In our previous post, we discussed the importance of measuring the effectiveness of your branding, marketing, and advertising initiatives in a both an accurate and reasonable manner. A successful business is almost always an introspective one. It can be important to understand that changing and adapting to a shifting marketplace, serving an uncertain target market, and being flexible enough to seize new and exciting opportunities as they arise all require that a business have a firm grasp on the effectiveness of their branding, marketing, and advertising. With this in place they need to be ready, willing and able to make changes when necessary.
Strike A Balance
Only by establishing procedures for testing and evaluating those initiatives can a business be ready and able to make those changes in a sound, rational, and effective manner. However, it’s also important to have a firm grasp of the identity of your business and to keep its branding and identity consistent, stable, and trustworthy in the eyes of your customers and target market. How can you balance the need to adapt and shift the focus of your branding, marketing, and advertising to be as effective as possible while at the same time maintaining a core identity and set of values? It’s all about striking a balance between short-, mid- and long-term goals and not being too reactive to short-term trends.
The Importance of Core Branding and Identity
Why is it important to maintain a set of core brand principles and maintain a consistent brand identity for your business? It’s all about building trust and brand awareness among your clients and customers. Businesses that are prone to changing their existing brand identity or periodically scrapping their brand in favor of one that may appear to be more trendy, or temporarily popular among their customers. In other situations, a business may choose to deviate from their brand identity in order to implement a radically new marketing or advertising campaign that they believe will provide a boost to short-term sales. While both of these plans may seem like good ideas at first if your current branding, marketing, or advertising initiatives are under performing, they can do long-term damage to your brand identity, and possibly your business as a whole.
The Trick? Establish A Core Brand Identity And Long-Term Goals
Your business should strive to strike a balance between maintaining a core brand identity and branding elements, plus have the flexibility necessary to revise marketing and advertising initiatives that are under performing. In order to do this, your business must establish a bedrock set of principles that both establish the core identity of your business and provide a guide for developing marketing and advertising campaigns. Rebranding is an option, but it should be used sparingly and only when your current branding has been proven to be outdated and/or ineffective as a whole, as there are significant drawbacks to doing so. If you choose to rebrand or disregard the core tenets of your brand when developing marketing and advertising campaigns, you diminish the power of your brand and the awareness you’ve developed in the marketplace while giving the public an unfocused impression of your brand.
Brand Stability
In addition to retaining your core brand and brand identity, it’s also important to develop long-term goals based on the core tenets of your brand. For instance, if you intend for your business and brand to represent stability, reliability, and trustworthiness to your customers and target market, you may have to forgo aggressive short-term goals for your marketing and advertising campaigns, as being too aggressive in the short-term can do long-term damage to your brand identity. Instead, craft a set of metrics that measures short-term results against your long-term goals while shifting more of your focus to measuring brand awareness and effectiveness among your customers and target market.