If you’re an Aussie that gives any attention to sport, you’ll know of the NRL (National Rugby League) and probably have heard of the Newcastle Knights team. I support the Newcastle Knights, always have. Their first season was the year I was born so I thought it fitting. And over the past couple of decades, despite their two premiership wins, that choice has given other people plenty of opportunities to give me shit given prolonged stretches of sitting at the bottom of the ladder in dead last position, the latest being in 2025. But then in 2026, even after a raft of various player injuries and suspensions, the club managed to tell a fairytale underdog story and reach the 2026 grand final. Cheered on by thousands of local supporters for weeks after beating final’s favourite after favourite until the final siren sounded in the grand final to only lose by ONE BLOODY POINT. That’s a fair range of emotions to experience in twelve months.

Through all of it, I’ve of course supported the Knights and only the Knights. Another team winning more games hasn’t made me switch. Someone offering cheaper merchandise wouldn’t do it either. I even reckon supporting a team that spends years near the bottom of the ladder should count as a green flag in any relationship. As there’s some fairly convincing evidence you’re prepared to stick around when things aren’t going well…like at all.

This right here is the kind of loyalty marketers and businesses have banged on about for far too long as it’s often imagined how many ideal customer avatars will become loyal fans of the brand when they talk about building a brand people love. Supporters who identify with it, defend it and stay through the disappointing bits…we call them Tesla owners. That’s just a joke, chill out. But someone who says they only drink Coca-Cola might happily accept a Pepsi when that’s what the restaurant serves. They haven’t necessarily stopped preferring Coke, they just wanted a cola drink with their meal.

Both the Knights football club and the Coca-Cola soft drink are brands. However, the role each plays in someone’s life is typically chalk and cheese by comparison.

My favourite burger isn’t the one I buy most

I’ll give you another anecdote you can probably relate to. When I get fast food occasionally, I go to McDonald’s most often. I use its loyalty points program too. Other times I go to KFC, and sometimes I go to a local burger shop that I think is the best of the lot, but it’s also the most expensive. Meanwhile, I never set foot in a Hungry Jack’s (similar to Burger King) or in a Red Rooster (similar to KFC).

If you looked only at my purchases, you could reasonably describe me as (more behaviourally) loyal to McDonald’s. It gets a greater share of my visits. But that doesn’t mean I think it makes the best burger, or that the local shop has failed to make me like its brand. My favourite and my most frequently purchased option aren’t the same business.

Price, location, convenience, familiarity and whatever I feel like eating can all influence the decision. A reward available through the Macca’s app can give me another reason to go there, just the same as my kids asking to go to McDonald’s when I can’t be arsed to cook on a Saturday night. But that still leaves room for KFC or the local burger shop on another occasion. Or I could throw in a completely different option than a burger and opt for sushi, or some honey chicken and rice from a Chinese takeaway shop in our shopping centre. But the point is that I have a small selection of acceptable options, rather than an exclusive relationship with one.

This is where it helps to separate behavioural loyalty, meaning what people actually or repeatedly buy, from attitudinal loyalty, meaning their preference, attachment or commitment, regardless of what they actually end up buying. Both are useful to understand, but if you interpret repeat purchases as proof of deep emotional attachment, you might misunderstand what’s actually keeping people coming back.

Sometimes the loyalty really is personal

My mum would only buy Devondale butter. The company behind it had employed her father, Frank (who I’m named after), helping him support their family of nine. Her commitment came from what that employment had meant to her family. Buying the butter was connected to a much bigger story than what she wanted to spread on toast.

That’s a deeply personal reason to remain loyal to a brand, and I wouldn’t dismiss it for a second. Businesses can become part of people’s lives in meaningful ways. They can represent a family connection, a place, an important experience or something someone genuinely believes in.

But you’re unlikely to find that same history across a broad base of customers, and you can’t manufacture it for everyone through a new logo or an emotional advertising campaign. Mum’s connection to Devondale helps explain her behaviour. Though it doesn’t give every other butter shopper the same reason to choose it.

The same applies to my ride-or-die Knights support. It’s part of how I identify myself as a supporter. However, buying a burger is usually a much smaller decision in my day. There are passionate commercial-brand communities (like Pokemon, or LEGO) and casual sports supporters too, so this isn’t a perfect dividing line. But the eye-opening point I’m going to hammer home here is that expecting everyday customers to behave like devoted football supporters is setting a pretty unrealistic benchmark for success.

Growth needs more people buying

Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have helped explain a pattern known as ‘double jeopardy’: smaller brands tend to have fewer buyers, and those buyers are slightly less loyal. Bigger brands have substantially more buyers and somewhat higher loyalty. The major difference is the size of the customer base.

That matters because it changes how you interpret a big brand’s success. Seeing more repeat purchasing doesn’t establish that a devoted fan base made it big. Its broader presence and greater likelihood of being considered and bought help support both customer numbers and repeat buying. Which is why Sharp and the Institute describes improving mental and physical availability across the market as central to that process to come to mind and be present in the places and times of a customer’s need.

Kantar’s 2023 Brand Footprint reporting gives another useful perspective: “88% of the growing FMCG brands found more shoppers”. That’s a finding about growing fast-moving consumer goods brands, rather than a claim that 88% of every business’s growth comes from new customers. But it reinforces the importance of expanding the pool of people who buy your brand.

Of course you should serve existing customers well. Giving people a reason to regret choosing you is hardly a sensible growth strategy. But concentrating all your attention on your most enthusiastic customers limits who you reach and is why I often steer clear of creating ideal customer personas either based on who you think will buy most or who is already buying most. It’s why I’d recommend focusing on positioning the time/place/need of your offering, rather than the individual buying it — eg. “have a break, have a KitKat”. As the people who buy either occasionally, haven’t bought for a while, or haven’t considered you yet, also need opportunities to notice, think of, and choose your brand. Especially if your product or service is not like a FMCG product where customers frequently purchase your category in a weekly grocery shop. Even so, a light buyer who might not have bought your product for a year would not show up in your yearly sales figures but may be in the market in the near future.

So your biggest fans can be valuable without becoming the entire audience for your branding and marketing. But for many brands it’s about appealing to a broader customer base by being present in a moment to then be thought of and found easily.

Even Coca-Cola is questioning brand love

Coca-Cola’s Chief Marketing and Customer Commercial Officer, Manuel “Manolo” Arroyo, recently put this rather bluntly. Speaking at October’s ANA Masters of Marketing, he said, “I do not believe any more in love.”

In a separate conversation at ADWEEK’s Brandweek, Arroyo described people expressing affection for Coca-Cola and wearing its logo without drinking it. His emphasis was on behaviour and consumption. That’s a useful distinction coming from a business whose identity is recognisable well beyond the people currently purchasing its drinks.

Someone saying they love your brand tells you something about their attitude. A purchase tells you they chose it in a particular situation. Another purchase tells you they came back. Those things can connect, but one doesn’t automatically guarantee the next. My local burger shop already has my preference and still doesn’t get most of my visits, which is similar to me supporting the Knights but not watching every one of their games, but different when I won’t instead watch any other team’s game if the Knights aren’t playing against them.

For your business, that means getting specific about the behaviour you want to encourage. It might be a first trial like Canva allows you to get started using their design platform without even creating an account. It could be choosing your brand for a different occasion, like a special $70 bottle of Champagne for Christmas rather than the $5 white wine from Aldi in a weekly supermarket shop. It might be booking an appointment at the dentist because they offer dental implants while their current dentist doesn’t, which may encourage long term checkups. Or they’re ordering again because you got a discount code from your last purchase and want to experience that again.

When you’ve nailed the behaviour you want to encourage or can help address their need, then investigate what’s preventing that action. An enthusiastic response to your new packaging or product idea is encouraging, but you still need to understand how it fits into someone’s life to address the behaviour of actually getting them to pick it up off the shelf.

The shelf, the price and the situation matter

Consider a shopper choosing between Raw C and Cocobella coconut water. Raw C is my client and I regularly see customers take either of these brands off the shelf during my own supermarket shop visits. Customers tend to like both and many just buy whichever is cheaper that week. If one is unavailable, the other is likely to go into the trolley. That shopper doesn’t need to have fallen out of love, or preference with either brand, as both could already be familiar, acceptable choices, with price or availability settling the decision on that occasion.

It’s the same principle as the Coca-Cola drinker accepting Pepsi at a restaurant. The preference can remain, while the circumstances change the purchase. This is particularly prevalent for brands that have similar competition. Be it 5 real estate agents or coffee shops on the same street. 2 mechanics at either end of town. Or 2–3 coconut water brands on the shelf. For a service business, someone might prefer their usual provider but book elsewhere because the next appointment is three weeks away and they need help today. By knowing that, it changes how you respond to the lost sale, and for a business like a Dentist, it could be to increase the number of dentists in the practice if your books are filled up for the next 6 months.

The way choices are presented can matter too. Research by Itamar Simonson demonstrated that an option can gain share when it becomes a compromise between other alternatives. For example, a mid-range product like a bottle of wine on a restaurant menu might become more appealing when presented alongside the cheapest and a premium priced option. That’s an influence on choice, rather than proof of emotional loyalty to the brand offering it.

Price framing and comparisons provide other possibilities to investigate. A monthly cost broken into a daily amount can draw attention to affordability, while a genuine saving against a usual price can make value more noticeable. These are things to test in context, rather than guaranteed tricks that make everyone behave the same way. The broader point is that repeat purchases can reflect a consistently convenient or appealing choice, so you need more than the transaction record to understand the reason if it’s a combination of behavioural and attitudinal choices before the sale and at the point of sale.

A loyalty program can give me a reason to return

My use of McDonald’s loyalty points is a good example. A reward can make the next visit more appealing, and the app gives me a practical reason to engage with the brand. That’s useful. It still doesn’t make Macca’s my football team, or Coles my go-to supermarket because they’re offering 8,000 points equivalent to $40 off my next shop if I buy $190 worth of groceries by Friday…true story and I totally did it, then shopped at Aldi the following week.

So when assessing a loyalty program, I’d want to know whether it encourages additional profitable purchases, changes when people buy, or makes the experience easier. I’d also want to know whether it mainly rewards purchases that would have happened anyway. As a customer joining because they already shop frequently is different from a customer shopping more frequently because they joined.

That distinction matters when you’re reviewing the results. Comparing members with non-members alone won’t tell you how much extra behaviour the program caused. Your most regular customers may have been the most likely to sign up in the first place. So membership, points earned, and rewards redeemed are useful activity measures, but the business benefit needs a closer look.

But for brands that are likely to not have frequent repeat purchases, take a mailbox brand like Milkcan here in Australia. They don’t ever discount their products. Why would you when you sell a relatively unique product that is as infrequently purchased as a mailbox? What could be done to psychologically encourage a sale is increase the price by 10% and offer periodical 10% off offers, or a better one offer free shipping. But again, if the person was already going to purchase their offering, why would they reward a first purchase when it’s likely to be their only purchase ever?

The advice then would be to keep the experience good enough that customers have reasons to return beyond the next incentive as a baseline effort of everyday operations. And keep reaching people outside the program if you have one, because someone who hasn’t bought yet can’t demonstrate much loyalty.

Give people more opportunities to choose you

So yes, branding can contribute to loyalty. A recognisable identity helps people find you again. Clear positioning and messaging help them understand the value you offer and influences their consideration, to then think of your brand when needed. A consistent experience can build confidence in choosing you another time and that becomes a strong association when they think of, hear, or see your brand. There’s plenty worth developing there without promising that your customers will become ride-or-die supporters.

For your brand strategy, I’d put these priorities ahead of simply trying to make everyone love you:

• Understand the situations that create demand: Identify the needs and occasions that bring your category to mind, then build associations between those moments and your brand.
• Make the brand easy to recognise and recall: Use distinctive assets and consistent communication so people have something familiar to find again.
• Remove barriers to choosing you: Review availability, price, pack sizes, booking, delivery and whatever else affects the buying decision.
• Deliver an experience worth repeating: Meet expectations and address the problems that make customers reluctant to return.
• Reach beyond your regulars: Give occasional buyers and people who don’t currently choose you reasons and opportunities to do so.

For a new product or service, the same thinking should inform innovation. Start with the buying or usage occasion you want to serve, establish what the new offer makes easier or better, and plan how people will discover it, try it and buy it again. Being interesting enough to receive compliments is a start. Becoming useful enough to enter someone’s routine is a different achievement, like the same mundane toilet paper brand purchase a customer will make every few weeks.

Measure repeat buying and customer retention, but also track how many people you’re reaching and converting into buyers. Learn when your brand comes to mind and when it doesn’t. Then pair that with what customers actually do, so you can distinguish an issue with awareness, from an issue involving availability, value or experience.

So look, I’m still gonna support the Knights after any disappointing season, just the same as I’m gonna ride on the coattails of their near-grand final win this year. But I’m also gonna keep buying from different food and drink brands depending on what I want, where I am, how it’s priced and what’s available. Neither behaviour is particularly contradictory once you understand the role each brand plays in my life, let alone your customers when most purchasing decisions aren’t sweated over for hours and are often done on autopilot.

Your business doesn’t need every customer to love it like their football team to become a successful brand. It needs more people to remember it, find it and feel confident choosing it when it can meet their needs. So if you need help developing the strategy, messaging and identity to make that happen, say g’day. Let’s give your brand a shot at better branding for better business success.

About me:

G’day I’m Frank. Give your brand a shot and try a new brand of branding. I help businesses develop better branding for better business success.

To contact or work with me, email: gday@gdayfrank.com
Say g’day on Instagram
Say g’day on LinkedIn
Or visit my Website to check out some of the branding work I do.

A couple of years ago, I developed the brand identity for Alice CPA, an audit firm in New York City. One of the insights behind the brand was the feeling startup founders faced when they realised they needed a financial audit before securing venture capital funding. And for what is already a stressful time, is then met with a compounding moment of needing someone to come in to go through the details of their business. “Oh shit, we need an audit” summed up that feeling pretty well.

