Brand Risk, Reputation, and Safety: Hidden Dangers of Cheap Branding Services
Building a brand is never easy, whether it’s one for your business or a personal one. It takes a lot of self-reflection and strategy; a good brand is one that both captures the essence of who you are, while also helping you stand out in your industry. Good branding services will help you understand who you are.
Then, once you figure out what your company stands for, you’ll be able to share it with the world. You’ll be able to use your brand to attract a like-minded audience that looks to you for content. Your audience will look to your brand as a beacon and will rely on it whenever they need to do business in your industry.
Building a good brand is also a lot of hard work. To save time, companies sometimes find cheap branding services to build a brand for them. Yet, such cost-savings will almost always backfire and end up costing the company more than they would have spent on worthwhile services.
Brands are powerful, and if they fail, they can take your whole company with them. Keep reading below to learn how powerful brands can be, and why you shouldn’t skimp on building a good one.
Cybersecurity Isn’t a Part of Branding Services
Most branding services just advertise that they will churn out regular content and post it on strategic platforms. They believe that a brand is nothing more than what people read on the internet. Yet, this couldn’t be any less true. A brand is more than just the content you make.
Your brand includes your business practices and it describes the role you play in your industry. Hiring someone to manage your brand is just hiring someone to create content for you. It’s impossible to get someone to manage your entire brand at a cheap price.
For example, something as banal as cybersecurity is a core part of your brand. Investing in it isn’t just a way to protect your company from hackers. It’s also a way to demonstrate that you care about your customers and want to protect their data.
A Data Breach Will Damage Your Reputation
A cheap branding service probably won’t include your company’s cybersecurity in its overall branding strategy. That does more than just leave your company vulnerable to hackers and data breaches. It damages your company’s reputation and by neglecting your cybersecurity, you hurt your brand.
If your company doesn’t demonstrate its commitment to staying secure through its brand, people will get the impression that you don’t care. They’ll start to think that you’re apathetic about them and their data. And if they don’t think you care about them, why would anyone do business with you?
Your Brand Needs to Be Unique
One thing your brand is supposed to do is cut through the noise of other companies in your industry. It’s supposed to be unique enough to be recognizable, without being so unique that it puts people off. And for your brand to be truly unique, it needs to truly reflect your company and its values.
Yet, you’re the only one that can make something that adequately shows that. A branding service may try to get a sense for things your company is all about, but it won’t ever truly understand it. As a result, your brand won’t be a true reflection of your company, and it won’t be unique.
Instead, by hiring a branding service, your brand will only ever be a reflection of what the service thinks of your company. It won’t attract the people that truly share your company’s values.
Cheap Branding Services Follow a Template
The worst part of hiring a branding service is that your brand won’t ever be truly unique. Branding services usually follow a template to create different brands. They have a process for developing brands, and when many companies’ brands are developed with the same process, they are never truly unique.
At best, a cheap branding service will leave you with a brand that fades into the background of your industry. Your brand may go against the tide of the industry, resulting in criticism of your company as a whole. In this worst case scenario, your brand simply won’t tell your company story, and nobody will ever understand what you stand for.
Good Positioning Takes Industry Knowledge
One role that brands play in helping you attract new business to your company is positioning. Brands can be used to give your company an advantageous reputation that resonates with people. You can use your brand to be the cheap company, or the high-quality company, or the company known for excellent customer service.
However you want to position yourself, you first need to identify a space in your industry that you can fill. You need to see what kind of company is missing from your industry so that you can become that company. And when you fill a hole in an industry, you help everyone who participates in it.
People will recognize your brand as a valuable part of the industry and will respect you for it. When you position yourself to do something nobody else is doing, you enrich your industry and make people feel happier for being a part of it.
Brand Services May Not Be Familiar with Your Industry
To enrich your industry, you need to be intimately familiar with it. You need the kind of knowledge that only comes by running a business within it. Most cheap branding services don’t have that kind of knowledge.
That means you may not be able to position yourself and your brand as well as you could by yourself. By going with a cheap branding service, you’re costing yourself the opportunity to fulfill a role your industry may need. And you’re losing potential customers at the same time.
Build a Brand That You Love
The most important part of building a brand is making sure it’s one that you love. If you don’t love your brand, how could you expect anyone else to respect it? And that’s one of the biggest benefits of avoiding cheap branding services: you get to build a brand yourself.
You get to recognize all the work that goes into making a successful brand. You get to watch it grow and develop, and you’ll get to see all that work pay off in the end. That doesn’t mean you need to build your brand all by yourself, though.
Everyone needs help at some point, with anything. And if you need help building your brand, just contact us. We’ll work you to make your brand as good as it could possibly be, while also making sure you’re happy with it!