multi-national brand presence. As I say, it’s better branding for better business success, so give your brand a shot with better branding.