So we conceptualised this idea onto packs of toilet paper as a somewhat appropriate, not overly practical, but nonetheless an empathetic response to that particular feeling that can be humorously relatable. We also developed touchpoints like a calming scented candle and branded matches to help relieve the stress of an audit. It gave Alice a way to acknowledge the nerves with a bit of humour and make the process feel more approachable before it had even started.

Now, a brand audit serves a different purpose, but I reckon the word “audit” can bring on a similar reaction. You’ve put time, money and a fair chunk of yourself into building your business. Having someone examine how it looks, what it says, how your team represents it and what customers actually think can feel a little uncomfortable. Especially if you already suspect some things aren’t working but have swept it under the rug for another day to deal with, and/or you’re up against stiff competition and not sure how your brand compares or how it can compete.

But that uncertainty is exactly what a brand audit helps address. It assesses how your brand is performing, how people perceive it and how well it supports the business you’re building. You get an outsider perspective and objective assessment to understand what’s working, what needs protecting, what’s missing and what deserves attention. Because you might be worrying about your logo when the bigger issue is that customers don’t understand your offering. Or you’re considering changing everything when there’s already valuable recognition you should keep.

The aim is to leave with clarity and a practical direction to move forward. Now what I wanted to do for this article is collate a bit of a checklist you can reference and put your brand up to the lens to assess. So the following ten-point brand audit checklist gives you a way to start, either yourself or as a heads up before working with a brand professional like myself.

The idea is that for each item, record what you know, the evidence behind it and anything you still need to investigate. Mark anything that doesn’t apply to your business accordingly. “We don’t know” is still a useful answer at this stage. And hopefully as a result you’ll be able to self-identify what’s working, what you need to find out more about and what needs work. Any step forward is progress to get past that “Oh shit, an audit” and turn it into, “Oh yeah, this is what we’re gonna do to help our brand win”.

1. Start with the business and where it’s heading

Before assessing the branding, get clear on the business it needs to support. Sometimes we become so rooted in the day-to-day that we lose sight of the bigger picture and the trajectory you’re heading in, and it all depends on your current circumstances. An established business opening a second location has different requirements from a product brand trying to secure its first supermarket stockist. Your ambitions, capacity and current challenges give the audit its context. Without that, you can end up judging everything on whether you personally like it, which is a subjective slippery slope away from the objective task at hand.

Here’s your checklist:

🔲 We’ve documented our current business priorities and challenges.

🔲 We’re clear on what we want to achieve over the next one to three years.

🔲 We’ve identified planned changes to our products, services, customers, locations or price positioning.

🔲 We’ve considered whether our current brand can support those ambitions.

Look for a mismatch between where you’re heading and how you’re currently perceived. If you want to attract larger commercial clients but everything about your presentation suggests small residential jobs, that’s worth investigating. So is a brand name or structure that could become limiting as your offering expands. Something that worked when you started might need to evolve as the business grows.

2. Check whether there’s a usable brand strategy

Some businesses have a strategy in a presentation nobody has opened for three years. Others have a reasonably clear direction that exists entirely in the owner’s head. The audit needs to establish what’s actually guiding decisions, whether it still makes sense and whether anyone is using it. A list of values and a revenue target won’t cover the whole thing.

Here’s your checklist:

🔲We have a clear view of the market needs our business serves.

🔲 We’ve identified the customers or market segments we intend to reach and why they’re viable.

🔲 We’ve defined what we want our brand to be remembered and chosen for.

🔲 We have objectives, priorities, responsibilities and a realistic budget for putting the strategy into practice.

The useful test is whether the strategy helps you make decisions. Your team should be able to use it when developing an offer, briefing a designer, planning marketing or deciding which opportunities to pursue. If it’s too vague to guide any of that, there’s a gap. Getting the direction out of someone’s head and into a form the team can understand might be one of the most useful outcomes of the audit. Additionally this particular part of your brand is never set and forget or a means to an end as it’s an ever evolving and cyclical process you should engage in periodically so that you’re adapting to changes within the business and in the market.

3. Understand where you stand against competitors

Get specific about the alternatives customers actually consider. These might include the business down the road, a national brand, an online provider or simply doing the job themselves. Review how those alternatives are positioned, what they offer and how they’re encountered. Don’t just line up everyone’s logos and decide yours needs a different colour.

Here’s your checklist:

🔲 We know which alternatives customers consider alongside us.

🔲 We’ve compared their offers, pricing, messaging, presentation and customer experience with ours.

🔲 We understand where we’re stronger, where we’re similar and where we’re falling short.

🔲 We’ve identified which claims and visual cues are common across the category and which help people recognise us over a competitor.

You’re looking for a credible position your business can support. “Quality service” is something almost everyone claims. The audit should investigate what customers value about your particular approach, alongside the distinctive elements that make your brand easier to recognise. With my client example of Alice CPA, the result of understanding how founders felt about the process gave us something specific to respond to through the brand, beyond simply communicating that the firm conducts “quality service” audits.

4. Review what customer research is actually telling you

This is where you check the assumptions behind the first three sections. Speak with recent customers, repeat customers, potential customers and people who chose someone else. Explore what they expected before buying, what influenced their decision and what they experienced afterwards. I covered this in my previous article about knowing why customers choose your brand, because it’s a pretty important part of shaping the strategy.

Here’s your checklist:

🔲 We have recent feedback from a useful mix of customers and potential customers.

🔲 We understand their needs, buying situations, hesitations and reasons for choosing.

🔲 We’ve compared their feedback with available sales, enquiry, conversion and repeat-purchase data.

🔲 We’ve recorded contradictions, unanswered questions and limitations in the research.

Check when the research was done, who participated and whether they reflect the market you’re trying to understand. Five enthusiastic regulars can offer useful insights, but they can’t speak for everyone, especially as there’s counterintuitive evidence in marketing that shows heavy buyers of a category tend to be the least ‘loyal’ to one brand. Equally, sales figures might show a problem without telling you what caused it. Give people room to say something you weren’t expecting, then investigate the patterns rather than reacting to one uncomfortable comment.

5. Assess awareness, recognition and recall

Being pleased with your branding doesn’t tell you whether anyone remembers it. This part of the audit looks at whether people know your brand, recognise its identifying features and think of it in relevant buying situations. Those are different things, and it helps to assess them separately.

Here’s your checklist:

🔲 We’ve explored which brands come to mind before prompting people with our name.

🔲 We’ve checked whether people recognise our name and correctly associate our visual or verbal assets with us.

🔲 We understand what people associate with our brand, including unwanted or outdated perceptions.

🔲 We’ve investigated the needs and occasions that bring our brand to mind.

It can be a tricky task when you’re a smaller brand compared to the big brands we can instantly think of as category defining brands. And it takes time to build these associations for your brand to come to mind when needed. Even so, ask about recall before showing people your branding, otherwise you’ve given them the answer. You can then explore recognition using assets such as packaging, colours, signage or a familiar phrase. For category entry points, investigate situations like needing a snack after school or considering selling the family home. The aim is to understand when your brand enters the picture (if it’s not currently, then still identifying when it can) and where it’s being overlooked. However, one thing to keep in mind is that you’re not looking to have people guess what it is you do just from the look of your branding, or the name of your brand. You’re better off knowing if the brand was easy to recall after only seeing it for the first time, even at the end of a short survey.

6. Check how easy you are to find and buy from

A customer can remember your brand and still buy elsewhere because you weren’t available, accessible or easy to deal with. Review the places your customers look, the channels they buy through and the steps required to complete a purchase or enquiry. This connects what you’ve learned about their needs with your actual presence in the market.

Here’s your checklist:

🔲 We’re present in the locations and channels relevant to our customers’ buying situations.

🔲 Our website, listings, contact details, opening hours or stockist information are accurate.

🔲 Our offering, pricing information and next steps are clear enough for customers to act.

🔲 We’ve checked for friction in enquiries, bookings, checkout, stock availability and follow-up.

Walk through it yourself. Try finding your business, understanding the offer and making an inquiry on the phone. For a product brand, check the shelf and online buying experience. You might discover that the problem you thought required a rebrand is partly an availability or purchasing problem. That gives you something specific to fix before committing to a bigger project.

7. Review the name, visual identity and messaging

Gather examples of your website, packaging, proposals, signage, advertising, emails and social content. Assess whether they feel connected, communicate clearly and support your positioning. Then look at the individual elements and how they perform in everyday use. A logo might look impressive on a presentation slide but become an indecipherable blob on a social profile. A name might have a clever backstory but be difficult for customers to pronounce, spell, remember or recommend to someone else.

Here’s your checklist:

🔲 Our name is easy enough to say, spell, remember and search for, without being confused with another business.

🔲 We’ve checked whether the name’s length or meaning creates problems across signage, packaging, conversation or future expansion.

🔲 Our logo remains recognisable at small sizes and doesn’t rely on intricate details that disappear in everyday use.

🔲 Our colours, typography and other brand assets help people identify us across different applications.

🔲 Our packaging gets noticed in its actual retail environment and makes the brand, product and variant easy to identify.

🔲 Our messaging explains what we offer and why it matters in language customers understand.

🔲 Our materials are readable, accessible and supported by usable guidelines and templates.

Test these things where customers actually encounter them. Put the packaging alongside competing products on a shelf. View the signage from across the street. Hear someone unfamiliar with the name say it aloud. For packaging, check whether people notice it, understand what it contains and can find it again. Getting attention is useful, but customers still need to recognise what they’re buying. And separate personal taste from performance: you might be bored of a colour that’s helping people find you, or attached to a complicated logo that nobody can recall because there’s too much going on.

8. Look at the experience behind the presentation

Your branding creates expectations that the business then needs to meet. Review the experience from the first interaction through to delivery, support and repeat business. Include the awkward bits, like delays, complaints and refunds, because the way your team handles those situations forms part of the impression people take away.

Here’s your checklist:

🔲 The experience customers receive supports the promises made in our marketing.

🔲 We’ve reviewed feedback across the main stages of the customer journey.

🔲 We understand recurring complaints, points of confusion and reasons customers leave.

🔲 We know which parts of the experience people value and recommend to others.

If your brand promises personal attention but customers constantly chase a response, that’s a brand issue with an operational cause. Updating the website copy alone won’t resolve it. The audit should connect the promise with what needs to happen inside the business to deliver it. For a brand presenting itself as approachable and reassuring, that should be reflected in clear explanations, helpful communication and a process customers can understand.

9. Check team alignment, recruitment and long-term commitment

Your brand also shapes how people see you as an employer. It can influence who applies, what they expect from working with you and whether the experience gives them a reason to stay. Speak with people across the business about how they understand the brand, whether they’re proud to represent it and whether they can see a future there. Compare that with the picture you present through job ads, interviews and onboarding.

Here’s your checklist:

🔲 Our team can explain who we serve, what we offer and what we want to be known for.

🔲 Our recruitment communicates the work, expectations and employee experience clearly enough to attract suitable people.

🔲 We understand why candidates accept or decline our offers and why employees stay or leave.

🔲 Our onboarding, management and everyday behaviour reflect the values we communicate.

🔲 People have the training, resources, recognition and opportunities to develop over time.

🔲 We’ve explored what makes the team proud of the brand, what frustrates them and whether they’d recommend working here.

Look for gaps between the employer you say you are and the experience people actually have. If you promote career development but nobody knows how they can progress, that needs attention. If suitable candidates consistently overlook you, investigate what they know and believe about the business before assuming the job ad needs a rewrite. Pay, workload, leadership and working conditions matter too, so the audit may uncover issues that require changes within the business. Give people a way to speak honestly, including privately where needed, so you get a useful picture of what working there feels like.

10. Turn the findings into priorities and measures

An audit needs to finish with decisions you can act on. Bring the findings together and distinguish between things supported by evidence, reasonable possibilities and areas that need more research. Then prioritise according to their impact on customers and business goals, alongside the effort and budget required. A long list of problems without an order of priority is only gonna leave you feeling more overwhelmed.

Here’s your checklist:

🔲 We’ve identified the brand strengths and assets we should retain.

🔲 We’ve prioritised the gaps affecting customer choice, experience or future growth.

🔲 Each agreed action has an owner, timeframe and realistic allocation of resources.

🔲 We’ve established relevant baseline measures and a date to review progress.

Those measures could include awareness, correct recognition of brand assets, enquiry quality, conversion, repeat purchasing or team understanding. Choose measures that relate to the issue you’re addressing and recognise that pricing, distribution, service and market conditions also affect performance. You’re gonna need that context when assessing whether the changes are helping. Finish with a manageable plan that makes clear what to do now, what to investigate next and what can wait.

If you reach the end with a few unchecked boxes, take a breath. You’ve now got a clearer picture of where your brand needs attention. Some of those gaps might need more research. Others might call for clearer messaging, better packaging, team development or an easier buying experience. A larger rebrand could be justified, but that decision should come from what you’ve discovered.

You might also have found strengths you’ve been overlooking. A name customers remember, a team people trust or a colour that makes your product easy to spot. Those things matter, and knowing what to keep gives you more confidence in deciding what to change, especially when strategy is often identifying what not to do as much as what to do.

That was the thinking behind making an audit feel more approachable with Alice CPA, and it’s how I’d encourage you to approach your own brand audit. Acknowledge the uncomfortable bits, have a proper look and use what you learn to move forward. You don’t need to fix everything at once, but you do need to know where your effort is gonna make a difference.

If you’d like to download the condensed one-page PDF of this checklist, head to the following link: DOWNLOADABLE CHECKLIST

So if “oh shit, we need a brand audit” is sounding familiar, say g’day. Let’s clear up the uncertainty and give your brand a shot at better branding for better business success. Toilet paper optional.

