Blog Post Design Story

Branding a company that fails

FURTHER READING

Should one even talk about one?

Of course that’s never going to happen right?

Over the course of our almost two decade long experience, we have come across many different companies and products being marketed and sold. A key differentiating factor between all of them was the structure of the company itself and the quality of the products or services they marketed and sold.

Over time, we graduated from stopping at logo designs to fully branding a company A to Z. This involved a complete journey through the company’s history, present situation and vision for the future. Obviously this task sounds more straightforward than it really ever is.

Beginning at the history of the company, we found that a lot of times it was formed without a plan for its future and rather sprung into existence as a matter of opportunity. For when the plan was in place, is a discussion for another time. This time we shall focus on the times when the iron was struck while hot.

With convoluted beginnings, the look and feel of the brand is always up for revisions. Sometimes we have had to revise the branding of a company as far as being ready to launch. Those times were the test of everyone’s patience and an extremely important time for learning. Obviously we had missed something in the process that made the final brand not ‘click’ with the founders.

However, when it did, it was a thing of beauty. The founders? Happy. The team? Happy. Their new clients? Happy. Us? Proud and happy.

So what happens when a brand we designed and gave life to fails?

It is a difficult situation to wrap one’s mind around. On one hand, you have the hundreds of hours of work that went into designing the patterns, obsessively choosing the right color palettes, painstakingly deciding on vocabulary, grinding over the HTML code for the website, revising the business card designs and on and on. On the other hand, you have the actual company behind the brand itself. A team and aspect of the brand that we as consultants and ‘third parties’ have essentially no control over. 

The biggest failure comes from not learning from the moment in which you fail. And for a long time, this is what hurt our pride and egos the most. That a company we designed should fail. That people could Google some of our work and find no trace of it outside of a mention on page 6 in a person’s LinkedIn page.

This is exactly why we turned things around the moment we learnt our lesson. We gave up our pride and got better. This is why we developed our own method for branding that included, most crucially, brand strategy.

Brand strategy is the bloodline of a company. Deviating from it usually results in a loss of efficiency, clients and even the whole business. Brand strategy is what allows the company to make the right decisions, guided by a literal booklet, in some cases, that notes down what a company aims to do, why it aims for that, how it achieves it and at what speed should this happen.

We learnt that Branding without Brand Strategy is like a cake without any icing. It may be the best cake ever but only those who chance a cake without frosting are going to realize while everyone else is going to go after the ones that look like they came right out of a picture.

This has been a short monologue on what we have learnt from branding companies that failed. Give us a call or shoot us a mail and see how we can put our knowledge to good use and guide your brand to success in the MENA region too. Till next time!

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