Branding Isn’t Going to Save You

A few years ago I worked with an up-and-coming app company that needed help to meet its growth goals. As a consultant, I provided a list of items that could easily be implemented in order to increase conversion rate, retention rates, and create solid foundations that could allow it to meet its long-term growth goals. While the strategy I laid out was solid, it was complex. It involved many moving parts and hiring new individuals with core competencies that were very different from what the founding team possessed. 

This often happens when founders both come from the same backgrounds. In this case, both founders were engineers and lacked a real appreciation for the profession of marketing. 

When an investor, who similarly lacked experience in marketing, reviewed the plan and saw what was needed to reach a successful outcome, he suggested that the real problem was with the brand and that the brand needed to be ‘fixed’ before anything else could be tackled.

My client’s brand was just fine. It had bright, appealing colors that were associated with youth and dynamism. It had the sort of logo that companies dream of – a universally recognizable symbol that encapsulated the product’s name. It was the sort of logo that a company would be millions to obtain.

The Branding Company Experience

After listening to their investor, my client decided to pursue branding despite my misgivings. They contracted a local branding agency and paid $10,000 for a total rebrand. It’s not all that expensive when you consider how much top branding agencies charge, but when the deliverable was filled with collages of movies from the 90s/2000s, actors, and memes with little relevance to my client’s product or target demographic, you start to wonder if the ‘branding agency’ didn’t just use the money to indulge in their own ‘fun activities’ while couching the entire exercise in buzzwords and jargon in order to build credibility and justify the expense.

Luckily (or perhaps unluckily) for my client, there was a new brand guideline, albeit an incomplete one. Guidelines were provided for the website and a single social media profile, but nothing on video, audio, or print materials. Furthermore, the suggestions flew in the face of everything we know about UX, including advice on ‘turning the imagery black and white’.

Have you ever read articles on how to force yourself to reduce screen time? Many times those articles reference going into your phone’s settings and turning it to black-and-white (also known as grayscale) mode. That’s because we don’t find grayscale images as visually appealing and engaging as full-color imagery. Furthermore, the new logo was unreadable. You couldn’t even recognize what the brand was anymore. 

When the new branding was revealed to the marketing time (myself included) – the reaction was universally negative. Not a single person preferred the new branding. Instead of going back, however, the founders decided to double down. Classic sunk cost fallacy.

The Branding Disaster

Despite misgivings, the founders rammed through the branding changes. The results were disastrous. On social media, nearly every comment was negative. No one liked it. The grayscale images suffered from a 90% reduction in engagement over the next month. Website engagement was down, too. New brand-aligned advertisements performed very poorly. The app did not reach its growth targets.

Of course, all of that could’ve been avoided if the founders would’ve listened to their team’s feedback. But, perhaps most importantly of all, it could’ve been avoided if they had more faith in the power of their existing brand. Newer is not necessarily better and if your existing user feedback shows resonance with your brand then there’s no reason to undergo any major changes. 

Why I Think Branding is Overrated

Most of the clients I work with are not Fortune 500 companies (though I have worked with a few of those) – they’re scrappy startups and enterprises looking for an edge over their competitors. Branding can be one of the edges, but it isn’t the end-all, be-all solution to your business woes.

Every time you spend time or money on an intangible like ‘branding’ you are making a deliberate choice to not take that same time and money and put it towards measurable, performance-based marketing. You are essentially hoping you will have an impact on your bottom line. 

Quantify the amount of time you are spending on branding-related exercises (e.g organic social media posts, blog content, etc). Ask yourself honestly if that time wouldn’t better be served on something with greater immediate impact and measurable results. You’ll find that most of the time the answer is that it’s not worth it to spend time on low-impact activities.

Not to mention that if you’re a commodity product, a low-cost product, or a highly-niche product, then branding likely won’t make a difference in performance regardless of how many branding consultants or agencies you consult. 

Your product is likely not operating at a ‘Coke vs Pepsi’ level where the only difference with a competitor is brand perception. You likely have some other value (feature, price point, etc) that is more compelling to customers. 

In Spanish there’s a saying – customers want something ‘Bueno, Bonito, y Barato’. It directly translates to ‘Good, Pretty, Cheap’ but it really means ‘High-Quality, Beautiful, and Inexpensive’. 

This is what 80% of your customers are looking for. You’d be better served thinking how your brand adequately conveys value and cultivates trust than you would be about how ‘cool’ or ‘trendy’ it is.

My Advice For Branding

A branding document shouldn’t be a holy document. It’s not sacred. It’s meant by human beings to help businesses, not a text handed down from a benevolent God. Therefore, you need to maintain it as an open framework for how your brand exists both online and offline. Be open to experimentation in limited capacities. Evolve the brand and move it forward. This advice should be especially true if you used a branding agency that was not embedded in your team and which had limited knowledge of your industry and product. This is a lesson my aforementioned clients had to learn the hard way. 

If you have developed a good sense of aesthetics, design, and what constitutes ‘usability’ chances are you don’t need a very well-developed brand. You need to achieve what I call the ‘Minimum Viable Brand’

The Minimum Viable Brand

The Minimum Viable Brand looks good and has a clear way of communicating which is unique. It has a voice and personality. It has a font, logo, and color scheme which doesn’t look like trash. It’s forward-thinking while remaining true to the industry that the product or service finds itself in. It is an 80/20 solution to branding. 

Once you’ve achieved your MVB, focus on activities that help you make sales. Period. 

Will your customers care if your brand is highly opinioned and ethical? 80% of them won’t. Focus on messaging that addresses quality, and value to your customer, and cultivates trust. When, and only when, you can get to the point where you can splurge on ‘branding activities’ without it hurting your bottom line then engage in them.