About me:

G’day I’m Frank. Give your brand a shot and try a new brand of branding. I help businesses develop better branding for better business success.

To contact or work with me, email: gday@gdayfrank.com
Say g’day on Instagram
Say g’day on LinkedIn
Or visit my Website to check out some of the branding work I do.

Look, you can 100% know your business inside out and still misunderstand why people choose your brand. You might put it down to your quality, pricing or years of experience. While a customer simply remembers seeing you somewhere and felt comfortable giving you a go. Understanding that decision helps you shape your brand around the needs and wants of the customers you’ve identified…and maybe even the ones you hadn’t. It also helps you recognise the situations where people need what you offer, so your brand can be thought of and available at those moments. Because I cannot tell you how many times I’ve chosen a Corona cerveza/beer when I’m at a bar or bottle shop (liquor store) when I’m near the beach, all because of the way Corona has been positioned for certain buying and consumption situations.

To demonstrate this, I’m bringing back two of the fictional brands I’ve developed for previous articles. The first is Popits, which is a brand of flavoured popcorn balls for little ‘poppets’ (kids) and active adults on the go. The second is Chapter Realty, an independent real estate agency in Sydney, Australia. Imagine Popits is stocked in the 3 big Australian supermarkets of Coles, Woolworths and Aldi, in addition to its own ecommerce store. While Chapter Realty is competing locally with national franchise agencies from Century 21, Ray White and LJ Hooker. Different businesses and buying decisions, but both can use these five steps to develop a better brand strategy by knowing their customer better.

1. Get your assumptions down before asking anyone

Most strategies start AND stop here. We assume who the customer is, either because we’re just starting out and need an ideal customer we think will buy, or we don’t bother to go any further than an assumption. Even so, it’s a starting point. So start by writing down why you believe customers choose your brand, who those customers are and what’s happening in their lives when they need you, as well as where they might be at the time of making that decision geographically. Get your team involved too, particularly the people speaking with customers every day. This gives you something to compare with what you hear later, before you conveniently convince yourself you knew the answers all along. And be specific. “We offer great service” isn’t giving you much to work with when every business is using that as table stakes.

Popits — fictional product brand.

Popits might assume parents buy it because of its ingredients and on-the-go ease, while the kids are drawn to the colourful packaging, popcorn ball shape and the catchy advertising they’ve seen from the brand.

Chapter Realty — fictional independent real estate agency brand

Chapter Realty might believe vendors (sellers) choose it for its local knowledge and personal attention over the familiarity of a national franchise. Both are reasonable starting points. But at this stage, they’re assumptions. Write down what you’re unsure about as well, including the needs you believe your brand addresses, because that’s gonna help identify what you actually need to learn.

2. Speak to people before and after they choose

Customer research for small business can start with a manageable mix of conversations. Include people who haven’t bought yet, recent customers, repeat customers and those who considered you but chose someone else. Before buying, explore their impressions of your industry, what they need from businesses like yours and what they currently think of your brand. Afterwards, uncover what made them choose you and how the experience compared. Speak with different people at each stage, but return to some of the same people to understand how their expectations and impressions changed, if at all.

For Popits, that could mean speaking with parents considering a snack for weekend sport, then following up after their household has tried it. Include adults buying it for themselves too. For Chapter Realty, speak with homeowners before they appoint an agent, after they’ve chosen one, and after the sale if possible. Choosing an agent and being pleased with the eventual sale result tell you different things. And don’t only ask your happiest customers. The people who went elsewhere can reveal needs you haven’t adequately addressed.

You might also be thinking, “Where do I find these people?” or “People aren’t willing to give us this feedback”. To find people to speak with, start with recent enquiries, past customers, your email list or social audience. You can also invite feedback after a purchase, arrange a quick chat after a property appraisal, or work with a local sports club or community group to reach people who haven’t bought from you. A small thank-you, like a sample or voucher, can help, but making it easy matters too. Ask for five minutes, explain what you’re trying to improve and give them the choice of a quick call or short survey. Sometimes people will be more comfortable being honest through an anonymous form or speaking with someone outside your business. You’re not gonna hear from everyone, and any incentive should thank them for their time, regardless of what they say.

The bigger end of business does it with paid focus groups to analyse purchasing intentions as well as things like impressions of advertising, website navigation usability, and even packaging. Which is not to say you can’t do this too, but if you’re a smaller business, you can start small with your local community and existing customers to find these insights.

3. Get them talking about the actual decision

When you’re seeking this feedback from a customer (or a customer who decided not to buy), you’ve got to give people room to describe what happened in their own words. Ask them to walk you through when the need arose, where they were, what they wanted to achieve, which alternatives they considered, and what nearly stopped them. Avoid suggesting your preferred answer. Getting someone to agree that your packaging looks premium or your team seems trustworthy doesn’t explain much about their decision. Give them a chance to bloody explain it or you’re gonna be left with confirmation bias and you may as well have stayed at step 1.

With Popits, a parent might describe needing something easy to pack between school pickup and swimming lessons. An adult might have wanted a snack for the drive to or from a social tennis game. For Chapter Realty, a growing family might need to sell before buying somewhere bigger, while a downsizer wants help managing a move after decades in one home, while both are looking for an agent that understands these situations, especially if they have experienced them themselves. Those situations reveal more than demographic descriptions like “parents aged 30–45” or “Sydney homeowners”. They help you understand the needs, priorities and circumstances your brand strategy should account for and how well you align with those types of customers. Because the reality is that you’re not going to be for everyone and you might align with some segments of the market more than others…or even multiple but for different reasons and times of need. Without that insight though, you’re left without much of a solid direction to aim at for your strategy.

4. Compare what people say with what they actually do

What people say versus what they actually do can be miles apart. For example, many customers consider themselves altruistic and might follow the belief of “buying local to help the community” but end up buying from multi-national companies. So look for patterns in the conversations, then cross reference them with actual buying behaviour data where your industry and access allow it. This combines qualitative research, meaning the explanations and experiences of customers from their own mouths, with quantitative research, being the numbers showing the real outcome of when and how often something happens. A few interviews can uncover useful possibilities, but they don’t tell you how common those views are across your market and if they really are what ends up converting a sale. Equally, a sales report can show a change without explaining what caused it. The caveat always here is it’s often a mix of qualitative and quantitative reasons that people chose to buy, but for the times where there are discrepancies or outlier instances, it’s best if you can to have as much insight from both sides of this customer research coin.

Popits could compare feedback about flavours, price and convenience with available retailer sales reports, alongside its own ecommerce basket sizes and repeat orders. People might praise one flavour while another sells more, but you might be left with a choice if one product that sells less has a better margin. Additionally, check promotions, availability and distribution before deciding preference explains the difference because if the product isn’t where and when a customer needs it, coming to mind is only one half of the equation if it’s not available.

Chapter Realty could compare customers’ needs and stated reasons for choosing an agent with appraisal appointments and signed listings. If downsizers value its approach and consistently become clients, that could support further investigation over time of that target market if it emerges as a highly viable market. Use the numbers to test your interpretation of what customers are saying before shaping the strategy around a handful of enthusiastic comments.

5. Use the findings to shape who you target and when you show up

This is where customer research becomes particularly useful for brand strategy. Comparing what you’ve discovered with your assumptions, then deciding which customer needs your business is best placed to serve is the best starting point you can have, rather than going in blind.

Chapter Realty might find that the older demographic of downsizing sellers particularly value more in-person, patient guidance, clear communication and help coordinating their next move. If the opportunity is viable, that could inform the brand’s targeting, positioning, messaging and service experience. Its “Your Chapter” concept then has a specific customer need behind it, reflected in everything from its appraisal presentation done while sat next to them on their couch, rather than sent in a PDF via email, to the way agents provide additional assistance to co-ordinate their move from their home and even the purchase of their new downsized residence by offering a buyer’s agent service (or partnership referral with a separate buyer’s agent business).

For a product with wider market appeal like Popits, the findings could reveal several buying situations worth building associations with. These are called category entry points: the needs, occasions and circumstances that bring a product or service category to mind and inform when and where the product is available. After-school hunger for every day of the week could be one of these instances where Popits can use this insights to shape its packaging design with multi-packs for higher purchase frequency, that combines with advertising, content and distribution, connecting the brand with this kind of moment and making it easy to buy and have on hand where those needs occur. Whereas a single-serve for the front counter of a gym or sports club might serve different occasions.

Both approaches can work together. Chapter Realty still needs to be remembered when someone starts considering downsizing, and Popits still needs to understand who buys and eats its snacks. The aim is to give your brand a clear role in people’s lives, with the recognition and availability to be chosen when needed. That’s a much more useful direction for your branding and marketing than simply deciding it’s time for a different logo.

The thing is that this might feel overkill, or who knows, you might feel it’s a bit intrusive, especially the way many brands track us with online tools like Meta (Facebook/Instagram) to the point we think they’re listening to our converstions. It might even be a little scary talking to customers, either because it can reveal harsh truths, or because your inverted nature gets the better of you to want to reach out to people (I’ve got my hand up here, don’t worry). But knowing why customers choose you gives you something practical to build a strategy around. It helps define whose needs you can serve, what your brand should communicate and the times and places it needs to be present. It’s better than picking them from an assumed line-up and gives you something to fall back on, especially if you identify multiple customer segments that you could target, but only have the capacity to target one or some now, and the rest later. Maybe even allowing you to future-proof your brand for later expansion in mind, or niche down into a more lucrative offering like luxury real estate.

It doesn’t matter if your brand is genuinely there to help your customers rather than track them, or you simply want to ensure your business can remain profitable by attracting viable customers. This level of thought before you execute a new product or service, a new packaging design, an event, or advertising, will give you the confidence and direction in your decision making that identifies a need and a time/place you can be there for them, so that both you and your customers can mutually succeed. It’s all part of branding, marketing and business. And there’s nothing worse than buying from a brand that never really thoughtfully considered you as its customer, just the same as there’s nothing worse than serving a customer that is totally misaligned with your brand creating a bad experience for everyone. So if you need help turning those insights into brand strategy, naming, messaging and brand identity (yes, it includes a logo) for your growing brand, say g’day. Let’s give your brand a shot at better branding for better business success.

About me:

G’day I’m Frank. Give your brand a shot and try a new brand of branding. I help businesses develop better branding for better business success.

To contact or work with me, email: gday@gdayfrank.com
Say g’day on Instagram
Say g’day on LinkedIn
Or visit my Website to check out some of the branding work I do.

Imagine walking into a shopping centre with thousands of clothes to choose from. You can walk through every store, grab the shirts, pants, jackets and shoes you like, try them on and eventually walk out with an entirely new wardrobe. Or you could walk through those same stores with a professional stylist. The clothes haven’t changed. The shops haven’t changed. You both have access to exactly the same things. The difference is that the stylist understands what works together, what fits you, what suits the way you want to present yourself, what you already own, what you’ll actually wear and perhaps most importantly, what you should probably leave hanging on the rack. That’s a round about way I’ve been thinking about how I think businesses should approach AI when it comes to branding and marketing.

AI has given almost everyone access to an extraordinary collection of tools. You can generate an image, write an article, make a video, develop a presentation, brainstorm a name, create an advertisement or produce something resembling a logo within minutes. But access to a tool and expertise in what you’re trying to achieve with it are two very different things.

We’ve already been through this with Canva, Photoshop and countless other tools. Giving someone Photoshop doesn’t make them a graphic designer any more than giving me a set of hair clippers makes me a barber. I can technically remove your hair. Whether you want me anywhere near your head is another question. AI hasn’t really changed that principle. It’s just made the tools considerably easier to use.

AI can make you feel surprisingly good at things

There’s an interesting psychological effect that can happen when we make something ourselves. It’s been dubbed the IKEA effect, and research into it found that people can place greater value on things they’ve helped create, even when their creations aren’t necessarily as good as they think they are. They conducted experiments involving IKEA products, origami and LEGO, where many participants valued their own amateur creations similarly to expert-made versions simply because they’d invested effort in making them.

From what I can see, AI has become a new version of this. You type the prompt, you choose the image, you ask it to change the headline, you tell it to make the logo bigger, you regenerate it six times until something appears that you really like. And because you were involved in that process, it understandably starts to feel like your creation. I’m guilty of this myself after making personalised birthday cards for my kids. It made me feel, for a fleeting moment, that I was able to illustrate images that look just like them, when all I did was type a couple of sentences.

But there’s a distinct difference between that and developing the expertise required to create it yourself, let alone know if it’s objectively good and effective. It’s a little like assembling an IKEA cabinet and feeling pretty bloody pleased with the finished result. You did build it, but someone else worked out the dimensions, engineered the joints, chose the materials, designed every component and wrote the instructions that allowed you to put A into B.

AI does that similar kind of invisible work for us. That’s not intended to diminish your input either. Knowing what to ask for, making decisions and directing AI can absolutely be valuable skills. But it’s worth being aware of the attachment we can develop to something simply because we had a hand in creating it. Especially when someone with experience in that field tells us it isn’t working.

The original IKEA-effect research even cautioned that people may value ideas they’ve invested their own labour into more highly than other people do. So if a designer, marketer, customer or even your own team tells you something looks AI-generated, doesn’t feel like your brand or simply isn’t very good, don’t immediately take that as an insult to your newfound creative abilities. It might actually be useful feedback.

A professional with AI is still a professional

This is the distinction I think gets lost whenever people talk about AI replacing designers, marketers, writers, photographers or brand strategists.

The comparison isn’t really: Professional versus AI

It should be a suggestion: You using AI versus a professional using AI

A professional photographer can use computational photography. A designer can use Photoshop’s generative tools. A filmmaker can use AI video generation to fill gaps in between what was shot. The advantage isn’t that professionals have some secret collection of tools nobody else is allowed to touch anymore. It’s that they bring years of experience to the decisions being made before, during and after those tools are used. They know what to ask for. They know what to keep. They know what to change. And perhaps most importantly, they know when not to use it.

