Launching a new brand? Revitalizing a heritage brand? Jump starting a brand that’s stalled? Each project offers unique challenges requiring important choices. Despite best intentions, bad decisions sometimes happen to good branding. Avoiding those is what this post is all about.

We’ve teamed up with our friends at Think Brand Studio on companion blog posts to shine a light on some of the most common branding blunders, bad decisions, and managerial missteps we’ve seen sabotage branding projects of every size, and stripe.

Acknowledging these potential pitfalls will help you avoid them. As the saying goes, there are three kinds of people; those you can tell, those you can show, and those who have to pee on the electric fence to find out for themselves. We hope these posts save you the shock of finding out the hard way.

View it as a manual for avoiding mistakes; valuable advice for your brand, and your bottom line. If you’re starting with us, make sure you click over to Think’s blog at the end of our post to see what they have to say. We’ll kick it off with what has to be the most common branding mistake we encounter…

Believing that your visual identity is your brand

Your brand is not your logo, your web site, or your advertising. Those are identifiers, signals. Your brand is a perception; a feeling about your company, products, and services that lives in the hearts, and minds of the public. That perception is created at every touchpoint where consumers connect with your brand.

Perception creates value, but consumers don’t value brands, they value the promise a brand offers. Consistently delivering on your brand promise is the path to success. You do it through the quality of your products, and services while managing the perception with signals such as those listed above – as well as many more. When your brand delivers, you earn trust, form bonds, and increase value.

Delivery is one half of the equation. Your message won’t matter if it’s sent to the wrong audience. Which brings us to the next common branding mistake…

Not knowing your customer

We’re not talking about basic target demography; this is about drilling deeper, understanding what makes those people tick. Doing that means immersing yourself in the customer experience, starting from their perspective, and branding outward to discover how, and where your brand fits into their lives.

Sometimes, it’s about finding simple solutions to what’s been overlooked; figuring out what they need before they know they need it. Often, what’s revolutionary for brands is merely evolutionary for consumers. Remain relevant by evolving with your customers, while never losing sight – and never letting them lose sight – of what makes your brand valuable.

Not being customer-focused usually means you’re too focused on yourself, which inevitably leads to the next common branding mistake…

Believing it’s all about you

It’s been said that people care about brands that care about them. Well, sort of. Truth is people don’t really care about brands; they care about things that interest them, and add value to their lives. The goal of branding is to make your brand one of those things.

Here’s the hard truth; your products and services don’t matter unless consumers decide that your brand matters. You can’t control how they feel, but you can influence them. Branding is influence.

Consumers make emotional decisions about what and where they buy, but they justify those choices with logical explanations. Branding speaks to both the head and the heart to influence the buying decision long before the point of purchase.

People will pay a premium for a rewarding brand experience. Delivering that experience takes top-down passion, and commitment throughout your entire organization. Compartmentalizing your branding leads to another common branding mistake…

Leaving it to your marketing team

Branding is a management strategy too often mistaken for a marketing tactic. Get this straight; marketing is a department; branding is a culture. It’s too complex, and too important to be delegated to a single department.

Organizations often operate in silos. Marketing, finance, sales, and the C-suite are prone to define success differently. Misalignment costs money. Branding that is planned, and purposeful provides clarity of message, and consensus of strategy that aligns your enterprise, and moves your team forward with focus.

Being brand-driven gives you an unfair advantage over your competition. On the other hand, discontinuity could cause you to commit another common branding mistake…

Bolting it on

Branding must be built-in from the beginning, not bolted-on as an afterthought. The most successful companies in the world make it a starting point for every aspect of their operations. Yet astonishingly, some organizations still view branding as superfluous, an add-on if budgets allow.

You don’t operate a business; you manage a brand. That brand is your most valuable business asset; your competitive advantage; your secret weapon, and your catalyst for reaching, and retaining customers. “Good enough” isn’t. If your superior product suffers from inferior branding your competition will beat you – every time.

