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Despite a commonly held belief, your brand is not just the graphic elements on your site. Branding applies to every aspect of what differentiates your company from competitors in the minds and hearts of customers. This includes all aspects of the user experience, including content like merchandising.
Let’s also take a second to define what “old” even means in terms of branding. We come across sites that have limped along with their busted brand since the mid-2000s, whereas some designs that are less than a year old have already overstayed their welcome. Put simply, an old brand is one that is just not connecting with customers anymore.
Let’s be honest and admit that old branding is hard to get rid of. You can develop emotional attachments to things that are clearly bad for you. Somebody out there told you they liked that design, so maybe it’s not that bad. But it is—it really is that bad. It’s a wretched under-performing mess of a brand that represents your company about as well as a drunk hobo dressed as Santa Claus represents Christmas. Still, you kinda feel sorry for that hobo, and you still paid good money to get him in that red suit. Even if he does scare children.
At some point, you have to accept the reality that this dirty old brand has to go. Here are some tips on how to face the music:
1.) Your brand is not about you, and it never was.
If you think your brand is inexorably linked to you as a person or your company culture — well, you’re right! It is. But that doesn’t mean that your design did a good job of capturing that important differentiator. We commonly ask merchants to describe what is so unique about their brand. Nine times out of ten, we end up telling them that their brand is not doing a good job of illustrating what they just told us.
Here’s the thing: It HAS to. If your brand can’t convey the special sauce of what makes you such a great company, then it has effectively failed. Not just because you deserve to be shown in the best possible light — because you do — but because your customer base needs to understand how these differentiators affect them. How are you able to positively impact their lives?
Far too often, we’ve come across merchants who can’t look past their own needs. You’re in business to affect your customers. Your brand is either communicating that it’s able to do that, or it isn’t. You can never afford for your company branding to become a vanity project because then you’ll lose sight of what your customers really need.
2.) Brands built on the back of what’s “easy” become hard to sustain.
The lure of a perceived quick-and-easy branding solution is hard to ignore. When you encounter thousands of options claiming to establish your brand with quick and “proven” methods, be wary of them all. Branding is not easy, and it’s seldom quick. It takes a lot of work, research, and creativity to create something that appears effortless.
That template that supposedly worked for that one company may not work for yours, because you’re a different company with different needs. If we can agree that branding is all about differentiation, why would you want to adopt something that is easily replicable?
The reality is that the brands that put in the work are the ones that are often imitated but never duplicated. It’s amusing but also sad when we see some online store try and replicate the magic of a store we’ve designed. It’s obvious what happened: The merchant told XYZ developer to “make it look like this site because they’re doing well,” but it ends up looking like a weird Frankenstein monster of a brand. You can’t skip the line with branding. The imitated company is “doing well” because they’ve invested in their own authentic branding. It’s the only way.
3.) The “set it and forget it” brands are the ones that customers forget.
Peter Allen had a song called “Everything Old is New Again” which included these lyrics:
Don’t throw the past away
You might need it some rainy day
Dreams can come true again
When everything old is new again
Catchy tune, but it’s horrible branding advice.
Smart companies not only invest in the foundational quality of their brand, but they also properly maintain it. Just because something works for a while doesn’t mean it will last forever. “What’s old is new again” may apply to some types of clothing, but perpetually wearing the same brand in eCommerce is only going to alienate customers.
The needs of people change. Technology is evolving at an ever-increasing rate. Usability best practices are constantly being refined as a result. If your brand is also not being refined concurrent to modern-day advancements, it will be treated like the relic it truly is.
Investing in keeping your brand fresh demonstrates to customers that you’re investing in them. If that experience feels relevant to their current needs, they’ll reward you with more sales.
Classifying your brand as old and out of touch can be hard, but it’s much harder to live with the consequences of its inauthentic and limited reach. If you’re looking for a fresh take on where your brand can go, join the merchants that reach out to EYStudios every week for a site review. Your brand deserves it because so do your customers!