That’s particularly important with branding because we’re not creating pieces of stuff in insolation. A brand needs to work across different environments, over time, for different audiences and across hundreds of touchpoints. The logo you generate today might need to appear on a five-metre sign tomorrow. The character you create might need to appear in 50 different poses. The message you write needs to sound like the same business as the email somebody receives next week.

AI can produce an output, whereas the expertise determines whether that output is actually useful. The distinction I want to make here is that the prerequisite of using AI for branding and marketing isn’t that it requires a branding or marketing professional. But given AI is a tool, and like any tool, when it’s used by individuals that use them every day for specific purposes, it stands to reason that the outcome is going to be more effective when that tool is used by a professional that specialises in the area you need help with and even your specific industry.

It would be no different turning to a professional bricklayer to build a wall, than you going out and buying some bricks and mortar and figuring it out from a YouTube video. One is going to be quicker, more effective and have less headaches, and that’s the price you pay for a professional versus DIY on the cheap, right?

Some things I would not suggest using AI to create

For all the things AI can do remarkably well, there are still parts of your brand where I’d be particularly cautious about asking it to create the finished product.

Logos
A logo is probably the most obvious. Beyond whether an AI-generated logo is strategically or creatively appropriate (which are just as important), there are questions around originality, ownership, copyright and trade mark registration that make generating your primary brand identifier with AI unnecessarily risky. Use AI to research, brainstorm or test directions if it helps, but your final logo should be something you can confidently own, reproduce and protect.

Photos & Videos
I’d also be careful using AI to generate photos or videos of real people, especially those in your team. If you’re a dentist, accountant, real estate agent or any other business where customers are going to meet the people they’re seeing in your marketing, then credibility matters. Making someone look slightly younger, changing their face, inventing a different pose or generating a synthetic version of them can create that weird feeling that something isn’t quite right before a customer has even met them.

Flyers
Then there are flyers and advertisements. AI can certainly help create them, I see them everywhere now. But it’s incredibly good at giving you ‘more’. More copy. More graphics. More headlines. More icons. More calls to action. More visual effects. More fluff than the right amount of communication needed to get the point across quickly. The result can technically contain everything you asked for while communicating almost nothing particularly well. If it immediately looks like an AI-generated flyer rather than a communication from your brand, the tool has become more noticeable than the message.

Printing
I’d be especially careful with anything heading to print. Packaging, clothing, stationery, signage and other physical applications require more than generating something that looks okay on your screen. There can be requirements around resolution, colour profiles, bleed, dielines, finishes, separations, artwork setup and the particular production process being used. And if none of that terminology made any sense, there’s a sensible reason for you to consider hiring a professional for this task instead. This is where a graphic designer, finished artist, printer or other production specialist earns their money, because a JPEG isn’t necessarily a piece of production-ready artwork.

Some other notable mentions when AI is not the best tool to turn to first are Brand/Product Naming, Packaging Design, and depending on the complexity, any website or mobile app design/development.

Now these aren’t arguments for never touching AI. They’re arguments for recognising when the stakes of getting something wrong become considerably higher than the cost of getting someone who knows what they’re doing to help your brand deliver business success.

Where AI can be incredibly useful

The other side of this is that I use AI myself and think there are plenty of opportunities for businesses to use it well. For instance, AI can be a handy tool for research and data interpretation when it comes to analysing your brand performance. The difference though is that I’d generally use it to help with something in part, rather than it do the whole thing. Along with human oversight of any output AI makes, as it’s easy to miss an extra finger in an image.

So take photography. If you’ve already invested in professional team photography and someone happens to be wearing the wrong coloured shirt, AI can potentially help alter the clothing quickly. If the background needs extending or changing, it can be brilliant. But I’d try to preserve the actual person. The closer the result stays to the authentic source material, the less chance you have of presenting customers with a synthetic version of somebody they’re eventually going to meet.

The same principle applies to brand messaging. AI can be a useful writing partner, but give it something to work from. Have brand guidelines that outline your positioning, key messages, phrases, personality and tone of voice. Feed that context into the process and then actually read the output to make sure your blog articles, social posts, newsletters and documents continue to sound like the same brand. But even still, I’d suggest you take a stab at writing it yourself first and use AI to help you clean up your punctuation, spelling, grammar and succinctness to enhance the effectiveness of what you’re trying to communicate.

Characters and mascots are another good example when needing to re-produce it for low-ROI use cases like a quick social media post, or a last-minute addition to an email newsletter banner image. The point I want to make here is that even though it’s for a minimal impact addition, you still want your mascot to be consistently represented. So rather than asking AI to reinvent your character every time, develop a proper character sheet showing its proportions, front, side and rear views, its expressions, clothing, colours and defining physical traits. The AI then has a reference it can work from instead of guessing what your mascot looks like every time you ask it to wave.

Likewise, if you’re generating visuals that contain your existing logo, don’t accept some almost-right AI interpretation of it. Your logo already exists. Sub in your actual logo file if needed in a design tool, otherwise make sure it’s accurately represented rather than allowing an AI model to decide that today your wordmark apparently needs an extra letter and your icon could do with three additional fingers, if you get what I mean. The takeaway is ensuring the logo is accurately depicted and cross-reference it with your brand guidelines document if you need to.

Another one is an AI-generated website, especially if your business relies on a website or app, like an ecommerce business, this example could be very costly. Now don’t get me wrong, some of them look crazy impressive, especially as website development is not my schtick personally. However, I’ve heard enough tales of people that have made AI-generated websites or apps and over time they used it to fix parts here and there as the site or app has grown. Only to be left with a dog’s breakfast pile of indecipherable code and functionality that an actual website developer needed to be called in to fix to keep the business running. It’d be one thing for a website developer to use an AI tool like Claude Code to develop a website, compared to a gumby like me. As they know what to look for, that might be wrong or better yet, what is easier to use from a consumer user interaction standpoint. While someone like me who hasn’t got the faintest idea if there is a problem with that code, let alone how to fix it, is oblivious when I effectively don’t know what I don’t know when it comes to websites that I don’t work on day in, day out like a developer does.

Lastly, if you’re using AI to write your emails for you, especially through systems capable of automatically sending them, put a pause on auto-send and read everything. Every bloody word. And this goes for any form of writing, which could be a social media post or blog article. Your customer doesn’t care that an AI wrote something incorrect, inappropriate, generic or weird on your behalf. As far as they’re concerned, you sent it. That’s ultimately the distinction and that impression you leave someone with might carry a negative impact with it. So AI can assist your brand. It shouldn’t be allowed to carelessly impersonate it.

If it looks like AI, that’s probably the problem

We’re getting better at recognising AI-generated work and our bullshit detectors are on high alert most of the time, especially for those who are very anti-AI. There are certain visual treatments, writing structures, phrases, punctuation habits, overly polished voices, imagery and design conventions that increasingly make people think, “Yeah, that’s AI”. And we’ve gotta realise and remember that once that becomes the first thing somebody notices, you’ve created a branding problem.

Because instead of paying attention to what you’re saying, they’re paying attention to how you made it. This is why I wouldn’t be offended if someone tells you something you’ve created looks or sounds AI-generated. Even if they’re wrong, that’s useful information, right? Something about the execution has distracted them enough from the message that the production method became the message.

The same would apply if someone said your brochure looked like a cheap template, your photography looked like stock imagery or your website looked exactly like someone else’s. Take the feedback for what it is. Then ask whether the AI has actually improved the communication or simply made producing it easier.

Use AI to help you, not replace you

My general rule for using AI in branding and marketing is pretty simple, use AI to help with something, not necessarily to do the whole thing. Use it to generate options. Extend an image. Help organise your thoughts. Critique an idea. Rewrite something. Hunt for some research and make sense of it for you. Remove a background. Brainstorm headlines. Create variations. Speed up repetitive work. Help turn something that already belongs to your brand into another useful execution. But keep a human making the important decisions. And when those decisions require expertise you don’t have, consider whether doing it yourself is actually saving anything or just causing you headaches down the track.

Additionally, to repeat my earlier point, if looks/sounds like AI then it’s going to be an unwanted distraction that detracts from your branding and marketing intentions.

Of course, business owners already have limited time. But you can spend hours prompting AI to develop a flyer, another three trying to make the logo look right, a couple more working out why the printer says your artwork isn’t usable and another afternoon rewriting the copy until it sounds vaguely like you.

Hey, you may eventually get there. Or you could spend that time doing the things you’re actually an expert at and have someone who understands branding, design or marketing use the exact same AI tools alongside their own expertise to get you somewhere better. That’s the opportunity I think AI presents. Not replacing expertise, but amplifying it when used appropriately.

The shopping centre is open to everyone. We can all walk in and buy whatever clothes we like. But if the way you present yourself really matters, there’s still considerable value in having someone beside you who knows what suits you, what works together, what you’re trying to achieve and what should stay on the rack. AI certainly gives us access to more tools than we’ve ever had to give your brand a shot at better branding and marketing. Knowing what to do with them to create that better business success is still the important bit.

About me:

G’day I’m Frank. Give your brand a shot and try a new brand of branding. I help businesses develop better branding for better business success.

To contact or work with me, email: gday@gdayfrank.com
Say g’day on Instagram
Say g’day on LinkedIn
Or visit my Website to check out some of the branding work I do.

Put your name before what you sell. There’s a fairly simple pecking order I think more brands should consider when it comes to marketing themselves. Not literally in every instance, of course. There are plenty of occasions where explaining what you sell needs to take priority, particularly if you have a new product, an unfamiliar category or something that requires a little more explanation.

But like any conversation you might have with someone for the first time, you don’t first introduce yourself by saying what you do before what you name is. So when every piece of marketing leads with the product, service or category before it leads with the brand selling it, there’s a risk that all the attention you’re generating is helping people remember what they saw without necessarily remembering who it came from.

I recently saw a fellow brand man by the name of Mark Thouless who put it perfectly in video on LinkedIn:

“If people just think about the product before you, then the next time they want it, they can get it anywhere because lots of people sell it too.”

And that’s really the problem. If you sell coffee and all I remember is coffee, you’ve helped coffee. If you’re an accountant and all I remember is that you do tax returns, you’ve helped accountants. If you’re a real estate agent and all I remember from your advertising is that you sell houses, you’ve probably helped whichever real estate agent happens to be standing in front of your customer when they eventually decide to sell their property.

The product matters. The service matters. The category obviously matters. But if you’re spending money trying to build awareness, you probably want some of that awareness and thought of “Which brand comes to mind first?” to belong to you.

The category isn’t yours to own

This is the reminder, the category isn’t yours to own, even though the idea of positioning your brand and market share comes close. Now, there’s a reason brands naturally gravitate towards showing people what they sell because it makes it easy to understand right off the bat.

Coffee brands show coffee beans, cups and various shades of brown. Dentists show smiles and teeth. Real estate agents show houses. Accountants show calculators, graphs and people looking surprisingly happy while staring at spreadsheets. These cues and descriptors for the most part quickly communicate the category you’re in and it gives customers familiar visual shortcuts for understanding what they’re looking at.

The problem is that your competitors have access to exactly the same shortcuts. If ten coffee brands are all trying to communicate COFFEE as loudly as possible, they inevitably start borrowing from the same visual language. Brown, black, cream, coffee beans, steaming cups and perhaps some lovely photographs or illustrations of Colombian plantations. Everyone nails the brief to successfully communicate coffee. But who, out of any of them, does anyone remember and go hunting for again? Especially if they don’t have a commanding shelf presence or availability at the time.

The same thing happens with messaging. Businesses often give the most prominent ‘real estate’ title in an advertisement, website, sign or piece of packaging to categorise the service so it’s bleedingly obvious, while their own brand name sits somewhere above it waiting patiently to be noticed.

This makes sense if your biggest marketing challenge is convincing people that coffee exists. For most established categories, it probably isn’t. Your potential customer already knows coffee exists. They know dentists exist. They know accountants exist. They know supermarkets sell breakfast cereal and hardware stores sell drills. What they don’t necessarily know, or remember, is you and that right there is the reason branding and marketing exist.

Look at the shelf

A recent example I wanted to highlight since talking about coffee a few times is the brand, La Colombe and in particular its Draft Latte range of on-the-go canned coffee.

If you look at the image below of this supermarket shelf filled with ready-to-drink coffee, it’s not hard to miss the trend of fairly predictable visual language for this category. Coffee colours. Browns. Blacks. Creams. Product descriptors. Imagery and graphics designed to reassure you, very quickly, that what you’re looking at is indeed coffee.

Even Starbucks, which has one of the world’s most recognisable brands, has leaned heavily into familiar coffee-category cues across its ready-to-drink products. Then there’s La Colombe that you can see at the top left of the image.

Their packaging uses a predominantly white background, its distinctive dove mark and branding, with bands and areas of colour helping differentiate each of their product variants. I could safely say that the company deliberately developed its universal design language to run its own race rather than blending into the level of how many other brands un-distinctively present themselves across five levels of shelving in this example.

Placed amongst a wall of products trying very hard to look like coffee, you don’t have to wonder if it’s a coffee product. All you have to do is spot their branding and it’s far easier to spot their brand in a sea of same. And that’s the important bit. It doesn’t need to disguise what the product is. Draft Latte and other coffee related terminology is still written on the can. The product information is there. The shopper is also standing in a section of the supermarket dedicated to ready-to-drink coffee, surrounded by other ready-to-drink coffees. There are already plenty of contextual clues doing the category communication for it.

So rather than spending every available inch reinforcing COFFEE, the packaging has more opportunity to reinforce La Colombe the brand. That’s name first, product second.

Context can do some of the work

This is where I think brands can become unnecessarily nervous. There can be an assumption that if we don’t immediately show, say or illustrate exactly what we sell, people won’t understand what they’re looking at. Sometimes that’s true. But context does a lot more work than we give it credit for.