No amount of branding will help your organization if it’s mired in a management culture of mediocrity & denial. Saddled with that mindset, you may find yourself making yet another common branding mistake…

Collaborating with the wrong partners

You wouldn’t hire a proctologist to perform your heart surgery. Branding is an equally distinct discipline requiring planning, preparation, and razor-sharp execution. This isn’t amateur hour. There are two kinds of people you can work with to build your brand: craftsmen or tools.

Want to pay twice as much for half the results? Hire a coach, or consultant who will tell you what to do, then leave you to do it on your own. Think you can build a brand by clamoring for temporary attention? Hire an ad agency, or a marketing firm. Just want the cheapest solution? Crowdsource your project, cross your fingers, and hope there’s some wheat among the chaff you get back (good luck with that).

Hire tools and you’re bound to get hammered, and screwed. If you want to construct a sound, strategic foundation, then build upon it with concept-driven, creative executions to shape a lasting brand that will weather changes in economic conditions, consumer tastes, emerging technologies, and anything else the marketplace may throw at it then collaborate with craftsmen.

Quality professionals don’t come cheap, though, so you could end up committing another common branding mistake…

Cutting corners

Branding is a capital investment, not an operational expense. Cutting corners may save you a little in the beginning, but it will surely cost you a lot in the end. Don’t expect the return if you’re not willing to make the investment.

Quality counts. Benjamin Franklin forewarned, “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.” If you don’t take your brand seriously, neither will consumers, investors, or anyone else. People recognize cheap, and they don’t forget.

Human consciousness experiences the present for only one and a half seconds; everything else is a memory. Branding shapes the perception that forms memories. Truth is that cheap branding can be as memorable as quality branding. You have to decide how you want your brand to be remembered.

Conclusion

Most mistakes can be rectified – with enough time and money. Better to brand with care. The road to branding success is riddled with the wrecks of those who thought they were too smart to have to heed the warning signs. Don’t find out the hard way the pain of peeing on the electric fence.

Now, click over to Think Brand Studio’s blog to check out their companion piece to our post…

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According to rock n’ roll lore, Van Halen’s 1982 touring contract rider required the band be provided with M&M’s backstage at every show – absolutely no brown ones – or they would not perform. Turns out it’s true; but is it merely rock star narcissism? Hardly. The real reason is far more compelling – as is the lesson that it teaches about management, and attention to detail.

In case you’re wondering, a rider is a portion of a contract in which performers list prerequisites necessary for their performance. Van Halen’s fabled document outlined exhaustive instructions for their technically complex production, from lighting amperage to staging weight, ticketing to security.

Among quirkier requirements, promoters were to provide the band with “herring in sour cream,” an impressive assortment of liquor, and beer, and “One (1) large tube KY Jelly.”

Buried somewhere in the middle of it all was the colorful candy caveat; “M&Ms (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES) There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” While that infamous demand was long decried as outrageous rock star conceit, singer David Lee Roth eventually clarified in his memoir a more practical purpose behind the provision.

Roth explained that he devised the M&M clause to signal whether or not promoters had actually read the imposing, 53-page document detailing the elaborate concert logistics. If brown M&M’s were found on the catering table the band could surmise that important technical details might have been missed during preparations for their performance.

Lawyers call it putting a Trojan horse in the contract. In poker parlance it’s a “tell”. Roth referred to it as his canary in a coal mine. Here’s the story dished-up directly by Diamond Dave himself, as only he can tell it, right before your naked, steaming eyeballs:

Brown M&Ms from Van Halen on Vimeo.

They say not to sweat the small stuff, and that it’s all small stuff. Perhaps, but the devil is in the details, and not reading the fine print could make your life hell. Coca-Cola found that out the hard way with a rather embarrassing typo on nearly 2 million Olympic commemorative 12-pack cartons.

Small type under the copyright information that should have said, “The red disk icon and contour bottle are trademarks of the Coca-Cola Co.,” took on a whole new meaning when someone errantly replaced the “s” in “disk” with a “c”. Forget spell-check, only human eyes could have caught that one – but none did, until it was too late.

