Improving your brand gets more expensive every day you don’t take action. I’m not talking about inflation, rather customer perception and the momentum you build with customers– whether consciously or not. Here are three reasons to improve your brand sooner rather than later, no matter what stage you’re in.
1. Confuse fewer customers
You reach new prospects every day. You build brand equity in their hearts and minds, either positive or negative, that you will have to disrupt when you rebrand. Even if you are making improvements to a low-quality brand, the process will create some level of confusion, so the earlier you take action on rebranding, the fewer customers you will confuse.
2. Stop negative momentum
Remember how hard it was to get people to forget that time you fell down the stairs on the first day of high school? The obvious effect of waiting to improve your brand is that a low-quality image may be damaging, creating impressions with more and more customers you will have to work to undo later on. It’s a propagation of error problem; the situation is compounded with every email, tweet, sales presentation or business card that a prospect or customer interacts with. You’re creating an image in their minds, so you should create the right one.
3. Start making more money
It’s easy to forget that your brand should be an asset rather than a liability, but there is actually a return on investment associated with branding. The moment your brand starts to negatively impact your growth efforts, it’s time to invest in reducing that friction. Ask yourself honestly, do your customers purchase from you because of your brand, or in spite of your brand?
Of course you’ve known the above points are true for years, but all of that being said, you likely can’t afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on your brand right this very moment. But you don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars today, all you need to do is be moving upwards towards growth.
“The most successful business man is the man who holds onto the old just as long as it is good and grabs the new just as soon as it is better.”- Lee Iacocca, Forbes thought of the day.
