Is Your Brand Boring AF? Here's How To Tell
Is Your Brand Boring AF? Here's How To Tell
Do you ever worry that your brand may be boring AF?
It’s hard to objectively say that your brand isn’t boring. As the creator of your business, you’re not able to see past your own founder bias. If you do currently or can imagine having a child, you can deduce a number of reasons why your favoritism / bias may get in the way.
You love what you’ve created, but the thought crosses your mind now and then that people may not know how great it is because of how you present yourself. I won’t be able to tell you over an email if your brand isn’t sparking emotion, but I can tell you common ways in which a brand may fall short.
You self-filter too much
Any of us can hit Google right now and search “how to start a business” and get step-by-step instructions. This isn’t what most of us want though.
We want an unfiltered expert opinion from someone who has started a business before and can give us the real and dirty details on how to start a business. We want that messy, authentic tell-all.
When you’re thinking through the marketing of your business, self-filtering too much in an effort to seem professional can leave you with just that — being too professional with the danger of coming off as a robot. And last time I checked, we humans are still into buying from other humans.
You’re on a “mission”
If your mission statement starts with “we’re on a mission…” or use copy to describe your business in a similar vein, that is a strong indicator that your marketing may be a little snoozy.
Businesses just don’t talk like that anymore. We’re in an era that cares more about how authentic and truthful a business is rather than how corporate and professional they seem.
Most of us aren’t a part of a suit-wearing workforce anymore, and that trickles down to what we prefer out of the brands we consume too.
To spruce up your brand’s voice, experiment with recording the conversations you have with customers in-person and seeing what it would look like to transfer that conversation into written form. Would it make your marketing friendlier? More down-to-earth? Funnier?
You’re too perfect to be authentic
If your business is constantly playing its highlight reel on social and its marketing channels without any pulse of a human behind the scenes, you’re going to start feeling unapproachable to your audience.
I’m not saying that you need to spill your guts every time your business has a bad week on IG stories, but we want to see the human side of you, not just the pitch deck version of you. There’s no hard and fast rule on what authenticity looks like for each business, but whatever you decide that looks like, make sure that you -
a) don’t spend too much time worrying about messing up
b) chat more with your audience if you have trouble figuring out how they want to connect with you. You’ll start receiving clues.
c) Share in a way that feels the most natural, don’t force it, otherwise it won’t stick.
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