There’s a lot of mystique around branding, and quite a lot of money being charged for not very much work. There are also genuinely excellent branding people, and the fees for the two groups look surprisingly similar.
So it’s worth being clear about what branding actually is before you pay anyone for it.
Myth one: your brand is your logo
It isn’t, and the confusion is expensive.
Your brand is what people expect before they deal with you. It’s the look and feel of the business, yes — but far more than that, it’s the experience of actually working with you. It’s your onboarding process, how quickly you reply, what happens when something goes wrong, the handwritten thank-you card.
And you don’t put your logo on the thank-you card. That’s the point of it.
The consequence: a beautiful identity on a business that doesn’t return calls produces a worse brand than a plain one on a business that does. You’ve raised the expectation and then failed it, which is the one thing people genuinely remember.
The current fashion for having someone write your name in a handwriting font and charging hundreds or thousands for it is interesting. It’s also not a brand. It’s a signature.
Myth two: your brand is a fixed thing
It’s a living thing, and it changes as the business changes. If your business is new, it will change a great deal.
Which leads directly to the trap that costs people most: perfection before launch.
The perfect website. The photo shoot. The videos. All the opt-ins written, every page finished, everything right before anyone sees it.
Meanwhile no money is coming in, because attracting customers has been postponed until the presentation is flawless.
Very little of what you do will be perfect. Most small businesses rebrand substantially every couple of years anyway, because the business they’re describing keeps changing. Months spent perfecting a look you’ll replace is money and time spent on something with a short life.
What you actually need to start
Considerably less than you’ve been told.
- A clear sentence about what you do and who for. This is the single most valuable branding asset and it’s free. Most businesses can’t produce one.
- Consistent colours and a readable typeface. Pick something reasonable. Consistency matters far more than the specific choice.
- Somewhere people can find you and get in touch. A complete profile is enough at the start. A full website can wait.
- And a photograph of you. In a small business you are part of what’s being bought, and a real photograph does more work than a logo.
That’s it. Everything else is optimisation of something that isn’t earning yet.
What actually builds the brand
The unglamorous answer: behaviour, repeated.
Answering when you said you would. Delivering what you described. Handling the thing that went wrong without being asked twice. Sounding like the same person in an email as in a meeting.
Do that consistently and you acquire a reputation, which is what a brand actually is. Fail at it and no amount of design compensates, because people are forming their impression from the experience rather than the graphics.
This is also why a small business can compete with a much larger one on brand without spending anything. You can answer the phone yourself. You can remember their situation. A larger competitor structurally cannot, however good their identity looks.
Testing and changing
Take imperfect action and adjust.
Try different messages — it frequently takes several attempts to find the wording that resonates, and you can only find it by putting versions in front of real people. Try colours that suit your business rather than whatever is currently fashionable. Being the fourth business this year in the same muted palette isn’t distinctive.
Choose carefully, then stop. Don’t spend weeks on it.
When to actually pay someone
Worth naming, since the answer isn’t never.
When you know what the business is. Paying for an identity before you’ve settled who you serve means paying to have a guess made attractive.
When it’s costing you work. If people are choosing competitors because you look unserious, that’s a real commercial problem worth money.
And when you can describe what you want. The people who get good results from designers arrive with a clear sense of the business. Those who arrive hoping the designer will work out what the business is get an expensive, beautiful guess.
Until then: put yourself out there, ask for business, build relationships, be consistent. That’s the brand. The rest is decoration on top of it.
More on waiting for prerequisites that aren’t required and getting visible in the first place.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
