Diagnosing a gap is never easy. It’s negative space. When you’re looking for a problem, you want to see a problem. (Which is why we’re happy when we hear we have pneumonia. At least you know what’s wrong.)

In the absence of a clear issue, it’s easy to point to the creative. But if you’ve seen a string of off-base campaigns, maybe it’s not the creative after all.

If you’re lucky, someone in the room will have the guts to say the quiet part out loud: “Maybe the brand needs a closer look.” And then you can get down to business diagnosing the gap between what people think your brand stands for and what it actually means.

Four symptoms of a brand gap

We’ve been witness to a few clear signs of a not-quite-nailed-down brand.

1. Work keeps getting re-opened. When each new round of review becomes a protracted discussion of tone, look and messaging, it may mean there’s no fixed point to measure against. If every review becomes a referendum by the people in the room, it’s clear that no one knows the answer.When the brand is fully baked, there’s no question.
    
   We’ve also found this to hugely reduce effort and cost, as work is generally nailed in the first or second round.
    
2. New hires start to freestyle. Smart people who lack clear direction try to do the right thing. But if every deck, every ad, every post looks and sounds different, they infer what they can, fill the gaps with their own judgment and produce something entirely competent but, well, off. It’s how one of our clients woke up one day with three logos, three more “not logos, just graphics” and innumerable type treatments of their name. We were happy to lead them out of the jungle.
    
3. Channels argue among themselves. Sure, the site and socials are likely to have slightly different voices, but if the sales decks and advertising sound like they’re coming from completely different companies, everyone is going to wind up confused—employees and prospects alike. Of course, no one ever sets out to do things this way. It’s just what happens when teams don’t have a single source of truth.
    
4. Nobody can simply articulate what the brand stands for. A brand should be boiled down to one sentence. If you ask ten people about the brand, and you get ten answers, it means the brand isn’t fully formed, just assumed.
    
   What does a clearly established brand look like?
   • Trader Joe’s is a national chain of neighborhood grocery stores.
   • Nike is all about innovation that helps you perform at your best.
   • Ben & Jerry’s equals peace, love and ice cream.
   • Mercedes-Benz wants to be associated with performance, safety and status. (No comic sans here.)

    
   On our own roster, Eat Easy is a great example. The young brand is consistently about making shopping, saving and eating simpler. You can see it in the voice and design of every social post, poster and post card, and throughout the site. There’s a list of words we don’t use, and nothing is written without the audience’s goals in mind.

Shoring up the foundation

The examples above are a bit of a cheat. Those are huge companies with deep brand and marketing teams. In a small or midsized firm, or a firm without a powerful marketing arm that’s willing to throw their weight around, it can be tougher. We’ve worked with many companies where what’s “on-brand” lives inside the owner’s mind, or it’s what the head of sales says it is.

This isn’t a problem to ignore, though. The lack of consistency leaks out again and again and (if we can mix metaphors) begins to snowball.

Each symptom looks like an isolated issue, so you bat it down with a new design, rewrite or longer brief, but the gap remains.

The real fix only needs to be done once, but it’s all the way upstream. The brand needs to be explicitly detailed, in writing, so everything can align behind it. In our experience, this can require significant shifts in mindset (the smaller the company, often the larger the shift). But we’ve been able to demonstrate how consistency and clarity pay off in greater efficiency, shorter time to market and better results—pretty much everything a leader is looking for.

Think you might have some leaks in your brand? Let us know if we can help.