An error many businesses make when launching a new product or service is not focusing enough time, capability, and resource on establishing a brand that will stand the test of time. Too often the goal is getting the product or service into market, with the company or product brand being more or less an after-thought – arrived at after a desultory brainstorm in the company boardroom, writes Paul Davies, Head of Strategy at EverEdge.

Once you go to market, you’re asking people (customers, suppliers, employees, and stakeholders) to invest in your brand. Even if you haven’t given much thought to it, your brand is still out there in the market (hopefully) gaining recognition and accreting value. If that product is successful, value starts to accrue, you’re going to be extremely reluctant to change that brand down the track.

Your brand is your most valuable asset in the market

Ultimately, much of a company’s long-term equity derives from its brand. One of the primary reasons is that sooner or later all product functionality is superseded. Someone will always come up with a better version of your product at some point – over the long run you can’t outrun your competitors solely based on innovation. Eventually, they catch-up and supersede you and you begin a game of leapfrog where you’re ahead of them for a while and then they move ahead of you.

You can only sustain this for so long before you need to rely on your brand to support and grow your market position. And this is where many companies’ problems start: if brand and trademark strategy was an after-thought and you started out with a weak or compromised brand, it’s hard to rectify without a major investment of time and money in re-marketing your brand or worse a rebranding exercise.

1. Get the foundations right 

So, when it comes to developing your brand, it’s critical to put the work in up-front to ensure that you are investing in a brand that will stand the test of time and growth. Unless you are a brand and trademark strategy expert, the best advice is to get good advice – as the saying goes “if you think good advice is expensive try bad advice!”.

It’s important to be aware that brand and a trademark are two different things. “Branding” is the process of giving a meaning to a specific organisation, products, or services by creating and shaping a brand in customers’ minds. A trademark on the other hand is a legal mechanism used to protect a brand. They are related but draw on different skill sets: one is fundamentally a marketing and design-based discipline, the other is fundamentally legal.

So, do NOT go to your brand strategist for trademark strategy and vice versa. These are two different disciplines with little understanding of the nuances of the other discipline’s domain. For example, we frequently see trademark attorneys giving advice to clients that is legally correct but hopelessly commercially inappropriate from a branding perspective. A cross-functional approach (that combines the two disciplines) is essential.

Unfortunately, many management teams don’t realise this, which is why over half the companies we see suffer from major brand issues. With this in mind, here are three key brand and trademark mistakes (their brand strategist or trademark attorney didn’t mention) we see clients making everyday.

2. Choosing a brand that makes you fit in rather than stand out 

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is choosing a brand that is insufficiently distinct in the first instance. For example, a quick search of the agricultural sector will bring up a multitude of ‘Ag[this]’ or ‘Farm[that].’ While it is tempting to take a short cut and try to cue people into what you do immediately by using a reference to your industry, it just sets you up to look like one of many in that sector – which is the exact opposite of what a brand should be about!

A good example of this can be seen in the smartphone market. To the average consumer the technology, functionality and aesthetics often appear to be similar across devices. What drives market share and the ability to command higher margins in this sector is brand: Apple sells less than 20% of the smartphone globally but commands 80% of the industry’s margins. Without the effect a brand such as Apple transfers to its devices through strong marketing programmes, many people would be lost when it comes to knowing which smartphone to purchase.

3. Trying to be too “clever” with your brand is market mistake

A mistake we often see companies making is aligning a brand too heavily with a poor (or non-existent) wordmark but seeking to bolster that mark with a logo. Often this is because their trademark attorney is desperate to get them any mark at all and bolt on a device mark filing to a weak word mark.

If you are in market where people buy your products visually (eg. off a supermarket shelf) then logos and appearances are critically important. However, today many products and services are not in this space and the primary sales channel is online. If you are trying to build your brand around a wordmark in combination with a device mark, but a large percentage of your sales are made digitally, then you are making your life more difficult than it needs to be.

If you’ve invested in a poor logo or wordmark, it can be harder to gain traction via word of mouth or through digital platforms. People don’t search for ‘the company with the picture of the wheelbarrow with a spade standing in it’ they search for “George The Garden Guy”.

Similar issues exist with overly clever brands that use unique spelling of the brand to distinguish the wordmark. Not only does this cleverness fail in the face of official trademark practice that considers the words phonetic equivalents (i.e. the trademark offices don’t care how the word is spelled but how it sounds), but consider how the brand will play out in practice if passed on through word of mouth. If a colleague suggested you look up the “Branz” website, how likely is it you would search for “Brands” and perhaps end up on a competitor’s page?

A good example of this is Nike and its ‘Swoosh’ logo. The work mark and the device mark work well together because over the years Nike has invested hundreds of millions of dollars across all its marketing channels to build an association between its company brand and logo. It has long since reached the point where the Nike ‘Swoosh’ can stand alone as a brand asset. But if Nike was a new company starting out in today’s digital-first marketplace and putting all the emphasis on a clever logo, it just wouldn’t cut it from a searchability perspective.

4. Is it a product or is it a company?

Many companies also make the fundamental error of selecting a brand without putting thought into whether it will be the brand of the product or the company. A start-up with a single product or service often won’t need to distinguish between these identities, so often the product and company name become synonymous.

However, as a company grows, a subsequent product that is only tangentially related to the first one may become the hit. For example, what do you do if you are “Top of the Town Doggy Day Care” but it’s your cattery business that is growing?

5. Do the work up-front, or make sure you have deep pockets…

The above are just some of the mistakes we see companies mistake when they fail to understand the issues around brand intangible assets. Although it is possible to paper over some of the mistakes described above with enough time and money, it’s cheaper, easier, and safer to avoid them in the first place.

Brand equity translates into company value, but on the flipside, if you don’t pay attention to building a good brand right from the first instance, then it is highly likely you’ll pay the price down the track.

While companies rightly focus on their technology, products, or services as their springboard into the market, a little extra time and investment in brand strategy can make all the difference to the strength of the position they spring towards in the future.

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