5 common branding mistakes to avoid making with your small business

Every business – even yours – has a brand.

One common misconception is that your brand is your logo. Your logo is a single visual representation of your brand, but it is not your brand.

Your brand represents everything you are and aspire to be as a business. It is the culmination of many things, including the type of language you use in your communications, your website, your signage, your packaging, your website, your presence on social media, and even the way you and your staff answer the phone.

A brand makes promises to customers. To build your brand, it’s important that you live up to those promises. If you fail to do this, you will damage your brand.

The role of digital media in modern branding

In today’s digital age, your online presence plays a crucial role in shaping your brand. Whether it’s your social media activity, customer reviews, or the design of your website, these elements now directly influence how your brand is perceived.

Social media allows for authentic customer engagement, but it also poses risks—negative reviews and other interactions can quickly tarnish your reputation. Managing your brand across these platforms is important for maintaining trust.

Your brand is valuable, so nurture it

A well-regarded brand will help to attract customers to your business. Over time, a strong brand can become one of a business’s most valuable assets, so it’s worth investing a little time and effort in developing yours.

Think of how Apple has built immense trust in the technology space with its groundbreaking – and massively popular – products like the iPhone and MacBook.

This trust has allowed Apple to expand into other sectors, such as wearables with the Apple Watch, and financial services with Apple Pay. The seamless integration between its products and services has built massive customer loyalty across categories.

By maintaining a consistent brand identity, Apple has successfully leveraged trust from one product category to another, much like Virgin’s expansion into different industries.

With your brand being such a valuable tool you need to look after it, nurture it, and ensure that you never do anything to undermine it.

It’s easy to cause brand damage that can take years to repair. This is especially true in these days of widespread social media use. Within hours, a company can see a single act of poor customer service ‘go viral,’ tarnishing the brand and hurting the business.

Personal branding and thought leadership

Another rising trend over the past few years is personal branding.

Business leaders who establish themselves as thought leaders or influencers in their industry strengthen their own reputation and boost the company’s brand.

Aligning a founder’s personal values with the brand creates authenticity that resonates with audiences and can foster trust.

You don’t need to be Elon Musk to promote a personal brand – it can apply to anyone from a one-man band consultancy firm to an industry mogul.

5 common branding mistakes to avoid

Your brand is an important tool in helping to attract new customers to your business, so you want to do everything you can to develop and build a trusted brand.

With such high stakes, here are 5 common branding mistakes you need to avoid making with your small business:

1. Branding on price, service or quality

The people who run pound shops have a problem. Apart from inflation damaging their proposition, the only reason they are giving people to pick their business is that they are cheaper than their competitors. This is a dangerous message.

If your customers have picked you only because you are cheaper than the competition, then when they are ready to buy again in six months’ time, they will happily switch to any competitor that is now beating you on price. The internet makes this easy for them.

You have a similar problem if your brand is built around having the best quality or service. Does any business admit to having the worst service or quality? Of course not.

Yet when all businesses claim to have the best service and quality, it won’t work as a differentiator for any of them.

The key is to build a brand that relies on something your competitors don’t have, such as Gymshark and its founder, Ben Francis.

Gymshark isn’t just known for its fitness apparel; the brand’s success is tied to Francis’s personal journey from starting up in his garage to building a global fitness brand.

2. Not living up to your brand message

There’s no point in claiming to be the most innovative business in your field if you don’t spend the most on research and development and launch the best new products.

Customers expect consistency between what you say and how you act. If the two do not match, they will quickly discover this, and you will lose their trust in a way that can never be regained.

Trust buys a lot of business and needs to be protected. Make sure your business lives up to its promises.

3. Changing your message too often

You also need consistency with your brand message. It’s OK for a new business to experiment with a few messages to find the one that sticks.

But once you have developed a reputation for, say, innovation, you can’t switch to developing a reputation for “friendliness” without damaging the relationship you already have with your customers.

If they pick you for innovation and you suddenly declare innovation to be unimportant, that will have an impact on customer retention and future sales. A consistent message delivered badly is often better than brilliant delivery of several inconsistent messages.

4. Embracing innovation to stand out

When starting your business, it is very tempting to look at who else is in the marketplace and emulate them. In a way, it is the logical thing to do.

After all, if one company succeeds in that way, then surely you will. Sadly, you are unlikely to. You are telling the marketplace that you are a “me too” – a business that gets its ideas from others and doesn’t stand for anything on its own.

Me too businesses tend to survive only by competing on price… and you now know what a risky game that is.

Rather than mimicking competitors, think about how you can differentiate your brand through innovation.

Whether it’s offering a unique customer experience, using cutting-edge technology, or creatively addressing customer pain points, innovation is critical to carving out a distinct brand identity that competitors can’t easily replicate.

5. Trying to be all things to all people

A successful brand will repel as many people as it attracts. In fact, the less appealing your brand is to people outside of your target market, the more it is likely to appeal to those within.

If you try to appeal to everyone with your brand, you risk diluting your message and failing to appeal to your core customers.