Insight – 08/05/2024
Building a strong brand isn’t something only large companies need to think about.
For small and growing New Zealand businesses, branding can play an important role in how you’re perceived, the customers you attract and your ability to compete with larger, more established businesses.
But branding is also widely misunderstood.
It’s easy to focus on the visible elements — your logo, colours, website and graphic design — without first considering the strategy behind them. The result can be a business that looks reasonably polished but doesn’t communicate anything particularly distinctive or meaningful.
Here are eight common branding mistakes I see small businesses make — and what I’d recommend doing instead.
1. Thinking your logo is your brand
This is probably the biggest misconception around branding.
Your logo is an important part of your visual identity, but it isn’t your brand.
Your brand encompasses much more: what your business stands for, who you’re trying to attract, how you’re positioned, what differentiates you, how you communicate and ultimately how people perceive you.
Your visual identity — including your logo, typography, colours, imagery and graphic design — gives those ideas a recognisable visual form.
That’s why starting a branding project by simply asking “What should our new logo look like?” is usually starting in the wrong place.
Before thinking about design, I’d rather understand the business behind it.
2. Designing without a clear brand strategy
A beautiful visual identity isn’t necessarily an effective one.
You can create an attractive logo, choose sophisticated typography and develop a lovely colour palette, but if there’s no strategy behind those decisions, you’re largely designing based on personal taste.
Brand strategy provides the foundation.
For a small business, that doesn’t need to mean months of workshops and a 100-page strategy document. But you should understand some fundamentals:
Who are your ideal customers?
What are you offering them?
What makes your business different?
Where do you sit within the market?
What do you want to be known for?
What personality should your brand convey?
Why should someone choose you instead of a competitor?
Once those questions have been answered, your designer has something meaningful to translate into a visual identity.
Strategy gives design a reason.
3. Trying to appeal to everyone
It’s tempting, particularly when you’re growing a business, to want your brand to appeal to as many people as possible.
But brands designed for everyone often become incredibly generic.
Understanding your target audience doesn’t mean excluding everyone else. It means knowing who you’re primarily trying to connect with so you can make better decisions about your positioning, messaging and visual identity.
A premium professional service aimed at established business owners should probably communicate differently from a new consumer brand aimed at university students.
Neither approach is inherently better. They’re simply designed for different people.
The clearer you are about your audience, the easier it becomes to create branding and graphic design that actually resonates with them.
4. DIYing your visual identity for too long
DIY branding has its place.
When you’re testing a new business idea and don’t yet know whether it’s going anywhere, spending thousands on professional branding may not make sense.
The problem comes when the business grows but the branding doesn’t grow with it.
Your customers don’t need to be graphic designers to recognise when something feels homemade. They may not be able to explain that the typography is poorly considered, the spacing is inconsistent or the visual hierarchy isn’t working — they simply register that the business doesn’t feel as professional as another one they’re considering.
And perception matters.
At some point, the identity that helped you start the business can begin holding back the business you’ve built.
Working with an experienced branding and graphic design studio can help bring your visual identity into line with the quality, experience and ambition of the business behind it.
5. Following design trends instead of building something distinctive
There’s nothing wrong with being contemporary.
But there’s a difference between creating a modern brand and creating something that looks exactly like every other business launched that year.
Design trends move quickly. Your brand ideally shouldn’t.
If every competitor in your industry uses the same colours, typography, imagery and visual language, copying those conventions may feel safe — but it also makes it much harder to be remembered.
A strong visual identity should feel relevant to your market while still giving your business something distinctive to own.
This is where strategy and good graphic design work together.
Rather than asking “What style is popular right now?”, I’d ask:
“What visual direction is right for this particular business and its audience?”
That’s much more likely to create an identity with longevity.
6. Being inconsistent
One of the quickest ways to weaken an otherwise good brand is inconsistency.
Your website uses one style. Your proposal uses another. Social media introduces three new fonts. Someone creates a Canva graphic using a slightly different green because they couldn’t find the correct one.
Before long, the business doesn’t really have one recognisable visual identity at all.
Consistency creates familiarity, and familiarity helps build recognition and trust.
That’s why a professional brand identity isn’t just a logo.
A good identity system establishes how elements such as typography, colour, imagery, graphic devices and layouts work together so they can be applied consistently across different customer touchpoints.
Brand guidelines are particularly useful as a business grows and more people begin creating material on its behalf.
7. Treating your website as separate from your brand
Your website is often one of the most important expressions of your brand.
Yet businesses frequently approach the two as completely separate projects.
They invest in a new website while retaining an outdated identity, or create a beautiful new brand and then squeeze it into a generic website template that wasn’t designed around it.
The result can feel disconnected.
Your brand strategy, visual identity, messaging and website should be working together to create the same overall impression of the business.
This is one of the reasons we often approach branding and custom website design together at Studio Nine. Once the brand foundations are established, the website can be designed around them rather than trying to retrofit the brand into a predetermined layout.
For service businesses in particular, where a website may be one of the first meaningful interactions someone has with you, that consistency can make an enormous difference to how professional and credible the business feels.
8. Assuming professional branding is only for large businesses
You don’t need to be a large company to benefit from professional branding.
In fact, branding can be particularly valuable for smaller businesses because it can help reduce the perceived gap between you and much larger competitors.
What you probably don’t need is the same branding process as a multinational company.
A growing New Zealand business may not require months of research, extensive stakeholder consultation or an enormous agency team. But it can still benefit from experienced strategic thinking, a clearly defined position and a professionally designed visual identity.
This is where working with a smaller graphic design and branding sagency can make sense.
You can access senior-level strategy and high-quality creative work without necessarily paying for the structure and overheads of a large full-service agency.
The objective isn’t to make your small business pretend to be something it’s not.
It’s to make sure the quality of your branding accurately reflects the quality of the business behind it.
Good branding should grow with your business
Branding isn’t something you create once and never think about again.
Businesses change. Services evolve. Audiences shift. Competitors enter the market. What represented your business five or ten years ago may no longer represent where it is today.
That doesn’t mean constantly redesigning your identity.
It means occasionally asking whether your positioning, messaging, visual identity, graphic design and website still accurately reflect the business you’ve become.
At Studio Nine, we’re an Auckland graphic design and branding studio working with small and growing businesses across New Zealand. We combine brand strategy, visual identity, graphic design and custom website design to create brands that feel considered, distinctive and appropriate for where a business is heading next.
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33-45 Hurstmere Rd
North Shore, Takapuna
M. +64 21 1306 713
katrina@studionine.co.nz
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