“I run a boutique brand consulting agency in Arlington, Va.”
Eyes glaze over. Confusion is evident. What the heck is ‘brand? people ask.
I recently saw a meme that sums up what a brand is.
I would modify this, though:
Marketing is like flirting.
Sales is like asking someone on a date.
Branding is the reason they say yes.
Your brand is not:
- Your logo.
- Your colors.
- Your fonts.
- Your tagline
- Your messaging
- Your website.
Those are brand elements and assets. As are your photos, your products, your vibe, your values, your people, your goals, and your storefront.
Your brand is anything and everything that your audience remembers about you. Brand is a feeling, emotion, aesthetic, memory, or correlation. Your brand is your reputation.
Brand is the lasting imprint that your business makes in the world.
Branding – intentionally creating inputs so that you influence you brand – is a powerful opportunity that can too often be overlooked by business owners. But you need to use these powers for good – and not unintentionally create issues for your business.
The Bad News About Brand
You can control your brand elements, including logo, colors, fonts, and your brand voice and intentions. But you can’t control how your audience receives them.
The Good News About Brand
Your brand is a living being. If you pay attention, you can keep tabs on how your brand shows up in the marketplace and adjust those elements if you are not thrilled with how your audience perceives your brand.
Why Branding Matters in 2025
Here’s a cliche you are probably sick of: now more than ever (seriously?!), businesses need to stand out because marketing is noisy, competitive, and expensive, and consumers are sick of being sold to. So investing more ad spend to reach more people with your ad campaign, direct mail campaign, or social media content might get you eyeballs, but without intentional, strategic planning, your brand can be easily forgotten, ignored, overlooked, or, worse, irrelevant.
Globalization and the Impact on Brand
When the entire world can be your target audience and a source of endless competitors – your brand has to be different. You have to be intentionally relatable to your target audience.
We have all heard the saying, “You can’t be all things to all people” I’ve had many conversations with clients who say, “Why not?” If you are all things to all people – you are a commodity. And none of the clients are traded on the commodities market. Every entrepreneur I talk to has a special spark that has propelled them into starting a business. Every established company that is expanding or growing has people driving the success. They can’t be all things to all people, and they don’t try.
Artificial Intelligence and Your Brand
2025 is shaping up to be the year of full embrace of AI. But what does that mean for your brand? With more and more content getting created by AI tools, more and more content is looking and sounding alike. All the more pressure on you to create a strong brand that can uniquely rise above all that noise and volume of content that everyone else is generating.
Changing Social Media Landscape
You control a lot of where your brand shows up. From ad buying to social media accounts, your decisions and actions control most of where your brand intentionally shows up. In a changing social media landscape with new platforms and changes to legacy platforms, it is crucial always to assess if where you show up aligns with your brand. What might have been a good fit in 2024 may no longer be where you want your brand to appear in 2025.
Common Brand Mistakes to Avoid
We live in a world where agile development is all the buzz. Iterate. Fail forward. Take risks. Move fast. True – all of it true. In business, you can easily get stuck in overplanning, overthinking, and analysis paralysis regarding your brand. The trick (there’s NEVER a trick, I’m lying to you) is to strike a balance between planning, development, deployment, and iteration. There is no “perfect timeline” for brand work, but an intentional plan should be around it all.
Here are the top mistakes we see when it comes to building an awesome brand:
1. Being too timid to invest in your identity and associated brand assets
I’m not saying that your best friend’s college son’s girlfriend’s roommate is not a talented artist. But do you want to save a few thousand dollars on your brand identity and assets when they are the foundation of your entire business? Think of the long-term cost of wanting (or needing) to redo those assets later when you realize you rushed to market with immature branding.
Buying your logo on a freelancing website (often using talent from overseas) can be good. It can also be a nightmare. We worked with one client who sourced a new brand logo this way and ended up with hundreds of design iterations and no structure for moving ahead.