A can sitting in the ready-to-drink coffee section doesn’t have to single-handedly explain the existence of canned coffee. A dentist’s sign attached to a dental practice doesn’t necessarily require a giant photograph of somebody smiling. A real estate agency’s For Sale board already has the considerable advantage of being attached to a house that’s for sale.

Customers aren’t encountering brands in a vacuum. They’re searching Google for something. Walking down a particular supermarket aisle. Browsing a category and even a location in an online search. Driving past a business. Looking at a trade show stand. Comparing three businesses that provide roughly the same service. The environment is already giving them information.

So ask what information you need to add to what is already present. Sometimes the answer will absolutely be the product. But sometimes the more valuable use of that space is making your name, colours, typography, character, message or other distinctive brand assets considerably more prominent. Because once someone understands the category, repeating the category louder isn’t necessarily helping them distinguish you within it.

Context is such an underrated part of marketing. As it lets us focus more on building your brand and expanding its presence. Context helps give it a considerable leg up already that isn’t required to amplify further, costing you time, money, space and effort to communicate more than you need to. While also giving customers less to process and remember.

Don’t hide what you sell

None of this means you should make your marketing deliberately cryptic. There is a particularly annoying version of branding where a business becomes so determined to appear clever, premium or distinctive that nobody can work out what the hell it actually does. That’s not the goal or anything close to what I’m suggesting here. If I visit your website and spend five minutes trying to determine whether you’re a management consultancy, software platform or spiritual retreat for burned-out executives, we’ve probably gone a little too far.

Product and category communication still matter, as many businesses live in the niches and require that extra attention to product/service communication and even education. The difference is understanding the role of that communication and how/when it’s introduced.

So let’s say, your product helps someone understand what they are buying. Your brand helps them understand who they’re buying it from. Your positioning can help give them a reason why/when they might think of and choose you. Good marketing needs to connect all three rather than allowing one to consume everything else, and that right there becomes a pitfall for many startups and small businesses that get lost in only focusing on one or two of these at most.

So instead of removing product communication, look at the hierarchy.

What do I notice first?

What do I notice second?

What am I most likely to remember?

And if I encountered this without your logo, could it just as easily belong to three of your competitors?

Those questions can completely change the way you approach a piece of packaging, an advertisement, a website or even a sign on the side of a building. It’s basically the ‘thumb test’ another fellow brand man I know, Phillip Oakley came up with. Which is to say, cover up your logo on any piece of communication. Your coffee cups. Your shopfront sign. Your For Sale board. Your social media ad. Is there anything else that is easily discernable for a customer to know it’s your brand?

Additionally, showing the product in its use case is often a better form of communication than saying or showing what it is. As it could be this use case that is often uniquely defining of what your brand is remembered for, like Netflix and Chill.

So sell the product, yes. But not at the expense of your brand in many ways, not just your logo.

Make the brand sell the product

There’s also a much longer-term reason for getting this hierarchy right. Every product you sell is an opportunity to build your brand. Every coffee can that gets picked up, every package sitting in someone’s pantry, every vehicle driving around town, every invoice, every sign, every advertisement and every interaction with your service can contribute to somebody becoming more familiar with you. But only if you give the brand enough prominence to do so. Otherwise, you can end up continually marketing individual products while never accumulating much recognition for the thing connecting them all.

This becomes particularly important as a business grows. Products change. Services evolve. New ranges get introduced. Old ones disappear. Customer needs shift. Categories change. A strong brand gives all of those things somewhere to belong.

I’ve always had this thought that if you’re expanding into a new category, you’d honestly be crazy to ditch what has made you successful in one category and change it to fit the category norms of that new one you enter. So bring across that brand equity you have, as it’s more likely going to be the thing that has you standing out than just being some new player that thinks it has to play by the rules of everyone else around you just because you’re the newcomer.

If La Colombe launches another flavour tomorrow, it doesn’t need to build awareness entirely from zero. The new product can borrow from everything people already recognise about La Colombe. In 2024, the company said its updated brand design, including its logo, colour palette and packaging, would extend across product and retail touchpoints, reinforcing that connection beyond a single can or flavour.

That’s the compounding value of putting the brand first. You’re not just selling today’s product. You’re building recognition that tomorrow’s product can use too.

Make sure they remember your name

There’s a very simple test you can apply to almost any piece of marketing. Take a step back from it and ask what you’re actually helping someone remember. Are you helping them remember that coffee is delicious? That dentists can improve their smile? That accountants can help at tax time? That real estate agents sell houses?

Or are you helping them remember your brand when one of those needs arises?

Because most businesses aren’t fortunate enough to sell something nobody else can provide. There are other coffees. Other accountants. Other dentists. Other designers. Other real estate agents. Other products sitting centimetres away from yours on exactly the same shelf.

If people remember only the thing you sell, they can buy it from any of them that is available without preference, especially when many are solely focused on price if there’s nothing to sway them otherwise. So don’t stop communicating the product. Don’t make people guess what you do. And don’t sacrifice clarity just for the sake of looking different. Simply consider the order.

Use the category cues you actually need. Let context do some of the work where it can. Give your distinctive brand assets enough prominence to become familiar. Make the name easier to notice, recognise and remember. Even how it’s spelt and pronounced can make an impact based on its ease to recall. Then connect that name clearly to the product or service you want to be known for and make it prominent over or larger than the service or category descriptor in your communication. Because when the customer eventually wants that product again, you don’t just want them thinking, “I need a coffee.” You want them thinking, “I want a La Colombe coffee”

Name first, product second. Give your brand a shot at it with better branding and marketing for better business success.

About me:

G’day I’m Frank. Give your brand a shot and try a new brand of branding. I help businesses develop better branding for better business success.

To contact or work with me, email: gday@gdayfrank.com
Say g’day on Instagram
Say g’day on LinkedIn
Or visit my Website to check out some of the branding work I do.

Remember the memory card game you probably played as a kid? A bunch of cards are placed face down on the table. You turn two cards over at a time and try to find a matching pair. If they don’t match, you turn them back over and try to remember where they were for later. Branding is a little similar. Except your customers aren’t trying to match two pictures of a banana. They’re constantly storing little pieces of information about brands and, hopefully, connecting some of them together.

They might see golden arches and think McDonald’s. Hear a particular piece of music and think of an airline. Spot a certain colour combination and remember a product they saw at the supermarket. Drive past your for sale signage every morning on the way to work. Remember the unusual packaging they held six months ago. Recognise the mascot that keeps appearing in their social feed.

Every one of these interactions has the potential to become another card placed somewhere in their memory. But the objective isn’t simply for someone to recognise your logo, colour or mascot. Eventually you want them to make a much more important match.

I need something → Your brand comes to mind → You offer what I need.

Because being known is nice, which is brand awareness. But being thought of when someone actually needs what you sell is considerably better.

Being known isn’t enough

Brands spend an enormous amount of time trying to get attention. They want the social post that gets shared. The advertising campaign everyone talks about. The activation that gets people through the door. The clever bit of creative that stops someone’s thumb for three seconds longer than usual. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with any of that and brand awarenes definitely is needed, but that’s not the be all-end all. As there’s a big difference between getting someone’s attention today and being remembered and thought of by them months or even years later, especially when needed.

Someone might remember an ad without remembering who it was for. They might laugh at your social post and never think about you again. They might even recognise your name when they see it without ever thinking of your brand when they’re actually looking to buy something in your category. In marketing and branding jargon, what we’re really trying to build is called mental availability. Mental availability is essentially the likelihood of a brand coming to mind in a buying situation. To a normal, non-batshit crazy person that doesn’t obsess over brands, you might just call it being thought of at the right time.

That’s an important distinction because brand awareness ends at someone either knowing you or not knowing you. They might recognise you, they might remember your logo. They might know what you sell. They might associate you with a particular location, product, service, experience, price point or characteristic. Or, ideally, they might think of you without seeing anything at all. But if you don’t come to mind in that buying situation when they need or want what you have to offer, that’s potentially the harder game to play and it’s one that is generally won over a much longer period than the lifespan of your latest short-term campaign that is just trying to get your brand known.

Give people more cards to match

Imagine if every interaction someone has with your brand creates another card in their memory. Your logo is a card. Your colours are another. Your packaging. Your signage. Your advertising. Your website. Your store. Your staff. Your uniforms. Your mascot. Your photography. Your social content. Your tone of voice. The music you use. The shape of your product. The experience of opening it. Even the smell when someone walks through the door.

The more recognisable each interaction people have with your brand, the more opportunities you have to build memories. But that doesn’t mean the answer is simply to create more stuff. If every card appears to belong to a completely different game, you’re making the task harder. Your Instagram looks one way. Your packaging another. Your store completely different. Your website has a different personality again. Your advertising changes depending on which agency made it and your staff have never heard of the brand strategy everyone spent six months developing two years ago.

You’ve certainly created plenty of cards. They’re just incredibly difficult to match. On the other hand, strong brands have figured out how to build connections between these things. The logo feels connected to the packaging. The packaging feels connected to the advertising. The advertising sounds like the website. The website feels like the physical environment. The experience customers have with staff reinforces the promises they’ve already heard elsewhere. They don’t necessarily need appear identical. They need to feel like they belong in the same deck.

Over time, this creates multiple ways for someone to retrieve the same brand from memory. You don’t have to show them the logo every single time because eventually the colour might be enough. Or the character. Or the packaging shape. Or a phrase. Or a sound. Turn over almost any card and, hopefully, they know what it’s supposed to match.

Positioning determines what you’re trying to match

Of course, recognising your brand is only part of the game. Because ultimately you don’t just want someone to know who you are. You want them to understand you’re associated with and when you might be relevant to them.

This is where positioning becomes important.

Positioning is often reduced to a sentence buried somewhere inside a brand strategy presentation. But the real outcome of positioning isn’t what you’ve written in a document. It’s what exists in someone else’s head. What do they think about when they think about you? What do they remember you for? What situations make them think of you? And do those associations actually relate to something you sell?

Distinctive branding can help someone identify who. Positioning can help establish what. While mental availability AND physical availability (being available when/where needed) can increase the likelihood of that brand coming to mind when. The aim is to connect all three to drive a strong brand position to outmanoeuvre those competing in your market, so that you’re the go-to first brand the comes into a consumers mind for all the right reasons.

Someone sees your brand repeatedly and starts recognising it. They connect it with certain products, services, characteristics and experiences. Those memories become stronger through repeated exposure. Then, at some point, something happens in their own life that triggers one of those memories.

When they’re hungry.

When their car breaks down.

When they need an accountant.

When they’re buying their first home.

When they’ve run out of toothpaste.

When they need a brand designer.

Suddenly the card they’re trying to match isn’t your logo. It’s a need or sometimes a want. Which is also called a category entry point (another marketing jargon term for the specific need, time, location, or emotion that causes a consumer to think about a product/service category and consider making a purchase). The brands with strong mental availability have spent years making sure there are plenty of cards in people’s heads that can lead back to them and then back it up with physical availability to be present at those times/places that their offering is needed.

Play ’20 Questions’ with your brand

One way to test this is to turn your brand into a game of 20 Questions. Imagine someone has secretly selected your brand from all the brands within your category and another person has to work out which one it is using only yes or no questions.

Is it Australian?

Does it have physical stores?

Is it expensive?

Is its main colour blue?

Does it have a mascot?

Is it known for being fast?

Is it aimed primarily at families?

Would I find it in a supermarket?

Does it use a particular style of packaging?

Is it strongly associated with a certain location?

Does it always say a particular phrase?

Does it offer this particular thing?

And so on. The interesting question isn’t just whether they eventually guess your brand. It’s how many questions it takes them. If it takes all 20 questions to separate you from everyone else in your category, there’s probably not a lot of useful information attached to your brand. If someone can get there in five, that’s considerably more interesting and is more likely for those big famous brands we all know and buy from. But it means there are characteristics, associations or distinctive assets that help narrow the field quickly. And they don’t all have to be completely unique.

You might use the same colour as five competitors. Sell the same products as ten competitors. Operate in the same locations and make many of the same claims. But the particular combination of things people associate with you can still make your brand much easier to identify.

So play the game. What questions would someone need to ask to get to your brand? And perhaps more importantly, what could you build into your brand today that would mean they need to ask fewer questions tomorrow?

Play ‘Guess Who?’ with your category

You can take the same idea and play another childhood game with your brand. Guess Who? Except instead of a board filled with people wearing glasses, hats and questionable 1980s hairstyles, imagine every little window contains a brand from your category including yours. Now start asking questions.

Does the brand use blue?

*Click* Down go six competitors.

Does it have physical locations?

*Click* Another five disappear.

Does it have a recognisable character?

*Click* Another three.

Is it strongly associated with a particular product?

*Click*

Does it communicate in a particular way?

*Click*

Eventually there’s one little window left standing. Hopefully yours.

Now reverse the game. What question would make someone knock your brand down? That’s where things can get uncomfortable. Because you might discover that many of the things you’ve been treating as distinctive aren’t particularly distinctive at all. Everyone uses blue. Everyone talks about quality. Everyone says they care about customers or that they’re “people first”. Many use the same style of photography or the same stock photos. A lot of brands now have clean sans-serif typography. Everyone claims to make things simple or “No BS”. Everyone’s e-commerce website looks suspiciously like it was made from the same Shopify template.

The point isn’t that you need to deliberately do the opposite of every competitor just for the sake of being different. It’s to understand what people can genuinely use to identify, remember and retrieve your brand when needed. Because if every answer applies equally well to everyone else, you’re making the memory game unnecessarily difficult by not giving your brand a shot at creating better business success.

The best brands make the game easy

Your customers aren’t sitting at home studying your brand guidelines. They’re not analysing your positioning. They’re not keeping a spreadsheet of your distinctive brand assets. And they’re definitely thinking about your brand far less than you are….like, 1000x less.

