I find it fascinating that decisions that impact the brand are made without anyone even realising they are making a brand decision.

Businesses can invest a considerable amount of time and effort building a brand, only to unknowingly dilute it through various seemingly insignificant and unrelated decisions.

I’ve seen this countless times across multiple industries.

Yet, mention the word ‘brand’, and our minds tend to gravitate towards the obvious visual cues. The logo, a font, some colours. Perhaps messaging or a website.

These things matter, of course. They remain important facets of the expression of your brand. However, some of the decisions that have a significant impact on a brand have very little to do with any of them.

When brand isn’t in the room

A technical company can have a perfectly consistent visual identity and still dilute their brand. For the most consequential brand decisions are the ones where no one thinks to mention the brand at all.

Decisions such as allowing different regions to describe the company differently. Substantially separating product lines to create different websites for each range for fear of one range impacting sales of the other. Retaining multiple identities after acquisition with little guidance or direction.

Each one of those decisions is trying to solve a valid and legitimate commercial problem. Each answering a slightly different question.

Yet each one of those decisions is putting the onus on the customer to understand and associate the identity, message and intended distinction correctly. Asking the market to build recognition for separate things, rather than allowing an additional dimension to leverage the recognition the brand may have already accumulated.

Something that may be perfectly logical internally or operationally, but adds unnecessary friction for the customer.

How many different things are we asking the customer to consider or remember?

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The cumulative effect

Brand is cumulative. It can either compound over time or erode into obscurity.

Recognition isn’t created by one fantastic campaign, one website, or one exhibition. It is an accumulation of touchpoints over time.

The brand is noticed through the subtle interactions your customers have with your business every day. The product, people, language, service, delivery.

Consistency does not mean that everything has to be a bland version of the same design. It is about being recognisable. Memorable.

Marketers may be the stewards of the brand, but it is owned by everyone in a business.

From the salesperson whose behaviour and interactions quietly influence how a customer sees, and ultimately makes a decision about the business. The experience the customer has of your service infrastructure. The decisions made by the leadership team. The documentation that is shared. How the distributor represents you.

But yes, let’s just put the logo on it.

Thinking outside the box

Of course, at times some of the decisions are quite literally about the brand.

When thinking outside the box can be taken a little too literally. In this particular case, the box and colour were removed from a logo – completely. What works well on a laptop screen or document doesn’t work so well in the real world. On a product, or in an exhibition hall surrounded by dozens of competing identities, lighting and displays.

Technically, the exhibition stand was perfectly branded. The logo was exactly where it should be. Unfortunately, you couldn’t really see it.

Even a seemingly minor design alteration needs to be considered in different contexts.

There is a rather intricate and delicate balance between branding as design and branding as recognition. A decision made with only one of these two lenses will inevitably create a consequence for the other.

Sometimes you can dilute a brand not through what you do, but through what you don’t. Through what you stop doing.

Existing equity can create complacency. Giving rise to this sense that continued visibility is unnecessary.

By adamantly believing that ‘everyone knows us’, cancelling all marketing activity and allowing that previously hard-earned recognition to decay while competitors double down and capitalise on the space unintentionally left behind.

Markets change. Buyers change. Before long, ‘everyone knows us’ becomes little more than a fading memory.

One decision at a time

One deviation is unlikely to destroy recognition. One missed event or a period of silence won’t inadvertently encourage people to forget you. One inconsistent experience won’t quietly redefine what customers think of you.

Brands are not built through single interactions. They are built through the accumulation of those interactions. Recognition and awareness are the result of what we consistently and repeatedly promise, deliver, and present.

Micro-decisions made across the business will shape that brand, whether they are labelled as such or not. Individually, they may appear inconsequential. Collectively, they can determine whether what you have spent years building will be strengthened, fractured or slowly eroded.

Perhaps, then, the more useful question we should be asking is not whether something meets the brand or visual guidelines to a T. It’s whether the decisions that are being made around it are reinforcing what we want people to recognise us for.

Asking, what will this decision teach people to recognise, remember or expect?

Yet still, let’s not forget the logo…

Photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash

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