Seems as though attention to detail was also in short supply at shoemaker, Reebok, when they put their foot in it by dubbing a women’s running shoe the Incubus. The problem? An incubus is a mythical demon said to descend upon women, raping them in their sleep. Oops.

Reebok in-house marketers came up with the name (I’ll say it again; branding is far too important to leave to the marketing department). The legal team even did patent research, yet astonishingly it seems nobody knew what the word meant, or bothered to look it up in the dictionary.

Incubus didn’t actually appear on the 53,000 pairs of $60 sneakers shipped to U.S. retailers, only on their packaging. The footwear sold for a year with nary a complaint until ABC news noted the naming gaffe in a feature story prompting Reebok to recall 18,000 unsold units – and leaving them with their rubber-heeled foot in their mouth.

You can’t manage every detail, but you can set up systems that help you monitor operations to avoid disaster. Do what Roth did; create your own canary in a coal mine. Pay attention to details, read the fine print, build in fail-safes to make sure you’re always performing on a solid foundation.

Dave wasn’t a diva he was a detail-driven professional; the consummate artist, committed to excellence; a master of manipulation with a clever tactician’s mind for managing myriad moving parts. Who knew that Diamond Dave had so much in common with Steve Jobs? Who knew that rock n’ roll’s hedonist-hero in ass-less, leather pants who penned the lyric, “All I want to give you woman… is the best part of a man,” could teach us so much about operational genius?

As Dave would say, “Class diissss–missed.”

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Our methods of communication say a lot about us, and how we feel about the audience we’re communicating with. Email is mundane, perfunctory. Receiving hand delivered correspondence can be a delight, yet writing letters has become something of the past.

Culturally, we’ve moved onto digital forms of communication. Mail is seen as “junk.” Expensive. Sluggish. Business moves fast. Speed is essential.

Slow down. Taking the time to put your thoughts on paper can enhance the impact, and results, of your communications. The fact that you could dash off an email, yet choose to write then post (as in mail, not upload) a note may end up saying much more than the message itself.

Technology is wonderful; I’m speaking to you through a blog after all. But, have you ever received an e-card – no matter how beautifully designed – and not thought to yourself, “They couldn’t send a ‘real’ card?” Technology doesn’t do your brand any favors when it diminishes the human connection.

Emails, tweets and texts are temporary, and disposable; easy to overlook, to flatly ignore. Paper has weight, and heft. Paper has a voice. The printed page touches, and can be touched in ways bits and bytes on a screen cannot.

Apple takes great care in crafting what they call the “unboxing” experience of their products. Every detail of the packaging, and process meticulously designed to resonate with the consumer; reminding you that you are in receipt of something truly special – that you are truly special. Such brand rituals create important signals, and connections.

Receiving a beautifully designed envelope made from quality paper; opening it, removing, and unfolding the contents to reveal the message can be a powerful brand ritual of its own – full of sights, scents, sounds, and tactile sensations that become indelible brand signals forming personal connections.

Make personal connections whenever you can. Sometimes, it’s the simple things that have the greatest impact. Whether handwritten or printed, crafting your correspondence with care on stationery or corporate letterhead lends your words weight – literally.

Sending your message in an easily disposable digital format marks that message as disposable. In business, if you’re message is seen as disposable your brand is going to be seen as disposable.

Communications from your brand should be coveted. An email from Steve Jobs would have been exciting to receive. Perhaps even printed out and placed in a file for safekeeping. A letter from Steve Jobs, on Apple stationery, would have been archival framed and hung on the wall.

Compendiums of contemporary letterhead design are widely available. We thought it would be fun to take a look at some examples of personal stationery and letterhead that are perhaps a bit more historic. What’s striking is how powerful these pages are, even without any content. Not because of their design, but because of the tangible, personal connection they each offer to their respective namesakes.

Here are a few great resources for getting in touch with paper:

Crane & Co.

French Paper Co.

