Branding Red Flags

Has business seemed more difficult?

Has sales been growing more slowly?

Do customers seem less loyal?

Are your teams out of sync?

Moments like these are when it’s important to step outside the flurry of the day-to-day and assess the real drivers of your organization. It’s an opportunity to re-establish your baseline and make sure all teams and functions are aligned with your organization’s promise to the market.

However, there are a few red flags—sometimes mental, sometimes spoken—that can surface at this juncture. It’s important to identify these red flags and check our mindset against the truth.

🚩 “We have more pressing priorities right now.”

Fighting fires never stops for business leaders. You put out one just in time to find another. This approach is not sustainable and does not build transformative brands.

Most of your challenges can be improved with a brand-driven mindset (not to mention there’s a strong likelihood those fires exists due to the lack of strategy and brand direction).

Brand-driven organizations seek to align every function and action in a single-minded fashion against their challenges. This mindset is offers a heavy rainstorm for your field of fires.

🚩 “Let marketing lead this initiative. I’ll review the final deliverable.”

Any attempt to build the brand that’s not rooted in a strong strategy will be detached from the drivers of the business. The role of marketing cannot be understated but without guidance and support from the CEO, it will die from misalignment.

It’s not an accident that some of the greatest organizations we know have been led by brand thinkers: Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Howard Schultz, Phil Knight, and Richard Branson. This isn’t a duty to assign—as a leader, it’s yours to own.

🚩 “We don’t have the budget for that right now.”

Budgets reflects the priority of the organization. If you only invest in building your brand when convenient, you're facing the root reason why you don't reap the rewards.

Brand building is a long-term investment of time, capital, and resources. If it’s treated as a “sometimes” and “when convenient” behavior, save your resources and spend them elsewhere. But be warned: you’re failing to invest for the hard days that do come.

🚩 “Branding doesn’t directly impact revenue.”

This is the loudest red flag. I wish all the research performed, words written, and cases studied would eliminate this mindset ... but it still persists.

Put as simply as possible: strong brands attract new customers better, keep them longer, and sell them more. Strong brands hire talent more efficiently and keep them longer. Strong brands create pricing power and margin that the competition is unable to match.

Strong brands don't happen by accident—they're built.

3 ways I can help:

Brand Strategy: Build your brand holistically to create favorability with your target market.

Brand Identity: Confidently market, internally and externally, with a toolbox of visual and verbal assets that make your brand distinct.

Brand Marketing: Establish a distinct relationship with your current and future customers.