Creative Crimes: Involuntary Brand-Slaughter
Posted by on 04/15/2010
Until coming onboard with AREA203, all of my professional experience involved well-known or established brands, i.e., SunTrust Banks, Texas Roadhouse, and Marriott. Also before AREA203, I was naïve to the fact that companies can easily butcher their brand and confuse consumers by committing what I like to call creative crimes.
Committing a creative crime means changing a brand in a way that can have a negative impact on the brand and cause consumers to not recognize it. There are several creative crimes, but today I will be addressing involuntary brand-slaughter. Involuntary manslaughter is when a person accidentally kills another person. So involuntary brand-slaughter is when someone accidentally kills a brand’s identity.
The Internet has revolutionized the way we communicate, however it has also opened a floodgate of opportunity for companies to misrepresent their brand. Involuntary brand-slaughter can occur in press releases, emails, social media platforms, and on the Internet in general. I have noticed this particular creative crime evidenced in start-ups and small to mid-size businesses who let their “Uncle Fred” with Adobe CS design their brand identity.
Creating a brand identity isn’t just about creating a logo. It’s about recognizing how to consistently express a brand’s identity through all marketing facets, including online.
A great example is our agency, AREA203 Marketing. AREA203 should never look like Area203 or Area 203. If you understand branding, then you should understand why this is a creative crime. Branding is about having a consistently recognizable look and feel for your product or service. Change the look of our agency name to Area 203, and we suddenly appear as nothing more than the area code for Connecticut.
The best way to avoid such an error is to create a style sheet and brand guidelines that include logo, font, color palette, social media icon/avatar, and a description that specifies exactly how the brand can be represented. This is a service all marketing agencies should provide.
Companies should share this information with new hires, current employees, partners, vendors and clients. Communication is the best way to avoid involuntary brand-slaughter.