90% brand owners kill their branding themselves. What happens? Brand owners sometimes don’t understand branding principles or the nuances of good, functional branding. So what they generally do is push branding agencies to achieve something they are personally inclined toward. I have seen many situations where brand owners themselves killed their nice branding. That’s the truth in the Indian market.
We, as a branding agency, always try to help brand owners with highly functional and simplified branding. But they generally feel that this is not highly decorative or highly creative. They think it is more about decoration, more design elements, more fancy styles, more colors. But that’s not the case. Actually, branding is more than this. Branding is more about communication, about defining tone, and defining a personality.
In my experience, having been doing brand strategy for over 10–13 years, I have realized that highly successful brands have highly simplified branding.
I can give you lots of examples: Citibank, Sony, Samsung, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook—any big brand you name. You would realize they have highly simplified branding. Big multinational, billion-dollar organizations keep their logos and branding super simplified. They do not make it cluttered.
On the other hand, especially in India, I have seen brand owners coming to us and saying that your identity is very simple. They feel that simple is not good. But that’s not the case.
My suggestion to all brand owners who are new to the branding space and who do not understand branding is: if you are working with a branding agency, trust their knowledge and experience. You are building one brand. They have made hundreds of such brands. They have worked with more than 500 brands. So their experience is way higher than yours. It should not be the case that they are just working for money. I’m talking about agencies here. Brand owners need to trust their agencies. If you have hired someone, go with full trust and let them do the job. Don’t intervene, and don’t question their skills.
You hire someone you are 100% confident in. But once you hire, follow what they offer. I have seen many situations where we have designed highly functional branding that could last long, and then the brand owners killed it by giving their opinions because they liked something else. They didn’t follow the process. Sometimes, if a client is not in sync with what we are doing and feels they have a better understanding, we say okay. We generally say two or three times that this is not the right way and that they are going on the wrong track. But if they don’t listen, then we have no option. We say okay, fine, we need to close this project and don’t want anyone to have a bad experience.
We say okay, fine, if you like this, we will do that for you. But we don’t even show it in our projects. We don’t even consider it as one of our projects. I am not being overconfident or rude here just sharing my thoughts.
So my experience so far with brand owners is that they should really trust their agencies. Discuss everything upfront before giving the project, but once you give it, make sure you are 100% aligned with them.
