You may have heard this one before, but this old adage essentially means that because the shoemaker is so busy making shoes for his customers they end up having no time for to make them for their own children. And so it often goes for marketing agencies and their own marketing collateral especially virtual agencies without a large staff.

We’re trying to buck that trend here at Spoke and you’re looking at phase one, a redesigned Spoken Whirred blog. The design of this caused me to reflect on how we got here and the branding process in general.

Defining Brand

Branding derives it’s meaning from ‘branding a mark onto something’ or what you would see cowboys do with a hot branding iron to cattle in older Westerns.¹ This term has evolved into modern marketing parlance to define how a business or product makes a mark on their target audiences mind. Today branding encompasses a wide variety of things including:

• the logo and type treatment.
• the key messaging you use to define your business and the voice you use to communicate to your audience.
• and of course the visual elements – color palettes, graphic design, illustration and photography you use in advertising, website and other marketing collateral.

Since your company’s brand includes all of these elements it evolves over time, usually starting with a logo and messaging and then bigger brand “anchor” pieces like your website, corporate brochures, trade show collateral and advertisements. Each subsequent marketing tactic is adding another layer to your brand, and contributing to what a potential customer will view, hear or read when making a purchasing decision about the business.

The Invisible or Inconsistent Brand

Problems with brands usually creep in as part of normal business operations:

• You do an one-off brochure before a big product launch or tradeshow
• You create your own PowerPoint design based on a template
• You let the magazine or newspaper take your logo and make an ad (with inconsistent fonts and messaging)

The next thing you know, you have a inconsistent brand. These inconsistencies aren’t things potential customers will consciously notice or point out, but taken together your inconsistent use of fonts & colors, the changing corporate tone and voice and having different version of your logo on each thing they see will give them a less favorable opinion of your business and can lead to lost opportunities or business.

Become a Brand Bully

How do you avoid this…? As a business owner you need to define your brand, know that it will change over time and remain vigilant about keeping strict standards about how your business is represented (or shameless plug time – better yet, outsource to an agency like Spoke to do it for you).

What does this have to do with this blog? Well, the design we originally used for this blog no longer fit Spoke’s brand as it evolved, so we decided to redesign it and get it back on track.  This is the first step in a brand refining process that every company needs to go through… Even cobbler’s occasionally need to make shoes for themselves.

The design has changed, the goal of this blog is the same: To make comments and commentary on the marketing / ad / interactive world at large.

If you’re looking for real-time feedback, follow Spoke_Marketing on Twiter.

Thanks for reading.