BY JOWENE ELLE.
When you think of great branding, would you think of Coca Cola, Nike and Adidas? Small businesses always see branding as a high cost investment when they imagine their initiatives with these iconic brands.
Sometimes, it is just your imagination that scares you. Make
sure you avoid these critical mistakes, and your branding success will be just a
few steps away.
Mistakes #1: Contempt of Branding Power. Branding is an
ascendant for customer relationship. For example, when customers think of
online fashion shopping, they think of Zalora, that’s the kind of immediate
branding power happens to your customers. From SEO perspective, it is a
valuable asset for your company. Why? Do you know that Google likes to
prioritize branded listings in its organic search results by visitors’
favorable site? Your website traffic and brand awareness could come from your
strong brand building; more clicks mean more happy customers.
Mistakes #2: Go without Branding Guidelines. It is very
important and essential to establish well-defined guidelines, and make sure you
have proper check on your logo, branding colors, tagline, font and typography,
voice narration, imagery as well as mascots or spokesperson when creating a
brand identity. Feel free to do some necessary add-ons to define your branding
characteristic, but remember to file all these important documents altogether.
Your branding efforts would need them to keep up the consistency and direction
needed for branding success.
Mistakes #3: Being Too Complicated. The Coca Cola branding
is a classic example, its typical scripted logo has few slightly changed since
its first usage way back in 1887, let’s see figure below. Here at GE Consult,
we observed that when a branding process first started, it is quite tempting to
add more varieties than a logo truly needs. Frankly your logo doesn’t need to
have eight different colors, or have individual graphic elements to represent
each value proposition. Simple and clean
are more likable, memorable, and easier to recognize. So stay away from
overcomplicating your branding.
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| The Coca Cola Logo Journey |
Mistakes #4: Being
Vague in Branding. Being genuine is good! Go straight and develop your branding
guidelines and elements that reveal truly about your company and its value. Try
avoiding marketing jargons that could be alienating your customers and more
importantly hurting your sales. It’s time to consider eliminating made-up words
like “”No. 1” company, “best-selling” author, and “award-winning” agency etc.
that are meaningless to your customers. According to GE Consult’s branding
expert Fred Wu, “wallpaper copywriting” branding seems ubiquitous and
irrelevant nowadays, and what’s worst, it generates no value to the customers
or the society”.
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| Brand Story & Logo Design Work @ GE Consult |
Mistakes #5:
No Routine Infringement Check. Ask yourself if you have regular
trademark infringement check? Bear in mind that developing and implementing
your business branding guidelines is only half of the beginning, you have to be
proactive in monitoring if there is a “likelihood of confusion” caused by two
branding marks at issue. But how do we analyze the similarity or dissimilarity
of branding marks (or trademarks)? In
general, a court considers appearance such as common letters, pronunciation,
connotation as well as commercial impression. After all, if the marks are not
similar, it is considered no infringement.
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About GE Consult
Founded
since 2003, GE Consult has helped numerous local SMEs/SMIs in
developing their company profiles, business plans, business proposals
etc. assisted clients in securing business deals and contracts. If you
are looking for a winning company profile or any professional services,
please do not hesitate to contact us at (+6017) 330 8077 and/or email rachel@geconsult.org for further service explanation.
