There are a whole host of reasons why your brand marketing might not be producing the results you’re looking for. But you’re short on time, so let’s just take a look at the top 3.

Your Brand Yields To Commercial Imperatives

You’ve probably experienced this as a consumer. You like a product, you engage with a brand. You like how they act. You’re a fan. Then, all of a sudden, they change something you really liked about them. Maybe they swap stories for hard sell. Or start sending marketing emails when they previously said they don’t believe in them. Or a story breaks about them doing something in complete contravention of their attitude to sustainability.

Brands frequently fall victim to internal pressure stemming from commercial imperatives. “I know we said we wouldn’t do that, but we need the brand to be flexible in this instance. It’s for the good of the company.”

The issue is, that it’s not actually in the best interests of the company even though it might feel like it is at the time. Making compromises around your brand values and allowing for lapses in your adherence to what you believe in for short term gain cause long term and often irreversible damage to the business.

Your Brand Marketing Has Multiple Personality Disorder

When brands grow, the teams that support them grow too. As your sales and marketing effort becomes larger, more decentralised and more specialised, multiple voices start to emerge, telling different stories, with different agendas.

The problem is, your customer doesn’t necessarily grow in the same way. For B2B, you might see some shift in customer type or decision making unit. For B2C, you might move into different countries. But that doesn’t mean your customer wants to hear a confused susurration of different voices and stories from the one brand.

Your Brand Doesn’t Pull It’s Weight

Even the best brand marketing won’t get any traction if the brand being promoted lacks sufficient substance to achieve its objectives. This sounds obvious, but many businesses don’t ever take a very close and critical look at their brands once they are created and launched.

Often, they are a hangover from the days of being a smaller SME, created cheaply and without much thought as to the true nature of the brand, rather focusing on logos and colour schemes. Where there’s no compelling brand story, brand marketing will struggle. This isn’t the end of the world and is easier to fix than you might imagine.

Before you embark on expensive and time consuming rebranding, you need to spend time figuring out which bit of your company’s DNA makes it special and unique and then how you can consistently bring that to life for prospective customers. More often than not, these projects don’t involve or certainly don’t centre on the visual elements of your brand’s presentation but rather changing the nature of the stories you tell.

If you’d like to chat about any of these issues or others as yet unidentified that might be affecting your brand marketing success, you know where to find us.