Brand myths are floating around the internet like crazy fish constantly jumping out and attacking you. They can make it really hard for brand creators, strategists, and designers to get work done and even harder for people to reach out and ask for help on getting their brands created.
So, firstly, let’s define a brand quickly. A brand consists of two main things: a brand strategy and a visual identity. The brand strategy is the foundation and all those things you already know, but your clients may never hear about. The visual identity is how everything looks and the pretty things that draw your audience in.
To go in a bit more detail, a brand is what your audience perceives about your products, services, and business. Please note that I wrote perceives there and not sees. This is because a brand consists of everything within your business including, but not limited to, your business strategy, invoice content, contracts, content strategy, Instagram captions, marketing strategy, marketing plans, the appearance of your all of your products, services, employees, channels, the way you sound, and so much more.
There are some parts of a brand strategy that are taken from business plans and there are some parts in your marketing campaigns that come from your brand identity. It’s all connected and a brand has a finger in every pie and knows everything that is happening within your business.
So, let’s get started with some of these brand myths and debunk them all!
A BRAND IS A LOGO
No, this is the biggest brand myth of all. A brand is everything that you do, including how you look. I want to use the visual of an iceberg to explain this. Your logo? That’s the flat surface that reflects the light when a ship gets close to it. A ship, in this case, being your audience. Everything that’s below the water? That’s still your brand even though your audience may never see it or know about it, but it’s also what keeps that tip above the water so it’s visible. If you create a logo only, and continuing with my metaphor, that’s a sheet of ice that the ship crashes through and never notices.
A LOGO COMES FIRST
Nope, similar to the previous brand myth! Your brand’s logo should only come after you have your foundation. Let’s go with another visual example here: think of it like building a house, do you place your furniture before building the foundation and walls? Without the metaphors, you want to do your research first. If the logo is the first thing your audience will see about you, make sure to use it to draw them in. In order to know how to do that, you want to know everything you can about your audience. So, no, a logo doesn’t come first, finding your audience and talking to them comes before that.
MY INSTAGRAM FEED LOOKS AWESOME, SO MY BRAND IS DONE!
That’s awesome! Now, what about your website? Are you on Facebook? How about LinkedIn or YouTube? TikTok is getting pretty active now too… is all the same there? And no, I don’t mean is your content all the same (that’s a whole different can of worms). The same way a brand isn’t only a logo, it isn’t only how your IG profile looks.
It can be the most attractive thing in the world with the best photos and typography… but what are you saying? How are you saying it? Who are you saying it to? Who is engaging and how? Are you getting clients from your profile or heart emojis and no comments? You can have a very beautiful social media profile, but that’s only a small part of your brand. Yes, it draws people in, but why would they buy your products and services over someone else? Answering all of these questions debunks this brand myth.
ONLY BIG COMPANIES NEED A BRAND
Nu-uh. It is the age of branding and the reason for that is because we are now understanding how important having a brand is to any business. It doesn’t matter if you’re working for yourself, by yourself, and plan to continue that way for the rest of your business. It doesn’t matter if you have 50,000 employees worldwide and are opening another office on the other side of the world, or if you are at any stage in between above and below those, a brand is for anybody and everybody. Without a brand, you are only a sheet of ice on the water that gets destroyed when a ship passes through.
PEOPLE DON’T CARE ABOUT B2B BRANDS
They don’t? Since when? What is the difference between a business-to-business brand versus a business-to-customer brand or even a customer-to-customer brand? There isn’t! And the easiest way to think about this is to remove the idea of business and customer from this. Because a B2B business still has customers, even if they are other businesses. If you have customers looking at the B2B brand that are not businesses, then the business isn’t for them, meaning the brand isn’t for them. The purpose of the brand is to connect with that one business’s customers, no matter who they are.
I want to give you an example that will automatically debunk both this one and the previous myth. I am an entrepreneur and a small company. When I was interested in hiring a business coach, I was looking online for someone that I can connect with. I was specifically looking for female solopreneurs, individuals like myself. As a business coach, most of these women had a B2B business model – they run a small business specifically focused to work with other small business owners. What drew me to my coach is her communication style, her language, her personality – her brand. So yes, small businesses with brands have an advantage and B2B businesses also have clients, even if those clients are other businesses.
BRANDS ARE ONLY FOR COMPANIES THAT SELL PRODUCTS
No. Brands are for anybody and everybody. Same as above, it doesn’t matter what you sell. In fact, it doesn’t matter if you sell. You can have a brand without ever selling anything. Your brand is dependent on how you interact with your audience, that doesn’t mean you have to sell to your audience. Hey, maybe that’s your brand? Without going into the semantics on this, the most common reason this myth comes out is because of services. And honestly, having a service-based company doesn’t mean you don’t have a product. For example, if your services are classes, your products can be the teachers.