O-K Paper

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Succeeding in business requires risk. Despite bromides about failure not being an option, truth is that it’s a very real possibility. Acknowledging that and preparing for the possibility of failure isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s the sign of a professional.

Professionals understand that failure is an option because professionals understand risk. As the military adage goes, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Likewise, the best-laid business plan rarely survives contact with the marketplace (apologies to Helmuth von Moltke). Circumstances change. Things can go wrong. “Everybody has a plan ’til they get punched in the face,” ~ Mike Tyson. Brands must be nimble. Preparation and the right response can be the difference between disappointment or disaster.

Failure can be a simple stumble or a full-on face plant, a private setback or a public catastrophe, but it doesn’t have to mean defeat. New Coke was a colossal, fizzy failure, yet Coca-Cola Classic remains the world’s best selling soft drink. Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple only to return a decade later to turn failure into fortune.

Amid the spectacle of failure a brand must get out in front of the story, defining the situation before somebody else does. It starts at the top; leadership must make its presence felt. Succinctly explain what happened, what’s next, and what impact it all will have on consumers. Don’t side step. Owning the story means owning up to the failure.

Sidestepping was Japanese automaker Toyota’s reaction in early 2010 when brakes that didn’t work and accelerators that worked on their own resulted in numerous accidents and tragic deaths. By initially denying any design defects and minimizing the issues as mere software glitches Toyota’s response appeared less than forthcoming. Failure to accept responsibility in the face of irrefutable facts created a public-relations nightmare.

Toyota eventually recalled the affected vehicles and President Akio Toyoda apologized to customers for the “inconvenience” – while also suggesting that poor driving was partially to blame. It was far from a satisfying mea culpa. Woeful crisis management in the face of failure cost the company billions, plus incalculable damage to the brand’s reputation of quality, reliability and integrity.

Perhaps the shame and embarrassment of owning up to failure in a culture committed to quality played a part in Toyota’s lackadaisical response. Notwithstanding cultural mores, another Japanese automaker reacted very differently when they, too, hit a bump in the road.

By all accounts, the 2012 Honda Civic is a failure. So bad have been the reviews and sales that Honda CEO Takanobu Ito publicly accepted full responsibility for the perennial best seller’s poor performance. Honda has since taken the unprecedented step of moving up the nameplate’s mid-cycle retooling by one year to 2013 in order to correct the car’s failings. Some brands are able to correct course even more quickly in the face of failure.

Last year, Netflix made the destined-to-fail decision to split their brand into two web sites; one, still called Netflix, dedicated to streaming content, and another called Qwikster which would assume the mail-based DVD rental service that originated with Netflix. Two websites. Two accounts. Two passwords. It was too much. Customers were nonplussed… and pissed off.

After three weeks of vitriolic backlash, canceled memberships and sharply declining share prices CEO Reed Hastings announced Qwikster would be quashed and Netflix would return to business as usual:

“It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs. This means no change: one website, one account, one password… in other words, no Qwikster.”

The road to success is littered with more failures than we can mention here. Sometimes, bad business decisions happen to good brands. Other times, plans are disrupted by events beyond your control. Whatever the cause, you can control your response. Be prepared to correct course quickly. Recovery is possible, but you can’t always fix failure by correcting a misstep. Preparing for failure means also preparing for the worst.

Presidential speechwriter William Safire considered a worst case scenario in July, 1969, while the world waited anxiously for Apollo 11 to land safely on the Moon. Failure was a very real, present possibility. In a solemn memo to White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman Safire crafted a contingency plan in the form of a speech to be delivered by President Nixon in the event astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became stranded on the lunar surface:

To: H. R. Haldeman
From: Bill Safire

July 18, 1969.

IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

PRIOR TO THE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT:

The President should telephone each of the widows-to-be.

AFTER THE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT, AT THE POINT WHEN NASA ENDS COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE MEN:

A clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to “the deepest of the deep,” concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.

Thankfully, those plans never needed to be executed. However, some 17 years later, Ronald Reagan would deliver his own message to mollify a shocked nation with a moment of pure presidential perfection in the wake of the space shuttle Challenger disaster.

