The average human attention span is 8.25 second and that of a goldfish is 9 second. It is a weird but highly fast-paced world we are living in. Trends change by the hour and there is a new business launched about every 3 seconds, that means more than 100 million new businesses are launched every year! (According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor) However, only about half of the new businesses survive for more than five years.
So, if you are not an industry disruptor, you are just a corpse among millions who just couldn’t hack it. And the reason is quite simple- it always tracks down to branding. Branding can sell an average product. Hack it can sell the same product that has been in an industry for years, at a scale that seemed unimaginable before.
For every blockbuster, there is a Netflix in the making.
With its unforgettable and impressionable branding game, a business can easily make or break the sale. Branding is undoubtedly a company’s best friend. But it’s hard to make such a loyal friend.
Even businesses with turnover in billions struggle to keep their branding relevant, allocating millions to make sure their customers never forget about their brand.
Branding is Science. It's research and data backed, with thorough understanding of psychology. It’s never just a post, it’s a hundred tiny decisions with several drafts that never see the light. So, if you still believe that an internal marketing team can handle what experts have been managing with years of experience with success and equal failures, that’s one of the first reasons many brands fail.
In today’s context, your brand needs to differentiate itself, it NEEDS to have a positioning that sets it clear in your TA that you are superior and how.
Make the best product, do exhaustive branding and you are here to stay. But most brands don’t, they miss out on simple points, and we are here to help you avoid just that.
Branding is a promise. But if your products fail to deliver what the brand promises to its customers, it’s a recipe for brand failure. There shall not be any such gaps. Keep updating the product according to the customer requirements, technology advancement and market opportunities.
BMW's tagline, "The Ultimate Driving Machine," is more than just a slogan; it's a promise that is delivered in every vehicle they manufacture.
A loyal customer will always remember you and for that you need to maintain a strong brand recall value.
Your brand needs to-
Capturing customers with a memorable brand personality
Creating a compelling brand story
Developing an eye-catching logo or branding style
Maintaining a positive brand reputation
Stay relevant and keep up with trends in your industry.
When a brand becomes forgettable or loses its distinctive identity, customers may easily shift to other brands. A good design can make or break the brand.
Whenever you see a Yellow “M”, it is recognized as McDonald's as the logo helps in its brand recall.
When a company gets involved in aggressive expansion into various product categories without adequate resources and market understanding, it can lead to brand failure. In such cases, the brand’s architecture becomes so convoluted and overcomplicated that the hierarchy no longer makes sense.
Apple's brand architecture makes it look so easy, where we have the master brand sitting at the top. All sub-brands below benefit from the visibility of the Apple master brand, its logo and identity.
There is such a thing as overmarketing. And it’s NOT good for your brand. Excessive marketing not only makes a brand appear commonplace, but it also diminishes its uniqueness, making its customer lose interest.
Spamming your TA with newsletters and updates that aren’t of value to them causes much harm than good.
Posting the same content on different channels is a common mistake business makes. You need to be present on only those social media platforms that serve the purpose for you.
Zomato knows it’s majority of the audience is present on Instagram, so they focus all their creativity there.
This is undoubtedly the biggest and the most fundamental reason behind a brand's failure. Every brand starts with a novel cause, trying to solve the world issues but along the trajectory of profit making and adhering to the stakeholders, they lose their real sense of the brand. The market is filled with companies claiming to be the best in their field. The real challenge is to simply be real. You don't have to cater to everyone. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.
What needs to be done is to know what your brand is, what your brand does best, and who your brand serves. Have a marketing strategy that suits your brand and its TA.
Dove does it best. The company, in its ads uses women in their raw, natural element to inspire confidence in women and consumers around the world. What they do is more than just talk, they walk the talk.
A brand never just ceases, it dies a slow death. The customers get so bored of the sameness, safe positioning and bland messaging that they lose any interest in associating themselves with the brand.
The brand ultimately joins the list of irrelevant and has-beens. So, if you want to avoid joining them, you have to be bold and take chances, be a disruptor, a brand that is radically different from its competition.
Make your brand your ultimate competitive advantage. Know what your TA needs.
Netflix is just another textbook example of one of the most disruptive brands in the world. They started as a boring business idea, mailing out DVDs to customers who wanted a blockbuster-like experience without going to Blockbuster. But later they moved away from the tried-and-tested formula of mailing and decided to “stream” their media instead on their own computers, which meant that Netflix could officially push Blockbuster out of business.
Brands often get stuck in their comfort zones once they start making decent sales. They believe in the saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” too religiously.
Bad decision.
When such sales success becomes the meter for the organizations to make decisions, it's as if they are looking through the rearview mirror rather than at what lies ahead. They completely ignore the competition or what new features the customer might need.
Nokia- rearview syndrome, a lack of vision, and inferior technology were the unholy trinity of errors that contributed to Nokia's downfall. They completely ignored their customers’ feedback, lost customer loyalty, and unlike most companies in the mobile phone space, failed to keep up with evolving services and tech.
These are just a few reasons in the myriad of what can cause a brand to fail. You can have the best products, a huge marketing budget, an impressive team but if your branding sucks, you are destined to bomb.
Branding is the elixir for startups, read our blog to know why.
10 Reasons Why Branding is Important for Startups
But you are smart, you know what NOT to do. And to know what to DO, we are here to help.
By partnering with us, you get the brains and experience of a branding firm who is skilled at the science of brand development and art of human understanding. We make branding simple for you. Snag a free consultation call today.
Founder and CEO of Advist Global, one of India’s finest Creative Agency, started career as a photographer at the young age of 15. After completing engineering, passion for arts and experience of tech led to set the foundation of Advist Global, specializing in WEB 3 solutions, NFT arts, UX/UI and much more.
