Signs that you rushed your branding before launching your business.
- Fiona Hamilton
- Jan 21
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 3
Many businesses often overlook the critical importance of establishing a cohesive brand strategy before launching. This oversight results in discrepancies in their brand personality, visual style and tone of voice, giving rise to confused messaging, lack of loyalty and desperate marketing efforts.
Typical start-up prior to launch
For the majority of start-ups, the initial focus when launching their business revolves around demonstrating proof of concept, creating a business plan that emphasises projections and financials, exploring potential market entry strategies, managing operations and logistics, conducting market research, and analysing competitors. After addressing these critical business challenges, brand identity often becomes a rush job - with many business owners opting for a cheap and professional logo and their favourite colour(s) for the colour palette - white labelling their way to appearing ready and open for business.
The risks of this method include the loss of vital information, meticulously developed through the business plan and market research, through ineffective branding that fails to convey the culture, personality, or motivation of the business. Often, much of the brand-related content is already present in these key business documents. Elements like USPs, a mission statement, brand values, client personas, market research, competitors, and value propositions all play a role in creating a strong and relevant brand identity using the science of brand psychology.
Once these key motivators are briefed to a branding designer, we can begin to use specialist principles to extract any pertinent information that can be translated into a brand identity, and a visual language that communicates and connects with audiences on a much deeper level.
What does a cohesive brand strategy look like in 2025?
A well-defined brand identity is essential for fostering trust and connection with an audience, ultimately driving long-term success. A cohesive brand strategy would begin with a mission that gives the brand it's purpose, a tone of voice that builds trust and loyalty, a unique visual identity that drives brand recognition and a brand story that deeply connects to an audience on a semantic and emotional level.
Just like people, brands should grow, learn and evolve. A strong brand should be able to adapt to social, economic and cultural shifts while understanding and addressing what matters to its customers. A great brand is able to learn from mistakes, remains reliable and trustworthy and is open to visionary ideas for its industry's future. Brands of 2025 should ditch the influencer promotion model and focus on establishing genuine connection with their audiences through authentic purpose-driven storytelling.
Signs that your branding may have been rushed
There are certain indicators that a company rushed the development of their branding, the main one being that the branding fails to effectively convey the brand values, objectives or personality traits, but also includes:
Inconsistent tone of voice
Desperate and inconsistent marketing offers
Lack of cohesive visual identity - varying colours, fonts, and icons communicating different messages all at once
Lack of brand recognition within their market
Confused messaging
Copycatting - duplicating marketing strategies of more successful brands
Absence of onboarding and/or brand culture - resulting in high employee turnover
How to save a rushed brand identity
A brand audit is usually necessary to assess any existing information that is already available for the brand specialist to analyse. They may also want to guide the company through brand personality exercises to validate suitable positioning. This process involves choosing aspirational brands, revising the mission statement to reflect purpose, values, and tone of voice, and transforming these elements into mood boards that visually express some of these concepts in order to determine a style preference for the visual identity.
What about established brands?
Some businesses may already possess a degree of brand recognition, which can lead to resistance when considering changes to their visual identity. In such situations, conducting user-centred research is advisable to determine whether the audience likes and connects with the current visual identity or other brand elements. If the findings are negative or ambiguous, a complete rebrand is possible and necessary. However, if more than half of the user group resonates with the existing logo, it would be more beneficial to refresh the current visual identity to better align with the brand's updated position and mission. Some brands that have done this very successfully would be BBC, Google and Virgin.
The importance of brand guardianship
More than brand management, the crucial role of brand guardian entails being the "custodian of the brand," overseeing external communications that represent the brand identity to ensure visual consistency and message coherence as outlined in the brand bible. Additionally, the brand guardian is responsible for observing market shifts and trends, whether social, economic, or cultural, to continually assess how the brand might need to evolve.
Websites and digital content require the most monitoring, as they are frequently susceptible to confusion, with numerous voices and an overload of offers and messages that can undermine the brand standards established by the rebrand and audit efforts. Where necessary, guidance may be required to realign all stakeholders with the mission, values, and strategy to ensure all communications remain "on-brand".
The brand guardian role can be internal, assigned by the specialist responsible for developing the brand identity after onboarding, or it can continue to be the specialist's responsibility if this option is included in their services. If you are a business wishing to work with a brand expert to rebrand your business or conceptualise your new venture, please get in touch to book an appointment today.
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