They have jobs to do, kids to pick up, dinners to cook, emails to answer and thousands of other brands competing for some small piece of their attention. I’ve heard a well known marketing professor, Mark Ritson countless times say, “brands are little things to customers”. So don’t make remembering your brand harder than it needs to be.

Strong brands effectively rig the memory game in their favour, and it’s often why keeping your brand simple is often more effective. They repeatedly give people recognisable things to see, hear, hold and experience. They connect those things with particular products, services, needs, situations and ideas. And they keep doing it consistently enough and for long enough that those memories become easier to retrieve.

That’s why long-term brand building matters. You’re effectively spending years putting cards on the table and strengthening the connections between them. A logo on a sign. Packaging in someone’s hand. A character in an advertisement. Music they’ve heard dozens of times. A distinctive store. A conversation with a member of staff. A piece of content. A particular message repeated again and again. Each interaction might seem relatively insignificant on its own but together, they can create something considerably more valuable… A memory, or as I call it, “a captivating moment of connection”. Because the ultimate test of a strong brand isn’t simply, “Have you heard of us?” It’s, “When you need what we sell, do you think of us?” And perhaps the best measure of all: “How quickly?” and “How often?”.

Branding is a memory game and the brands that win aren’t simply the ones people remember. They’re the ones that have been given a shot to help consumers think of them when it matters with better branding.

About me:

G’day I’m Frank. Give your brand a shot and try a new brand of branding. I help businesses develop better branding for better business success.

To contact or work with me, email: gday@gdayfrank.com
Say g’day on Instagram
Say g’day on LinkedIn
Or visit my Website to check out some of the branding work I do.

The headline act of the work I do with clients is to help set the foundations of their brand. To develop a clear strategy and an identity to help them captivate and connect with a target market that chooses them over another, a bit like building a relationship if you will.

The other half of what I do to help my clients is the gritty maintenance part of branding. To maintain and grow its presence in the market which is a long term labour of time, effort, money, understanding and perseverance until proper value is created.

Which is why if I had to compare maintaining a brand over time to anything, as a married man myself, it would be marriage. Because you could say it similarly takes things like a commitment, shared values, alignment, and a common goal to succeed and succeed over a sustained period of time.

But what’s more interesting is that the more I thought about this idea, this process of maintaining and growing a brand over time does play out like many marriages do between spouses. I get that this is probably going to be a bit of a laboured metaphor, but stick with me here, as I start with the typical phases many businesses go through over the course of a brand’s lifecycle.

The Honeymoon Phase

This is where everything is fresh, exciting and you can’t wait to tell people about it. The social media posts are flying, emails are being sent out left, right, and centre and there’s an internal energy to get everything out there faster than humanly possible. This is why people find branding and even rebranding so exciting, just like that honeymoon holiday bliss.

The Reality Phase

Daily business operations, routines, and minor flaws set in as that initial rush of excitement fades. Reality sets in that this is harder than it looks and you wonder how you’re ever going to compete with these big brands. Even after 3 months of posting on social media, writing up 15 blogs and sending your 5th email campaign, the commitment to the cause starts to dwindle, especially when other priorities pick up within the business because of expansion or other issues that pop up from new customer interactions. This is why many businesses hire external help to manage branding and marketing efforts or hire dedicated teams to manage this. Rather than dropping it onto the plate of people within the organisation whose job descriptions are far removed from customer acquisition, let alone maintaining the brand’s presence…oftentimes it’s the office receptionist.

The Power Struggle Phase

This is where disappointments surface and deeper disagreements emerge between different departments as the team battles autonomy in their own team silos versus togetherness to reach that shared goal. The finance team, the sales team, the customer service team, the distribution team, the product/business development team, and the marketing team, all duking it out to meet their own KPI quotas and budget prioritisation. The idea of finance, sales, customer service, biz dev, distribution and marketing not all working together to perform the same outcome of generating profit while ensuring customer satisfaction is lost on everyone, when the brand has the potential to be that unifying thing that helps each team succeed by working together. Instead it’s fallen by the wayside and deprioritised as just “looking and sounding nice” or simply consistent enough.

The 7 year itch

Ever wondered why so many brands rebrand and we all wonder why everyone gets upset about them on social media? It’s this perpetual urge of businesses that believe they need to reinvent themselves to possibly get out of their dissatisfaction by remaking the logo above the door that signals that change. It’s often when a new CEO, or a head of marketing, or creative director comes in as a new participant to the relationship. Change is sought after to band-aid fix the issues, or hopefully act as proper deep rooted fundamental change across the business. The least effective is the change in branding just because the people within the business are sick of it, when it’s more likely that keeping it would have been more effective for customers who engage with the brand a hundred times less than the team behind the brand ever will.

The Stability Phase

This is where acceptance of what the brand is, what it stands for, how it looks and sounds is now locked in. There’s a collective realisation that you’ve got something now and we dare not change it because you know what it should and shouldn’t do. This is what you are known for and this is how you should maintain your brand position. You learn to respect the guardrails of your brand’s guidelines. You instinctively know how and where it should show up, behave and what’s best for it as it grows. This should lead to confidence in creating more opportunity to go bigger, with bigger budgets, greater capacity to do more and potentially see exponential growth in the value of your brand beyond your product and service utility, because you see your brand as an investment now, rather than a cost.

The Mature/Legacy Phase

At this stage, this is where brands transcend the products and services that helped create their legacy. This is why, after 30–40 years of maintaining their brand into maturity, they can start pushing the boundaries with their brand assets like McDonald’s does in advertising that never says or shows their logo, let alone their products, because they have utilised their branding so deeply that it has created vast and fast recognition with minimal communication. This is where total acceptance of the brand puts it in a higher tier within the business as the connection point centred between finance, HR, sales, business development, customer service, legal, distribution, administration and marketing.

So it’s safe to say that it’s not smooth sailing for any business to create what ends up being a mature legacy brand the likes of which we see in brands like Coca-Cola, Virgin, McDonald’s OR Nike. And yet there are no doubt a great deal of things you can do within your business to help it along its way so that you create a great relationship bond between your brand and your team, not just with your customers. So here goes, some brand relationship advice, if you will:

1. Strategy first, strategy always: set the foundations, and come back to it to form new plans of attack to achieve the strategy. The strategy is what helps you win, not just the execution. It’s all fun and games to try new ads, new products, hire a new agency or create a new logo. But if there’s no strategy or if it’s ignored, you may as well throw darts at a dart board with your eyes closed and face the other way. Market orientation, segmentation, targeting, positioning and objectives, that’s your strategy. All the tactical stuff to do your branding and marketing is the plan, they are the fun bits that you’ll eventually get bored with and run out of ideas without the strategy in place and the discipline to follow through with it and maintain it.
2. Marketing isn’t just about promoting your brand: Marketing is 4 key principles — product, price, placement and promotion. This means in your board room or weekly WIP meetings with different departments, marketing has a role to play in helping with the products and services you develop, how they can be priced, where they can be found/purchased and then how they can be promoted. Silo this role/effort to just promotion and watch your brand become irrelevant and severely undervalued or disconnected from what you sell. To do branding (maintaining your brand to help it grow, not just design a logo) the role of marketing needs to be taken seriously and implemented more vigorously.
3. Stop dicking with your brand assets: Don’t bloody touch ‘em… for years! Refresh as necessary for functionality reasons, like better legibility, or easier colour reproduction, fit it into an app icon, or just so you can embroider it on a shirt better. Your assets like a logo, colours, fonts, patterns, mascots, sounds, packaging. If they were designed well to begin with, keep them. And the longer you keep them, the more valuable they become as true assets of value to your business beyond product and service utility. If anything, add to them over time where it makes sense to help improve wider brand recognition and memorability. Because here’s a big point to remember, most customers aren’t frequent customers. They may only buy once in blue moon. They may also not need your brand at the time they see your brand. But in those times they do, they will search for what comes to mind. Change that moment of connection they had with what they remember your brand for and you’ve shot yourself in the foot.
4. Hire outside help to get out of your own way: This isn’t a point to sell my own services, as much as it is to say that branding is going to be done more effectively by the people that specialise in it. Be it marketers or branding specialists like strategists, naming experts, copywriters and designers, these are going to be the people that live and breathe the brand maintenance stuff for you as their one prerogative to help your brand grow. Even if you say you can do it yourself to begin with, the reality of the day-to-day maintenance will take its toll as other priorities take hold and it becomes one of these “I’ll do it later tasks” and opportunity cost is knocking on your door.
5. Protect your brand: When it gets to that stage of stability in knowing how your brand operates and how it should and can show up, this is the stage of maintenance I believe requires protection at all costs because it now has proper value. Be it protection of your IP against copycats who smell blood in the water, or ensuring it’s not steered off course because of trends or new blood coming into your team that have their own subjective ideas for what the brand should do entirely different. Maintaining that course of success you’re on can still be a tightrope for many brands and it might even be something as simple as dusting off that brand guidelines document in your bottom drawer, or having mandatory brand strategy meetings to review it every quarter, half year or year.
6. Branding is more than just the assets, it’s your team: There are many overlooked parts of developing and maintaining a brand, but one in particular I bang on about a lot is team culture as being one of the fundamental factors of brand success. The people behind the brand being on the same page and rigorously fighting to maintain a common, collectively understood idea of success is what forms a great internal brand identity. One that you can hire and fire by and set the tone for a particular personality and experience that you deliver and customers engage with. Because a brand needs to be a shared belief in something more than just your product or service. It’s a captivating moment of connection between company and customers. If there’s not that shared belief that for your team the brand they manage is the one for your customers, and for your customers that this is the brand for them, then we don’t have a brand. There’s a disconnect and no compelling reason to choose your business offering over another.

So that’s my spiel on brand maintenance. Sure it’s fun to work on branding at the start of things to create a new name, or a logo, or new packaging. But without some of these fundamentals in place, that honeymoon phase doesn’t last long and you may as well have not forked out the time, effort and money spent on setting your brand up for success if we can’t follow through with it by maintaining it effectively to help it grow. And if you’re not convinced, this is what the big brands spend an inordinate amount of time on maintaining when it’s helped them build multi-national brand presence. As I say, it’s better branding for better business success, so give your brand a shot with better branding.

About me:

G’day I’m Frank. Give your brand a shot and try a new brand of branding. I help businesses develop better branding for better business success.

To contact or work with me, email: gday@gdayfrank.com
Say g’day on Instagram
Say g’day on LinkedIn
Or visit my Website to check out some of the branding work I do.

Products and services come and go. A brand should last. That’s why many of the strongest brands aren’t built solely around what they sell, but around a bigger idea that gives people a reason or an idea to easily remember them, connect with them and choose them when needed.

This is the power of branding. But for many small businesses and start-ups, branding is often seen as nothing more than a unique name they can register and a logo above the door. Because they believe their offer is better, even as a newcomer in an already highly competitive and established market of competition. Oftentimes the offer is no better and no different at all, but creating some form of meaningful differentiation for your customers to recognise and value to set yourself apart from others, is something you can do in your branding. And that is with a brand concept.

Some people call it a brand concept, others might even describe it as your north star to follow and be guided by, which is a nice metaphor for how you can utilise the central idea that holds your brand together.

This is something I’ve endeavoured to do with as many clients as possible that I’ve worked with, who have seen the value in developing a brand that is based on a concept and not just a product or service. So here are three examples of brands I’ve developed that were based on a simple but unifying concept that tied each brand together with the breadth to accommodate change in their offering over time.

Figurs

As my most recent example, this newly reinvigorated accounting business was one my client wanted to start up again after years away from it since co-founding and operating a business college. The accounting business was previously called Open Book Business Solutions and it had no real brand to lean into when engaging with clients and relied solely on one-on-one engagement with clients for their accounting needs.

So to give this business venture a shot at success with a better brand, we looked at their offer and experience, their potential clients, the needs of those clients, their location and competition. During these strategy discussions two themes emerged:

• Business accounting + training, as more than what accountants offer
• Helping clients figure out their finances

Combining the experience of teaching business and finance through their private business college to not only train teams on better financial management, but also training individuals to upskill and join or partner with businesses to manage their finances exposed this “more than accountants” positioning for their brand.

While “figures”, “it figures” and “figuring out” became the basis of this brand concept that translated into the name ‘Figurs’ and was integrated heavily into the brand messaging as it became a word that stuck in many conversations we had together when developing the brand at each stage that it felt like a natural no-brainer for the brand to have as its concept as a connection point to being thought of as more than accountants when needed.

This concept further played out in the form of developing the Figurs logo, with the ‘g’ in ‘Figurs’ becoming a subtle figure eight ‘8’ shape. Additionally we developed a logomark symbol and brand mascot with the help of some alliteration to create Figgy the Figurs Phoenix. Figgy was developed as a natural extension of the Figurs name, but he also represents something bigger. As a phoenix, he symbolises the positive transformation that can happen when you figure out your finances, helping turn uncertainty into confidence. This symbology of a phoenix rising from the ashes as a metaphor for business transformation when your figure out your finances added further depth to the brand story told about how Figurs help its clients, rather than just some good looking bird in matching brand colours.

So with this concept in mind it becomes clearer to shape messaging, visuals, client targeting, and future offers around being more than accountants to help you figure out your finances, as it figures to count on Figurs. See, it writes itself in one on-brand bundle because of a concept that shapes the brand.

Saweet Way

When this client came to me we had no name, a rough idea of initial products, a need but more importantly an overarching idea in mind to have as the backbone of this new product-based brand. Which was improving metabolic health. See, many founders start new businesses off the back of personal experiences that transform their lives and they want to share that goodness with others.

I’ve seen this with another client of mine Raw C that started out with coconut water because of its naturally raw benefits that they enjoyed and wanted to make that accessible for everyone. Which I might add has transformed into a globally present brand after 13 years of backing the benefits of coconuts. But back to Saweet Way.

