Is your brand working for you or slacking off?! If you don’t know or you’re worried it might not be, here are three key reasons why a lot of brands might not be working as well as they should:
1. Lack of Brand Recognition or Consistency
This lack of recognition and consistency can be caused by many factors. Sometimes it’s a watered down market with too many similar companies in your area. I don’t doubt for a second that construction contractors run into this regularly in any city of any size. There are too many contractors doing similar work, maybe even at similar costs. I noticed that a bunch of these contractors are just having logos created with chatgpt now and as you can guess with a “free” or “cheap” logo, they’ll all end up looking the same soon enough.
The consistency part of this is interesting as well. I’ve seen vehicles have wraps that will have a different font all together from the actual logo. Back where I used to live, I had a made a logo for a local company and the mark stayed the same but they had a completely different font used for the name. To say it lost some of it’s impact, is an understatement. This comes back to guidelines for the creation of the variations of logos. This can take time and ultimately the owner of the business has to recognize that the more consistent the logo and brand can be, the better it will be recognized. It only helps.
2. Failure to Understand the Target Audience
This is a vital piece to all things brand. If your target audience isn’t fine tuned, you are in for a world of hurt. I.e., If you are cookie shop and you are aiming at cake lovers, are you going to sell enough cookies? Probably not. If you sell workout shoes but you aim at long distance runners, you most likely won’t succeed.
It’s also one thing to aim at the right audience but not have the right messaging, and another to understand them. You can always tell the companies that are grasping at straws with their audience. They will ask you to fill out surveys for them for free. Value the time of your customer and/or clients. For them to take your survey, they have to have some form of buy in, if they don’t, they have no reason to fill it out or to even be truthful. If you’re a multi million/billion dollar organization, offer something for feedback, $10+ is better than nothing.
If you don’t stay open to the feedback you receive, you will most likely spin your tires and get stuck. Honest feedback can be painful, but that’s often where there’s weight and opportunity to clarify your company’s goals.
3. Inadequate Market Research and Adaptation
This follows the same concept as the first two reasons. This inadequate research made me think of what is probably rather common in many businesses. You move forward with a concept of something you love but you don’t always see the big picture to see if it’s a good idea or not.
I knew a couple people not long ago that started a restaurant. Which is fine, food is good, and here in Western NY, some might say it’s king. The issue is that they didn’t do their market research. They didn’t know that where they were putting their shop had over 10 other similar restaurants within a mile fighting for the same customers. What they found out quickly was that customers could bounce from shop to shop and just get deals, and if their shop wasn’t the lowest or best deal on one of those nights during the week, they wouldn’t get most of those sales.
Brand loyalty was non-existent. Once you start having to be the best deal while you are trying to still make a quality product, you lose your shirt in the long run. They tried adapting to the market but it left them in a rut they couldn’t recover from.
How do I fix my brand? We get to work!
If you see some of these issues in your own brand, there’s multiple steps you can make to remedy it.
This is where Ambit can help. We would help you do some exhaustive research to find who your ideal client/customer really is and help you see if you have a niche and if you do, how can you leverage that. What customers are your best and help you see if you are failing for specific reasons? Then we’ll help you gameplan a way out.