As President Reagan asserted in that speech, “The future is not for the faint-hearted.” Success in business rarely comes from playing it safe. Shoot for the moon. Set massive and unreasonable goals that freak you out a little.

Failure is always an option, but brands that don’t take a chance don’t stand a chance. Don’t fear failure. Respect risk. Fearing failure and being prepared to respond should failure occur are very different things. Preparation separates professionals from pretenders.

Happy New Year.

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Johannes Kepler noted, “Nature loves simplicity…” Water does indeed flow down the path of least resistance. Human beings are 98% water, so perhaps it stands to reason that we, too, would naturally seek simplicity.

We live in a seemingly complex, often confusing world. Simplicity offers order, understanding and a sense of control. Design – across it’s many disciplines – is the science of simplification.

Adolf Loos famously espoused, “Ornament is a crime.” Mies van der Rohe proclaimed, “Less is more.” Buckminster Fuller favored, “Doing more with less,” while Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Good Design dictate, “Less is better”. Simplicity for simplicity’s sake isn’t the goal. Without design, less would just be less. Minimalism is not merely visual veneer.

Da Vinci declared, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Designing simplicity requires probing the core of complexity; doing away with the superfluous and inefficient; clarifying, organizing, optimizing; pruning the subject to its purest form to function effortlessly and beautifully, while drawing forth meaning, metaphor and character.

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” ~ Hans Hofmann.

Minimalism is simple, that’s why it’s so hard. An awful lot of complex thinking goes into making something simple. Simple should not be mistaken for simplistic.

Consider this simple, six word story by Ernest Hemmingway: “For sale. Children’s shoes. Never worn.” That’s the story in its entirety, but it’s clearly not the whole story. Those six simple words send the imagination careening. So, too, does a simple set of six 2×4 LEGO bricks which can be configured into 915,103,765 unique combinations.

Flights of imaginative fancy take wing with the simplest of beginnings. Give a child a cardboard box to play in and watch what happens. Give a musician a simple three-chord progression and you could end up with anything from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony to Richie Valens’ La Bamba to John Coltrane’s Lazy Bird to the Ramone’s Blitzkrieg Bop.

Things are rarely as complicated as they seem. Rubik’s Cube can always be solved within 25 turns, no matter how scrambled. The most prodigious prestidigitation is achieved with simple, subtle slight-of-hand. We often miss the obvious because we’re confused into over-thinking. Good design cuts through confusion, which is one reason why good design is good business.

Design Simplicity Into Your Brand

Life is complicated enough, consumers don’t need poorly designed products and services making it more difficult. Lexus’ GPS – a product whose purpose is to make life easier – is notoriously convoluted, yet Toyota engineers refuse to simplify the design because they maintain users are operating it incompetently.

Conversely, simply type in a search term on Google and in a fraction of a second their algorithms solve an equation of more than 500 million variables to rank more than 8 billion web pages. For the end user, Toyota complicates a simple task while Google simplifies one of monumental complexity.

Charles Mingus observed, “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”

Simplicity sells. With the launch of the first iPod Apple conveniently put “1000 songs in your pocket”, provided an elegant device on which to play them, and later, with the iTunes Store, an effortless system with which to preview and purchase them – each element, from product to process, meticulously designed for simplicity. As of October 2011, 300 million iPods have been sold worldwide with more than 10 billion songs downloaded from the iTunes Store.

Does your brand simplify or complicate? Does it consistently deliver on the promise that it makes? What needs do your products and services satisfy? How well do they work? How simple is it for consumers to get support when they don’t? How convenient is the customer experience within your retail space; the social media space; on the phone; on your web site?

Give consumers simplicity. Think in terms of what problems you solve rather than what features you offer. Simplify your message and the customer experience by designing from their perspective outward. Connect your solutions to their needs. Add excellence to the equation with beauty. Provide simplicity and people will naturally flow toward your brand.

“Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity.” ~ Plato

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