4 ways to prevent brand remorse so you can show up more professionally and confidently in your business.
As a fellow small business owner, I’m guessing you’re passionate about helping people. You know—deep in your bones—that people need what you have to offer and that it can truly make their life better. And you’ve worked really hard to develop your products and perfect your services. You’re doing your best to build your brand, but you find yourself saying things like “I know I need to update my branding, but I’m so busy running my business I don’t have the time!” or “My brand just doesn’t feel like me, but I hate to start over.”
I totally get that!
It can feel confusing and overwhelming to figure out how to visually share about your business in the right way with the right people. Keep reading for 4 ways to prevent brand remorse so you can show up more professionally and confidently in your business and create a brand that is as unique and beautiful as the work you do.
One of the most important aspects of a boss brand is a firm foundation. In your rush to get your product or service out, you may have skipped over solidifying your mission, vision, values, and figuring out who exactly your target audience is and what’s important to them. If you can’t communicate what’s important to you, how can you communicate—through your messaging and visuals—what your audience cares about?
You may default to making your brand self-centered rather than audience-specific. This can look like messaging that only talks about yourself, your service, products, and features; or like visuals that appeal only to your personal tastes.
Here’s the truth: people don’t care about what you sell. They care about things that make their lives better by solving a pressing problem or giving them joy and fulfillment. If you want people to buy from you, you have appeal to their needs on an emotional level. This starts with getting your brand foundation right.
Here are 6 questions to get you started:
You know you have competition, and maybe that’s where you draw a lot of your brand inspiration. But sometimes, we can draw a little too much inspiration if you know what I mean. You borrow an idea here, a design scheme there, and soon your business looks so much like every other business it’s forgettable. Plus, it will never fully feel like you, because your personal values and what makes you unique aren’t emotionally tying you to your branding.
It’s healthy for your business to examine your competition, just make sure you’re not obsessing over them. In addition to a bland brand, this can kill your confidence and make you lose sight of your purpose. And in case you didn’t know, you are what makes your brand unique. You are the value you bring to your customers. What do you do well that your customers value? Highlight that thing!
Here are 4 questions to help you figure out what makes your business even more unique:
How your customers experience your brand is what will keep them coming back or keep them away. It’s like Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
This starts with a solid foundation and continues with your brand’s visual representation (the colors, fonts, tone, and imagery it uses). A good place to start is by choosing 3–5 adjectives that describe your business and how you want to make people feel. From there, you can dig into the design psychology of exactly how to do that. Which leads us to the next point.
Maybe you’ve bootstrapped your brand design or got a logo on the cheap, and now you’re left struggling with how to make everything feel cohesive. Here’s why:
You are amazing at what you do. But you don’t know how to create a visual brand identity, because you’re not a professional brand designer.
Yeah, I said it.
But, honestly, would you expect your customers to be amazing at the thing you do? No! Because that’s what they’re coming to you for.
Professional designers spend years learning about how color impacts people on an emotional and psychological level. They spend years studying the meaning behind shapes and symbols. They understand how fonts (yes, fonts) shape perception. They have a deft and practiced awareness and understanding of how visual spacing and ratio draw or repel attention. And they know for darn sure that a logo is not your brand—it’s just one small, but important piece of a larger brand identity strategy.
Without a brand strategy, it won’t matter how beautiful your branding is—it will just be pretty decoration that never quite feels like you.
To avoid brand remorse and build confidence in your business, it’s important to tell the story of your brand in the right way to the right people. But if you’re thinking, “That all sounds great, but I still don’t have the time!” Then I encourage you to dig deeper and examine your values. Often, our frustration points to a misalignment with what we value.
If you’re really honest with yourself, do believe having a cohesive brand that feels like you and communicates the right message with the right people in the right ways is important? And if so, are you willing to align your schedule and resources with that value to make it a priority?
If you said “yes,” I have a free resource to help you get rid of your brand remorse by clarifying your brand, its impact, and its visual identity right now. Click the link below to get my guide You Are Your Own Brand.
