Brand identity is often touted as something that’s important to businesses, and it certainly is. Carving out your own place in your industry and becoming recognizable to a wider audience is paramount in marketing and can help you to bring in new customers all the time.
Getting to this point is difficult, though, and might require some trial and error to get into a groove that best fits your own business. And even when you’re at that point, it might not be the smooth sailing that you were hoping for. Pitfalls are everywhere. Identifying these, then, is naturally your first step toward avoiding them.
Overconfidence
As stated, perhaps one of the biggest risks that you face is overconfidence in your own standing. If you’re at a point where your brand name is an established one, some of this confidence is likely well founded. Amazon certainly faces controversies, but that doesn’t cause the entire company to implode immediately. Not everyone is going to be able to afford to take these kinds of PR issues, however, and even the larger companies can begin to feel the stress if they start to build up.
Therefore, doing your best to remain aware of what you can do to improve and listening to your audiences can showcase that you’re sincere about improving and remaining in their good graces, which likely won’t go unnoticed.
Security Issues
This isn’t always going to be something that’s within your power to avoid. After all, businesses are always going to be the target of malicious online attacks, and as robust as your defenses might be, there’s always the chance that an accident or some fluke could lead to a breach.
However, it’s your job to ensure that the chance of that happening is as low as possible. The loss of sensitive data is always going to reflect badly on you and your brand as a whole, and damage the trust that people might have in your business. How you respond to this is important and can absolutely help to minimize the initial damage, but ensuring that you’re using the most up-to-date and relevant security systems, and investigating API security best practices can prevent that from becoming necessary.
Contradictions
As a business, you’re likely to have a set of values. These values might relate to some sort of ethical issue, such as sustainability, and as important as the issue might be to you, there’s a good chance that you see the marketing potential in it. If these values are a core part of your business, it’s important that you’re not seen to be contradicting them, as it could expose a layer of dishonesty that audiences might not react well to. After all, if it isn’t true after all, the dam has been broken on what can be trusted.
Climate change, for example, is an issue that people feel very strongly about, and with businesses often being cited as one of the primary drivers of greenhouse gases, your stance to the contrary could be something that endears people to you. As tempting as it might be to simply use this as a face for marketing purposes, actions to the contrary could be more damaging than you expect.
