Your customers see your marketing efforts, but do they really see them? With so much digital advertising out there, your efforts may be creating brand blindness. A cluttered advertising landscape, unattuned marketing materials, and disjointed targeting can all contribute to brand blindness. Luckily, you don’t need a miracle or modern medicine to cure this type of blindness. You just need better marketing.

Why Brand Blindness Happens

If, as marketing exec David Batten claims, marketing departments were “under siege” to deliver results and capture attention a decade ago, today it’s the customer who’s under siege. Advertising dominates every aspect of our customers’ lives.

It’s within that cacophony of marketing messaging that your team launches your best efforts out into the world. The result? There’s a tendency to put ad volume above ad quality and to chase trends that may not have much to do with your brand. And therein lies the problem of brand blindness.

Scattered, one-off campaigns are a problem for marketers and their customers.  As Batten observes, this scatters your results and splinters your brand. A tighter prospect pool and better-controlled marketing strategy will deliver better results with less wasted effort.

Trends obviously can shift whole conversations in a new direction, but the latest craze doesn’t change the core of your personality or identity. It shouldn’t sway your brand either. When it does, your customers may well wonder why you don’t seem like yourself. Instead, your brand should be focused on the long game, because trends are often short-lived.

How to Cure Your Current Brand Blindness

How you address brand blindness depends on where you are. Let’s say some of these issues ring true for your business right now. You need a cure. I love the two-pronged approach Batten recommends:

• Pull back to look at the bigger picture.
• Let the brand lead and the marketing follow.

First, the big picture. Go beyond short-term targets and siloed marketing efforts. Pull everyone in together and get them on the same page. You’ve heard this before: marketing needs to know what’s going on in the C-suite, in product, in R&D, in sales, and in customer service.

Closely tied into that is letting the brand lead and your marketing follow. Ideally, that means there’s “brand leadership” within your business, setting up the brand’s positioning, and articulating values and messaging.

This could vary depending on who owns your marketing responsibilities. If it’s in-house, make sure it’s well integrated with the rest of your organization. If your marketing comes from an agency, make sure all the necessary internal stakeholders get to voice their two cents to your agency. Again, everyone needs to be on the same page.

How to Prevent Future Brand Blindness

If your brand isn’t suffering from these problems but you’re still concerned, you can take preventative measures to ensure your brand doesn’t fade into obscurity.

For Tessa Wegert at Content Marketing Institute, this comes down to three rules:

• Do what you do best.
• Stay active in your space.
• Startle and surprise (in a good way).

Staying true to your brand means identifying what’s unique to your brand and committing to it in your marketing. It means your customers know what to expect from you. It means that if your business doesn’t have a natural tie-in to the music of Prince, maybe you don’t need to tweet about his passing. Remember, don’t just chase trends.

Wegert also makes clear that you have to stay active in your advertising space. This is where that big picture plan helps you avoid a buckshot approach that scatters attention. Remember the opposite of “dead air” isn’t one-off campaigns.

Lastly, stand out from the competition by startling or surprising your audience with your creativity. Don’t get trapped in a “we’ve always done it this way” rut. Let your creative team try something new and different in an existing channel to give something fresh to you customers.

Get more visibility for your brand with fresh, creative marketing from the talented, collaborative team at our full-service digital agency. Call 313-338-9515 or email hello@kaleidico.com to get in touch!