Now, this is not a rule and you don’t have to do it this way, but turning your people into the products of your brand is a different way of looking at what is sold – are you selling the one-thousandth course on learning design, or are you selling that cool trendy teacher that uses hipster ipsum instead of lorem ipsum. I will go back to my publishing background for a bit here because it is applicable in a lot of areas. When you have a famous author, the design of the book cover has the author name larger than the title of the book, because the publishers aren’t selling the book, they are selling the author. Think about that for a second.
HAVING A BRAND SOLVES EVERYTHING!
Unfortunately, no. A brand consists of every aspect that’s in your business, so to get your business up and running you want every aspect of it to be running smoothly. A brand isn’t a magic pill you take and boom, you’re a millionaire. If that was the case, everybody will be millionaires. The trick here is to have a strong brand that helps you connect with your audience, consistency to keep you honest, and to keep every aspect of your business running smoothly. Honestly, if you have a strong brand and have fifty clients coming in a day, if your contracts aren’t on point or you haven’t figured out your finances, then nothing will be solved.
MY BRAND CREATOR IS IN CONTROL OF MY BRAND
Ha! No. You know, it would sometimes be easier if that was the case? But no, this is your brand. Whether you’re an individual or a giant corporation, you hire someone to help you find your brand. Firstly, that brand is created around you (or your team and company), and you know yourself and your audience better than any brand creator, no matter how much research they do. Additionally, it is your job and responsibility to keep that brand alive. Whether you are hiring someone to write your captions, create your graphics, whatever – it is based on you and you are the one that has the final say on what is going to be visible to your audience.
HIRING A BRAND CREATOR IS TOO EXPENSIVE
“If you think that good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.” – Dr. Ralf Speth CEO Jaguar Land Rover.
I like to refer to this quote anytime anybody says something is too expensive. Yes, this is about design, but it’s also applicable to a brand. If you think a brand creator is too expensive, there are usually three alternatives that you would go to.
DO IT YOURSELF
I am all for this one, I support and encourage people to create their own brands because, as I’ve said many times before, a brand is based around you and you know you best. My signature service is literally named DO-IT-YOURSELF Brand Creation Program. But the things I want you to consider here are: do you know what to do?
The research that goes into creating a brand already takes a lot of time… now add in the time to research what type of research to do. Add in the months (yes, months!) you will spend going back and forth on ideas and concepts, growing and then doubting, because we all know that is the entrepreneurial life. And add in the time spent learning how to use design software and learning more about the psychology of design to make something beautiful that works.
Your time is worth something. Let’s be total geeks and add a dollar value to it, how much you would charge your clients per hour. Now consider all of those added on hours and days you will spend creating your brand and consider – is it more expensive to hire a brand creator or to learn how to become one?
In addition, as someone who has worked with people who have created their own brands from scratch, I’ve worked with them. Read that again. They were not happy with their final design and then we had to do a rebrand, instead of a brand from the beginning, which ended up being even more work.
HIRE SOMEONE CHEAPER OR A GRAPHIC DESIGNER
A graphic designer is not a brand creator or even a brand designer. I know, because I used to be a graphic designer. As a graphic designer, my job was to be given a project and create something that my clients love. The end.
Yes, there were a lot of steps involved in the process and a lot of moving parts, research, and work on my end. But at the end of the day, as a graphic designer, I frankly didn’t give a shit who your audience was or what your brand’s mission was. I would ask what the purpose or final use of whatever I’m designing was, but that’s it. Any graphic designer that cares more than the individual design is a brand designer.
But again, a brand designer’s job isn’t to figure out your audience or your personality. Their job is to put your personality into visuals that appeal to your audience.
I’ve heard so many stories about investing in yourself and your business early on and I admit, I didn’t follow that advice. It took me three years to get my business up and running as a business, not as a freelance contractor taking on any job that came my way in order to pay the bills. I knew I wanted a business coach or someone to help guide me on how to do this properly, so I tried going free and then really cheap.
And you know what… I didn’t get the results I was hoping for. Then I went something different that was still cheap and… still didn’t get it. At the end, I threw close to $3K to learn nothing and not grow. Then I spent more than that and within a week I was seeing results. So yes… I tried hiring someone cheaper and then I tried hiring someone that only focused on a specific aspect of growing a business and it didn’t work for me.
DON’T CREATE A BRAND AT ALL
Yea, sure… you can group yourself as one of the many. One of the tricks I focus on when creating a brand isn’t to create a new product or service, that’s not your brand’s purpose. Your brand’s purpose is to figure out how to sell your product or service, that thousands of others already have, and make it look different to your ideal audience.
If you don’t have a brand, you’re all over the place and you’re losing potential clients. And no, I am not saying the day you create a brand you’ll make thousands of dollars. A brand is a long-term return of investment. It is something that grows and evolves with you, picking up steam as it goes. Think of it as a snowball – it starts as one size and then it grows and grows the more it rolls. If you never create that snowball, you won’t ever grow.