When we work with a new or established business or organization, we invest a good amount of time before we even start drawing to understand the brand essence, goals, and positioning, and we do market research to ensure that our client is going to get a unique design that serves them and their goals.
It can feel scary to start a business. You are spending money everywhere, and it makes sense to be frugal on start-up costs where possible. But cutting corners when building your brand is not a recipe for long-term success. Your brand is essential to your business and demands an appropriate investment in time and resources to get it right at the start. Another hiccup with the cheap approach is that you end up with logo files from one person, graphics created by someone else, no brand color guide, and a lot of confusion. We’ve had clients come to us with a .jpg file only of a logo and no idea how to contact their freelancer even to get a complete set of design files.
Bottom line: Take time to identify and hire a brand agency or an established local designer that you can trust with the look and feel of your business.
2. Not taking enough time to get your name and messaging right
I had a conversation recently with a client who was so excited to go to market with their new business and didn’t want to sit on their hands to do the brand work before getting paying clients. It makes sense, and there is a school of thought that leans into soft launching a business and iterating based on success. The trick (haha, you falling for that this time?) is managing how and where you soft launch so you don’t create confusion in the overall marketplace.
You only get one opportunity to make a first impression. Though with branding, it takes upwards of thirty impressions before people even remember you, but still my point is the same: your goal with marketing is to create that lasting brand impression. If you soft launch TOO LOUDLY, you start to build those associations, and then if/when you pivot, evolve, or start over, you have wasted money and time marketing the wrong thing. Worse, you may have turned off people with ineffective or offputting marketing, and then you will have to work harder to get them to give you another look when you make improvements.
Bottom line: Test messaging quietly in trusted circles. Don’t buy an expensive public ad only to put out bad messaging. Take the time to get your words and positioning close – so that even if you continue to improve (and you should!) you aren’t creating confusion in the market.
3. Inconsistent everything across your marketing assets
Your website has stock photos. Your social media profile has a picture of you. Your collateral has your logo and fonts, but those don’t appear anywhere else. Inconsistent marketing assets are a huge red flag. They scream: immature business. Unprofessional business. Marketing is being managed by interns. (For the record, I love interns. You should love interns, too. But don’t hand them the responsibility of managing your brand, please.)
To create that lasting brand impression you want, you need uniformity. You also need to be consistent. And redundant. That means keeping the same look, feel, and message consistent over and over and over again. In practice, that means you stick with the same photo types, the same fonts, the same messaging, and the same tone and vibe. When someone sees your font, colors, and photo type – you want them to think of you!
Of course, some will say, but what about on social? Yes, you undoubtedly have to be more serious on LinkedIn relative to TikTok. But you should still be the same brand. I don’t know about you, but I dress up for some events and not others. I am fundamentally the same person, right? That’s the point with your brand. You can dress it up or down based on the platform or space, but you should always be the same at the heart of your brand.
Bottom line: Show up as the same brand everywhere you are marketing.
Conclusion
If you’ve read this far, hopefully you won’t be scrunching up your face anymore about What is Brand? And you understand why branding is so important, and you are equipped to avoid the most common brand mistakes. However, the reality is that building a well-known brand is only part of the process. Brands require nurturing. They mature (like people!) They evolve, too (like people!) We’ve helped many, many established brands rebrand – what?! Yes, even if you’ve done it all “right” and invested in building a solid brand, businesses often find that they have evolved enough that their current assets are no longer serving their brand. Brands deserve an occasional freshening up, if not a wholesale redo, from time to time. There is no timeline – Arlington Strategy rebranded after ten years in business with a refreshed look and feel and new messaging. But then we launched yet another new website (a major brand element) just a couple of years later. Sometimes, these brand investments are because we want to influence our brand (how we are remembered in the marketplace), and sometimes, it’s because we’ve determined that how we are perceived is not part of our current assets. Iterating is not always in response to trying to “fix a problem” – it could be about aligning to the current state.