As a tie-in to improving metabolic health they also held the exclusivity in the Australian market of a new natural sweetener called allulose that is 70% the sweetness and 87% less calories than white sugar, while appearing and acting the same way as white sugar granules. Meaning it can be used just the same as white sugar to add sweetness with far less compromise to your metabolic health with a natural form of sweetener that has no funny aftertaste.

So nothing else like it on the market essentially and proved to be the most differentiated offer I’ve had the chance to work with and form a brand around. That said, this wasn’t just about an allulose product either, as they could easily expand into a whole range of products and even by extension form a media arm of this brand to further promote the core purpose of the brand to help customers improve their metabolic health.

That said, “Improve your metabolic health with a natural sweetener” isn’t exactly an attention grabbing headline to lead with from a brand perspective. Instead, when developing the positioning and name for this brand, I considered what this brand offers that means something to a consumer to allow them to have what they want without compromising their health to the same degree processed sugar does. As a result, I landed on the phrase “Keep it sweet”, which not only became the tagline but became the concept for the brand. And what is the feeling of keeping it sweet? “It’s saweet!” that slang way of emphasising the awesomeness of something, not to mention adding the A in sweet with allulose as another little nod to tie everything together.

However, to meet name registration requirements we couldn’t just name it Saweet, so we thought about how you would describe the use case of choosing and using one of their products, and that was “keep it sweet the Saweet Way”.

As for the logo, it has a mix of elements to communicate the feeling of the brand. The first was to look like a colourful treat brand and further extend the keep it sweet messaging by saying “make life colourful by keeping it sweet the Saweet Way”. This treat branding style also influenced the fat cursive wordmark for the logo. The next was to add a little smile beneath the two ee’s in Saweet that make it look like a smiling face and eyes. And finally the word WAY being integrated into the crossbar of the ‘t’ in the wordmark, to make it look like a street sign pointing to SAWEET WAY like the name of a street to follow.

All in all this brand concept came together to help subtly communicate and reinforce to consumers to encourage them to keep it sweet with a better alternative to sugar, and no need to turn to dull alternatives that just don’t make treats or drinks as colourful…like a vegan, sugarless cake…sorry!

Evening Clay

This brand I developed was much closer to home for me, quite literally as it was one I developed with my wife for a jewellery business she created. What started out as a creative hobby during covid turned into a handmade polymer clay earrings business sold online and at market stalls.

Now that was the end result, but the brand we developed started with the name first. And it was born from a really simple observation that she would mostly make these at night when our kids were asleep. Even with our second newborn, my wife was still at it making them, sometimes while nursing our daughter. So the name came quite naturally to call it ‘Evening Clay’. This became the brand story for consumers to connect with, especially for those with kids to appreciate the value beyond seeing them just as a $40-$50 pair of earrings.

This was extended to the logo with a crescent moon shape and a round moon shape represent ‘evening’ and an ‘e’ for Evening Clay. But we weren’t stopping there. As many of her earrings were designed with the same crescent moons and circular studs as a connection point to the brand.

Many small businesses like my wife’s, often start out with nothing more than a logo and typically their own name in the business name or something clique like Polymer Palace Jewellery. This is why consumers find it hard to buy into anything more than just the product and price tag in front of them. But if you communicate a little more substance as a concept that lifts the business up beyond just what it sells, you create greater perceived value.

Which is something we experienced at many of the markets we did. That when my wife was able to connect with customers walking by about the Evening Clay brand story a greater level of appreciation was revealed and you could see it on their faces, as their initial reactions changed from “they look nice” to “wow that’s quite inspiring as I could never have found that time to do something like this after I had my kids”.

So whether these handmade earrings were worn in the evening or during the day by customers, this Evening Clay brand was built on something more than just the product in hand, but by the concept and story that went into making it. Which is something that many famous brands around the world have done, like Rolls Royce, Hermés, and the good-old Australian made brand, Akubra that make our iconic version of cowboy hats like you see Crocodile Dundee wearing in those movies.

Give your brand a shot at a brand concept

There are many ways to develop and tie in a concept for your brand and the best ones I believe help shape business decisions when it comes to your offering, your team and who you want to attract to buy into your brand.

From these examples I’ve shown, it doesn’t take much to take a simple idea and creatively extend that out to all facets of your brand and business for customers to be captivated by and connect with, to see a greater level of value in choosing your brand over another — which is what we call brand equity, essentially the price your customers are willing to pay for your brand above the substitute, and that could be based on price, time and even distance to get it that quantifies this value over and above what you offer.

That is the value of a brand and you can give your brand a shot with better branding to develop a brand that creates better business success.

About me:

G’day I’m Frank. Give your brand a shot and try a new brand of branding. I help businesses develop better branding for better business success.

To contact or work with me, email: gday@gdayfrank.com
Say g’day on Instagram
Say g’day on LinkedIn
Or visit my Website to check out some of the branding work I do.

There’s a little section if you scroll down my website homepage called “WHY BRANDING?” and in there you’ll see 10 dot points that sum up the best reasons I could honestly give you for why branding matters and why better branding has a positive impact on business success. So here’s the list and I’ll expand on each one with a little bit of detail without getting carried away. That said, if all you do is read the 10 headline points, that’ll be enough to hopefully broaden your thinking to see the potential of better branding for your business.

People will pay more + go further to get you

There’s a video by marketing guru Seth Godin where he said, “The value of a brand is how much extra am I paying above the substitute. And if I’m not paying extra, you don’t have a brand”. Seth’s point is not that you have to charge more to have a brand. His point is that if a customer isn’t willing to pay a higher price, travel further, wait longer or choose your brand because of someone else’s recommendation over a comparable offer, then you’ve not given them a reason to choose you. And this is what branding (to develop a brand) does if customers are willing to go further to get it.

It might be the promise you distinctly deliver that a customer only wants to experience.

It might be the culture in your team that influences the experience a customer has with someone in your team that makes them want to choose your brand again.

It’s this added value beyond your product or service that makes a customer think of and want.

This substance that goes beyond your logo, tagline or brand colour is the value of your brand, which is called Brand Equity and it is worth billions to businesses all around the world.

It’s more than a $50 logo and it does take time and investment to grow that value but this is your brand’s super power that leads toward profit and growth.

To stand out on the street, shelf or scroll

At the top of the customer acquisition funnel or marketing funnel, is the Awareness level. This top of funnel area is where you need to get attention and build awareness for your product or service offering and we can do that with a brand. So this point is to say that with better branding that helps you stand out on the street, on the shelf, or while a customer is scrolling, it comes from your branding and marketing efforts. Firstly to have a compelling product or service and proposition, followed by the most effective placement for the right people to see it, and lastly it’s the creative that gets the attention and helps awareness progress to consideration and conversion in that funnel.

Which means you create branding that is distinct from competitors.

It has colours that either catch the eye or are aesthetically pleasing.

A logo and name that are easily recognised and easy to remember, this might mean you need a simple name and a simple logo as a result.

As well as an engaging message, sounds and other visual cues that create a positive response to something like an advertisement, piece of content, shopfront signage or on shelf packaging.

All of this is branding playing out at an awareness level to stand out and have your brand come to mind or recognise when needed.

People buy irrationally, give them a reason

I’m going to hit you with some rational facts with this one, which is ironic given 95% of purchasing decisions are made emotionally, while 5% are rationally driven according to this research. And here’s some more to demonstrate this point:

• Fear of missing out (FOMO) accounts for 60% of impulse purchases, particularly in digital commerce and limited-time offers.
• Research indicates that 83% of consumers require emotional validation through reviews, testimonials, or brand reputation before making significant purchases.
• Pride and status enhancement drive luxury purchases and brand preferences, with 72% of premium product buyers citing emotional satisfaction as their primary motivation rather than functional superiority.
• Brands that successfully create tribal identities see 3x higher customer lifetime value compared to those focusing solely on product features.
• Excitement about potential outcomes drives 45% of purchase completions, particularly in experiential and aspirational categories. Visualization techniques that help consumers imagine positive future states significantly increase conversion probability.
• Immediately post-purchase, consumers seek emotional validation for their decision. This vulnerable period determines whether customers experience buyer’s remorse or become brand advocates. Companies providing immediate positive reinforcement see 40% higher satisfaction scores.
• Research indicates that pleasant ambient scenting increases dwell time by 15% and purchase likelihood by 20%, demonstrating the power of subconscious emotional influence.
• Fear of making wrong decisions creates hesitation at the purchase point. Effective strategies address these concerns through guarantees, social proof, and clear return policies, reducing emotional barriers to purchase completion. For example, fear of career impact influences 74% of B2B purchase decisions, making trust and credibility paramount. Decision-makers seek emotional insurance through vendor reputation, peer recommendations, and comprehensive support guarantees.
• If you’re a service provider, emotional connection with service providers significantly outweighs price considerations, with 68% of consumers willing to pay premium rates for providers they trust and feel understood by.

If you take a look at the whole article linked above, it’s a great extension to this article, as it goes beyond research facts to give you some good tactics to optimise your brand efforts. But overarchingly, it’s very evident how irrationally or emotionally charged our purchasing decisions are. Of course many consistent purchases like the staple items we buy over and over again in a supermarket are less so. But for more significant purchases especially, there’s a level of buyer consideration that goes beyond function and cost, which is where this emotional resonance and trust in something like a brand is introduced to give buyers reasons to think your brand is the better choice than a competitor.

To be thought of + available when needed

There’s this growing rationale in branding and marketing that the overall goal of a brand is for it to be thought of and available when needed.

If your brand doesn’t come to mind at the time of need, another brand is more likely to be chosen. Which is why that level of awareness I mentioned earlier is important to increase that likelihood of being salient in a customer’s mind.

Additionally, if your brand isn’t present at the times/places that it’s needed, and/or there’s friction in not being able to get at the time of need, there’s likely going to be a substitute available. This is where marketing is crucial as it doesn’t just cover things like advertising, but also covers ‘placement’, as in where your brand is available for customers to buy at the times/places it is needed.

This is the classic customer order of Pepsi when a cafe or restaurant doesn’t have Coca-Cola available when requested. Coca-Cola came to mind, but it wasn’t available and leaves the door wide open for Pepsi to take that share of brand equity away.

So this is why better branding and marketing efforts that increase the chances of stronger ‘mental availability’ and ‘physical availability’ (these are the jargonny terms for these concepts), help create better business success when your brand is the one that is thought of and chosen when available.

People need encouragement to be loyal

Loyalty isn’t quite the same with brands as it is between people or pets for instance. Loyalty with brands plays out in a way that is more like preference rather than undying loyalty to never buy or even consider another alternative. While also being driven in large part by incentive rather than unprompted choice alone. Which means customers need encouragement to be loyal.

The other harsh reality for smaller businesses is that their customers tend to be less loyal than customers who buy bigger brands. Either because of greater availability when needed or cheaper or discounted price because of better purchasing power, better margins and greater ability to discount.

So the point here is that better branding and marketing efforts that encourage people to not only think of your brand but also create a level of association between it and your customers that goes beyond price and features, and leans more into status or self-actualisation, is something a brand can do to create perceived value and loyalty to an extent. As the status of being seen wearing/driving/holding/using your brand could be enough incentive.

Or at the very least, encourage repeat purchases with something like loyalty programs, referral incentives or other community building initiatives to increase customer lifetime value to the point in which your brand becomes the go-to they rely on and ‘feel’ loyal to because you deliver a consistently valuable product or service that can be relied on. Sometimes they just need a little reminder that you’re there, which is why we use ads and content and other branding and marketing efforts to drive further sales.

It’s why you choose the brands you prefer

I often say this in my content that if you were to now think about any brand you know, prefer and buy from, you’d be able to think of a handful quite easily. Now for the naysayers out there that suggest they don’t need anything more than a logo for their business, have a proper think about those brands you just thought of. Do they just have a logo and that’s it? Or do you reckon they’ve put in an inordinate amount of effort into how their brand looks, sounds, communicates and shows up? Probably the latter, right?

And look, I get it, if you’re a startup or small business and each of those brands you thought of before are all big-ass brands, of course you’re not going to have the same capacity to create a brand at their level. That said, any business, no matter the size, has the opportunity to do far more than just a logo to develop a brand that people can not only recognise but perhaps even perceive as a big brand.

The point is, we create a brand so that customers prefer our brand. It gives them confidence so that they think they’re not going to buy an absolute lemon. Because here’s the thing, subconsciously we perceive businesses, just like people, to be trustworthy based on how they present themselves. How put together they are and we can easily sense that if they’ve put this much effort into how they present themselves then they are surely the premium or better choice when considering others that don’t look/sound/feel as good. This is that emotional buying decision I mentioned in the second point of this article. So we choose the brands we prefer because of one reason or another and it’s usually because the brand appeals to us as the additional layer above functionality and price. Which is done so with inordinate amounts of effort equal to or above and beyond what our competitors are doing to have our brand be the preferred choice.

Your team will know why, how + what to do

This is often the most overlooked or “I did not know this was part of branding” part of why branding is valuable to your business success. Which is the internal part of branding within your team.

You’ve probably heard this term ‘team culture’ and this can be shaped during the branding process and continuously as you manage the brand over time. Because all brand experiences are driven by the team behind it that are either the front line faces and voices of the brand when engaging with customers, or they’re the one calling the shots to ensure the brand is thought of and available when needed.

This effort requires across the board clarity for everyone in your team to get behind, or hire and fire by to ensure the right people that align with the brand are the ones helping drive its growth. Because if there’s not a collective of agreement and belief internally amongst your team in what the brand stands for, why it exists, what it values, an understanding of how it shows up, what it should do next and how it communicates, then neither will customers. A well known branding expert, Debbie Millman said this perfectly that “branding is the belief in the meaning that you construct, that other people believe what you determined that meaning to be.” Which goes both ways for your customers AND your team. If your team doesn’t believe in the brand you’re developing and help create that perceived value in everyday experiences to connect your business with your customers, then how do we expect customers to also have that share belief?

