Growth is great, right? It means you have more resources to introduce new products and services to current and new customers. However, your sales and marketing materials also need to reflect this growth.

Your visual identity plays a significant role in communicating with your audience, and it has to be flexible enough to extend into more complex campaigns while maintaining your brand’s core essence.

But, there are some potential issues you could run into with your brand identity as your business scales.

Challenge #1: Being creative while staying consistent

From your logo to your color palette, each part of your brand’s visual identity works together to show the personality of your business. Keeping these elements consistent is crucial in making sure your brand stays consistent with what your audience expects to see.

It’s not uncommon for companies to struggle with keeping the core essence of their visual identity as they create new marketing campaigns or assets.

First, it starts with an employee experimenting with a few different colors or introducing graphics that don’t match the business’s existing brand standards. More and more of these types of changes seep into your company’s marketing materials until they become impossible to ignore.

What should you do?
It’s important to take a step back and take inventory of your existing brand and what you’re doing with it. This brand audit will identify areas where your company’s sales and marketing materials are inconsistent. From there, you can work with your creative team to reign in these off-brand mistakes and get back on track with on-brand advertisements that show off the company’s creativity.

Challenge #2: Showing customers you understand them

As your company expands into new markets, advertising to potential buyers within these segments requires intimate knowledge of them so your marketing communicates effectively.
Not having a clear vision of what motivates customers to act makes it difficult to create marketing campaigns aligning with their self-image and aspirations. Instead of thinking, “Hey, you get me!” they’ll believe you don’t understand their challenges and goals.

What should you do?
As you learn more about your target audience, you can use your imagery, colors, and other brand elements to shape your marketing to truly depict the people you’re trying to reach with authenticity. This includes choosing imagery that pairs your products with an accurate representation of your customers and where they want to be.

Challenge #3: Alienating people with major brand changes

Naturally, as your business grows, you want to push the limits with your advertising. However, people can have surprisingly strong opinions when companies change their brands.

And sometimes, this can even negatively affect product sales.

Making drastic modifications to your brand’s visual identity is jarring to buyers and can invite unwanted attention. Instead of paying attention to your message, people will zoom in on what changed.

What should you do?
Any modifications to your brand identity should have a purpose, which was the case for Skittles in 2020. They removed their trademark bright, vibrant rainbow design from their packaging and made it colorless in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community during Pride month. The candy was sold as a limited-run product, and once Pride month was over, Skittles reverted back to its regular packaging.

For your own campaigns, big brand changes should only be temporary, and customers should be informed about the reasons behind the sudden shift.

Challenge #4: Lack of brand management

The more people you bring into your organization, the harder it is to keep the visual identity in check if your brand management is disorganized and chaotic. As a result, consistency can suffer across channels, especially when your internal team doesn’t clearly grasp the company’s brand standards.

To maintain momentum as the company grows, the demands on sales and marketing teams increase. This pressure on your internal crew makes it easier for things to fall through the cracks if there isn’t an established set of guidelines or person responsible for overseeing the brand’s creative assets.

What should you do?
Implementing an internal brand management system in your organization provides one source where your internal team can find templates, style guides, and additional brand assets. This hub enables them to create new materials or communications without guessing about what their next steps should be. It can be as simple as a series of folders on a shared server or as complex as an internal company portal.

Creating a brand identity that grows with you

As your business continues going onward and upward, it’s important to create the space for your brand identity to grow with you. This especially rings true as your sales and marketing campaigns become more elaborate in design, strategy, and execution.

Brand consistency and asset management systems will be essential in this process because they will allow your business to reimagine your existing visual identity in new ways. As you reach more markets, your campaigns have to build a connection with them that meets them where they are and then takes them further.

Working with a creative partner makes this goal easier as your business develops. It relieves the pressure to manage your brand’s standards and gives you the expertise needed to produce marketing materials that continue to push the company forward.