Branding instincts that are almost always wrong

We’ve been doing branding and identity development for a long time. And we’ve experienced a few understandable, but counterproductive impulses over the years.

Here are a few of those:

I’ll just pick my favorite typeface - The job of the lettering style for your logo is to complement and support your symbol - not to upstage it. Often, the less remarkable typographic choice is the one that works harder for you.

If we can’t decide between good options, we should ask our friends to vote - Trust your team and trust yourself. People who have not been involved in the project are likely to bring in irrelevant biases. More often than not, folks will gravitate to the familiar - preferring marks that look like logos they already like over fresh ideas. If you feel like you really need input from outside the team, there’s a better way to do that than to take a vote.

If it works for our competitors, it’ll work for us - We’re trained to make business decisions based on case studies and precedent. But in marketing, one of the worst things we can do is stand behind other brands and say “me, too.” At the same time, simply being different is no guarantee of success. The discipline of keeping your message true to your brand, attractive to your audience and differentiated from your competition (all at the same time), is the essence of brand strategy.