So branding, from the internal side of things is addressing and constantly revisiting your:

• Brand Strategy: Who you’re targeting, how your brand is positioned, what your goals and tactics are to achieve that strategy.
• Purpose/Mission/Vision: whatever central reason for why the brand exists and what it is beyond just what it offers as a product or service to be of value.
• Personality: what shared personality do we want customers to expect that we need to constantly show up with.
• Values: are their guiding principles that act as our guard rails for how our brand acts — and go a little bit deeper than adjectives like ‘professional’, ‘integrity’, ‘excellence’ or ‘customer-focused’ as these are just table stakes for every brand that any customer would expect.

Do this better and it will give you and your team confidence in how to best develop and grow the brand and the business at the same time.

Help people make the easiest + best choice

Who wants friction in a buying decision? It creates indecision, confusion and mistrust, right? Sometimes the easier decision is more valued than just being the best choice because of price, or function/features.

It’s why we might not pick the best tasting wine on the shelf, because the one with the label that got our attention first, looked most aesthetically pleasing and had a name we could easily pronounce encouraged our purchase. Especially when purchasing for the first time, as consumers, we don’t 100% know what we’re going to get and it takes a level of confidence based on past experience of what is the best decision and what makes the decision easier to make.

This is why we look for social proof, like testimonials, reviews and word of mouth referrals to gain greater confidence in what we think would be the best purchase or know what might be a better alternative choice, not necessarily THE BEST choice, but the easier decision to make as a result of a confident purchase.

Branding does that with the simple things like a simple name that can be pronounced. Hell, I did this with my brand name, G’day Frank, rather than using my actual first and last name that is much harder to pronounce, spell and remember as a result. Or it could be a simple colour palette to be remembered as the purple real estate agency if the brand name doesn’t first come to mind. Or your brand could be the easy choice because you show up at the right time people are searching for your product or service based on keywords that you’ve optimised into your ads, google search terms and website SEO.

More customers, more profit, to do more

It’s no secret that more customers and healthy margins generate more profit so that you can do more to grow your business. That’s business 101. So it’s puzzling that when business slows down and more customers aren’t coming in, the brand tap to any branding and marketing efforts to ‘cost save’ in those slow times is abruptly turned off first.

Instead, if marketing and branding is seen as a passive sales person or even sales team, then you wouldn’t be getting rid of your sales team, right? With a bit of bias in my own view of branding and marketing, they are your sales team that don’t sleep. They work in the short and the long term if you maintain your brand’s presence and don’t turn it off the minute you need to tighten your belt OR when you have too many sales coming in to handle as it goes for both ends of the spectrum.

So if better branding and marketing are being used to drive more customers through your door at a steady or increasing rate, that’s more profit coming in, to then be able to do more and increase that rate of customers. Of course that sounds obvious but this is the purpose of branding and marketing.

Branding is to help people recognise, remember and understand your offering.

Marketing is there to help manage product, price, placement and promotion of your offering.

They work hand in hand to attract more customers to be aware of your brand. To then encourage further consideration that you’re the easiest/best choice. And then see that turn into a conversion based on your sales process.

There are ways that branding and marketing can be implemented at every stage of that awareness/consideration/conversion funnel and as more customers come through that funnel, it’s branding and marketing that can help manage that increase in customers and manage continued satisfaction when your business does expand to offer more.

Which might be new ranges of products or services and you want to manage a consistent brand experience and expectation is delivered so as not to hinder that expansion. Or expanding into new territories and managing the messaging or opportunities to show up that might require a different approach due to culture, language, society or buyer differences.

So yes, better branding and marketing is there to help drive greater profit to do more, but it’s also there to help manage that expansion when doing more to ensure sustainable growth.

…Yeah, you’ll look and sound better too.

My dad always said to me growing up, “presentation is 9/10ths the battle”. It’s never left me, especially when I help businesses present themselves better. So yes, branding is what most of us think is just looking and sounding better. None of that is untrue but having worked in branding now for 15 years with small brands, big brands and my own brands, it does go a little deeper than that as per the 9 other points I’ve made in far greater detail than I thought I’d go when setting out to write this article.

That said, the amount of businesses that don’t get these basics of looking and sounding better, or at least as good as their competitors is leaving tremendous amounts of value on the table. Yes it costs a bit to get better branding to look and sound good, but in many examples I’ve covered in my content over the last 8 years I’ve been making content, the initial outlay on branding to look and sound good is, and I don’t say this lightly, the easiest investment in your business. Because there’s not many business ‘expenses’ (if you’re viewing branding as an expense) that increase in value over time. Short of those who work in your team, your branding (name, colours, logo, sounds, mascots, etc) appreciate in value over time as their effectiveness grows the more they are experienced.

But to come back to my point, so many small businesses have the opportunity for a few thousand dollars to properly stand shoulder to shoulder with bigger brands and head and shoulders above competitors just by the way they look and sound.

A startup real estate agency in Australia for instance is typically up against 1–3 other independent agencies on average in their local area, in addition to another 2–4 established nationally present real estate franchise brands. It’s an uphill battle and yet I see countless real estate agencies pop up with sub-par branding.

The dead-giveaway is having superfluous words like ‘real estate’ in the brand name, a basic house silhouette shaped logo and dull colours that don’t get your attention. It shows little effort in how they present themselves, and that is subconsciously noticed by people wanting to sell their home or have their property managed by a real estate agent that gives them confidence.

And yet for $10,000-$30,000 put into their branding and as a starting point to their marketing efforts, that could made back in one $1M house sale on a 2% commission rate. Let alone all the other sales that come from sellers/investors that notice the standout For Sale billboards dotted around town that had a simple brand name they could remember when they got home to then google search and have confidence from a well presented website, professional team photos/videos, engaging social content and testimonials.

That’s the power of looking and sounding good, and yes, that definitely is a benefit of better branding and marketing.

That was definitely far more than what I thought I’d end up writing to cover each of those points. So if you happened to read through any or all of those points and you found them helpful to encourage further consideration of better branding and better marketing to help grow both your brand and business, I hope that serves you well and if you need a better branding partner to give your brand a shot at achieving better business success, say g’day.

About me:

G’day I’m Frank. Give your brand a shot and try a new brand of branding. I help businesses develop better branding for better business success.

To contact or work with me, email: gday@gdayfrank.com
Say g’day on Instagram
Say g’day on LinkedIn
Or visit my Website to check out some of the branding work I do.

Big brands have many advantages that smaller brands don’t, that’s not lost on anyone. As brand size is the biggest determining factor of marketing effectiveness and brand growth. However, there is that saying “Success leaves clues” and there are a host of things that most small businesses aren’t learning from or doing like the big guys, even though each one of the following tips is easily achievable by any brand of any size and give their brand a shot at growing.

Because a brand is not the business and a brand can appear far bigger than what it or the business actually is. So when all things are considered, be it on the shelf, or on a social media ad, for the most part, you have many of the same opportunities to help your brand become recognisable, memorable and thought of when needed and that starts with better branding to tip the scales in your favour.

YOUR BRAND NAME

Most businesses come up with a name before they design a logo. And yet if they developed a name with the process of designing a logo in mind, we’d have far fewer small businesses with names that consist of 3, 4 or 5 words.

The short answer is to pick one word. If you have to use more than one word, make your life easier and pick no more than two words.

Most big brands have found success with one word brand names. Mercedes to McDonalds. Cadbury to Costco. Apple to Adidas. Lego to Lacoste. Gatorade to Google. Why? It’s less to remember. It’s like a full stop at the end of a sentence, rather than 2–3 full stops.

In addition to this, if you create a name that is not only unique, but has either some meaning or word play, it can become an anchor for your brand messaging, so that every part of your brand’s identity aligns. Because if you think of your branding like a picture puzzle, less pieces are not only easier to complete but you see the picture on the puzzle far quicker. But when you have these odd shaped puzzle pieces that you need to join together, like a long name, messaging that has no tie in to the name, and a logo that is overly complicated, you end up needing more pieces to make the puzzle pieces fit together. It takes longer to fit them together and then recognise the bigger picture. It’s a bit of a laboured metaphor but it’s all to say that as long as you have a creative brand that does indeed stand out, giving your team and your customers a more limited number of pieces to work with, remember and recognise, becomes a more effective proposition to buy into.

YOUR LOGO

There’s a clear trend in branding for logos to be refined over time. It’s not one of those short-lived, come-and-go trends either as brands that have existed for over 100 years continue to do this with their logos. To refine them to their most basic form possible. Why? To make them easier to remember and recognise when needed. They started with something complex and over many years have seen that the less information their customers have to remember about their brand, the easier their brand comes to mind and is recognised unmistakably.

I said before, success leaves clues. And this is one of the biggest dead-giveaways of what to do, and what not to do from the beginning. Which is to create a minimal designed logo. Now it’s not to say you can’t have an intricate version of your logo that has all the flourishes and what not. But have your main logo something that is refined down to its most minimal form. The caveats are that it’d still need to be distinct, especially if you don’t have an overly distinct name. But the point is to minimise the amount of information, meaning the details in the actual form of the logo, so that it is far easier to recognise and remember. Additionally, you’ll also find it far easier to use as well if you consider all the specific touchpoints the logo will potentially ever be on, or need to fit and still be legible and/or recognisable.

YOUR BRAND COLOURS

If I sound like a broken record here, it’s because you’ll no doubt see a pattern emerging of less is more. So here goes, pick no more than 1–3 brand colours. The less the better, especially if you can have one hero colour that stands out in your market.

Choosing colours isn’t about selecting one because of what a colour means. We choose them because they aren’t used by the competition and potentially because of what they mean in relation to the personality your brand represents. Additionally, the easier it is for your team to use for them to then be effective.

But the big point here is that a trait the big brands have is to be known for a signature colour in their category. Coca-Cola red, Cadbury purple, Tiffany blue, Hermes orange, Starbucks green.

Or at most, a combination of 2 colours. IKEA yellow and blue. Fedex purple and orange. McDonalds yellow and red.

So choose one or two (black, white and grey or shades of your main colour(s) can be additional) and splash them everywhere to be seen.

YOUR BRAND MESSAGING

Messaging can be context specific, but you also have the opportunity to create and deliver a consistent message that becomes synonymous with your brand.

The problem many small businesses make is to use either a raft of different messaging every time they show up, or their communication only focuses on the direct sale rather than something to remember and recognise the brand for it to come to mind. This happens often in advertising but the thing is if you advertise your brand and not just the product, that advertising doesn’t only just sell the offer, it also has brand growth effects.

So the tip here is to develop a key message that you stick with in each bit of your communication. Used as much as you would your logo and keep it for as long as you can. It can tie in with your brand name, or be reflective of your brand personality. But keep it minimal, like ‘Just Do It’ that Nike used for a marketing campaign slogan, and later became their brand’s overarching brand tagline message that is now used as much as their logo in their brand communications.

YOUR BRAND POSITIONING

It’s simple, difficult to identify and often overlooked. It’s a brand’s positioning. What is something you want your brand to be thought of when needed?

Because most businesses and their offerings aren’t overly different from their competitors. What often sets them apart is their branding to distinguish one from the other. But the best brands give customers something to remember and think of them instead of the competition.

The reason why it’s simple is that it only needs to be a fundamentally simple concept your brand represents. The reason it’s difficult is that it requires choosing one clear idea to own in the customer’s mind, while resisting that niggling temptation to be everything to everyone. And this is why many strategists say the brand strategy process is as much choosing what not to do as much as what to do. And the reason why it’s overlooked is because most small businesses don’t set out to (or aren’t aware they should) develop a brand with any kind of strategy for success. I’ve written many other articles about strategy and positioning and it’s the one thing most small brands don’t have when all they come to market with is a logo, some brand colours and a product/service with nothing clearly guiding those decisions and keeping efforts on track.

I stress the importance for brand success because it can be such an effective guiding principle for every branding and marketing effort to reflect the positioning as one central idea. The shining example is KitKat’s “We believe breaks are good” positioning. Distilled down to one word, ‘Breaks’ and they have their guiding principle for what their product is, in addition to what their message is, as well as a reason and time to need their product. And we all know what each are without me even needing to write them.

So give your team a clear direction with positioning like the big brands do. Because I near guarantee your competitors aren’t doing this.

SOUNDS & MASCOTS

I’m adding this one in here because very few brands, even the big ones, use distinctive sounds and mascots to really stand out in more ways. Especially when every brand has the opportunity to do so. In addition to mascots and sounds respectively being 7x and 8x more effective than logos and brand colours are.

These can be sounds or music you use in video content on your website, social media, presentations, or ads. And it can be a character that personifies the personality of the brand, particularly if there isn’t already a face to the name of your brand that customers can identify with as an association to remember and recognise your brand.

Of course these kinds of brand assets aren’t always required for every brand, but I believe every brand can become creative to find ways and reasons for introducing these into everyday interactions that customers have with your brand. Be it music in your shopfront when customers enter. Or a mascot that is made into little figurines or dolls that are given out as part of your offer. But what they can do is set you apart from the competition and make your brand stand out in more scenarios where a logo or your brand name might not be present or recognised. They are simply more opportunities to build associations for customers to remember, recognise and think of your brand when needed.

These are the things that get me fired up about branding and the impact it can have on brand growth and business success as a result. They are really simple tips to create simple and effective branding. Most get this stuff wrong, overlook it or aren’t taking the opportunities to utilise the effectiveness of what developing, managing and growing a brand can do if you give your brand a shot at better branding for better business success.

About me:

G’day I’m Frank. Give your brand a shot and try a new brand of branding. I help businesses develop better branding for better business success.

To contact or work with me, email: gday@gdayfrank.com
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Or visit my Website to check out some of the branding work I do.