26 Sep How to Fight Brand Assassination

Brand assassination has a chance of happening every time a forward facing piece of communication goes out from your business to the public that is inconsistent with who you are.  You communicate every time someone sees your logo.  Every time you make an announcement, tweet, blog, comment as a business, you are communicating.  So what does that mean about where brand assassinators come from?  Yes.  Most of the time brand assassinators come from right within your organization.

Every brand in the world, from Apple to Zappos, has been threatened by brand assassinators.  Brand assassination is the primary way that brands are weakened in their effectiveness.  For big businesses it can mean losing millions of dollars in value, but for small business, it can develop less confidence from customers or at worst, committing brand assassination can forecast future business failure if a course correction isn’t made.   Thankfully, we can take the principles that big businesses like Walmart have spent millions to develop and apply them to our businesses to fight brand assassination and protect our business’s primary asset:  Our Brand.

Committing brand assassination can forecast future business failure.

 
One of the greatest values in a brand is recognition.  Once a customer or your target market identifies you with the values and emotions that you want to be associated with, that’s when you’ve hit brand awareness.  The downer comes when the people that are supposed to be behind that brand don’t hold the brand as sacred.  The brand needs to be thought of and expressed as a single entity.  Think about it this way, what if one of the younger members of your family came in one day with skinny jeans on, acting artsy, talking very precisely then came in the next day wearing all black with lots of eyeliner, then came in the next day wearing a clown outfit.  You’d probably think that this family member probably is having an identity crisis or has multiple personalities!  Thus, it’s imperative that they way your target audience experiences your brand is consistent every time.

One of the worse offenses you can commit is presenting your brand in a way that it wasn’t meant to be.  For example, taking your logo and putting a different color scheme on it or even worse, stretching your logo just to make it fit the width of a page.  Just remember:  Every time you stretch or smush your logo, a designer somewhere dies.  Brand assassination is one thing, but murdering designers?  That’s takes it to a whole other level.  Do the right thing, don’t kill designers.

Every time you stretch or smush your logo, a designer somewhere dies.

 
Big brands are doing consistent things on purpose to protect their brands.  One of the things they do is either hire a Public Relations firm or they have a marketing department in charge of press releases.  So what are small business and organizations to do with their limited resources?  Designate one person to be the brand ambassador.  They are to be the main person to defend attacks from within to make sure every piece of communication that goes out from the organization is uniform.

The next step in building brand value is to have the brand ambassador educate other people in the organization on these principles.  Once everyone is on the same page and the brand ambassador is able to multiply himself, you can recruit others in the noble cause of  helping in defending and portraying the brand in the best light!  One of the best ways to do this is with a document called a Branding Style Guide that communicates all of these principles in clear language.  Great logo and branding design firms usually offer Branding Style Guides in their conversations with businesses looking to brand themselves or rebrand themselves.

Now you know that every time you are inconsistently communicating to the public you are stealing value from your brand, the very thing that’s supposed to be supporting everything you stand for.  If you’ve been guilty in the past in letting your brand have multiple personalities, the good news is that it’s not too late to invest in your brand.  Every time you present your organization in the best way possible from now on is like depositing value in your brand bank.