When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
—Richard Buckminster Fuller
We discussed earlier why branding projects can fail, but what does it look like when they succeed? Here are three indicators to look at and their respective positive signals.
Recognition
Consistency: Your brand is consistent across all your customer touchpoints—product, website, social media, packaging, physical locations—Consistency in messaging and design helps you build trust and makes your brand identity easier to remember, notice, and recognize.
Recognition: Your intended audience remembers your brand when thinking about your category and recognizes you in the wild. They recall your brand’s color and maybe can even doodle your logo on a napkin from memory if asked.
Positioning shift: Positioning is how your audience perceives your brand compared to competitors—we’ll talk more about positioning in the next chapter. When your positioning is clear and strong, people notice you as different for the right reasons, and you gain ground in your niche.
Authenticity: Your audience trusts you and thinks your brand genuinely aligns with your promise. What do your customer reviews say? What do people tell their friends about you? How do people talk about you on social media?
Engagement
Conversion: Whether you’re getting more sales or newsletter sign-ups, it’s clear that the new brand identity resonates with your customers and can move them to action.
Clicks: You’re making waves on social media. Look for upticks in social media engagements, including likes, shares, comments, and follows. They mean people are interested in what you have to say…Go figure!
Loyalty: Your customers are sticking around for longer or coming back more frequently.
Coverage: It goes without saying that positive media coverage and mentions mean you’re building a reputation.
Alignment: Every team member is now a brand ambassador. They have embraced the new identity, feel connected to the brand’s mission and values, and don’t miss an opportunity to spread the word. Your ugly logo sticker covers the apple on the lid of their new Macs.
Endorsement: Partners and investors are impressed and excited by the new direction.
Return
Return on Investment: This one’s tricky because it’s hard to tie gains directly to your brand alone. But by looking at all the signals on this list, you’ll get a solid sense of whether the project was a worthwhile investment.
Resilience: Is your brand platform future-proof? Can it grow and adapt to business changes or market shifts? Adaptable branding is particularly valuable for young businesses learning new things about their product and market every day. A brand that can respond to evolving trends, new products, or new audience segments will make it easier to stay relevant in the future.
The Juggling Act
But branding for a small and young business is often a deeply personal endeavor, and success metrics almost always extend beyond growth and profits and into realms that are sometimes emotive and closely intertwined with the founder’s or the founding team’s identities and aspirations.
In pursuing a ‘scientific’ approach to branding, these kinds of insights are too often dismissed as distractions, but branding doesn’t work that way. In the particular lies the universal, and the particular often provides the most precious raw materials and fertile ground for innovative solutions. Be open about what matters the most to you and intentional when you weave it into your creative strategy.
Measure success by how closely your actions align with your values and your reason to exist while making sure to keep your business afloat. It’s a tall order, and I hear you now: business exists to make money. And yet, if it were that easy, the most successful businesses should also be the ones that can squeeze the most value out of their customers while offering as little as possible in return. Leaving out some big corporations, which game you can’t play and don’t have to, that’s simply not the case.