Over-branding

Over-branding comes off as inauthentic, like the popular kid in school who won’t stop talking about himself. It’s better to identify your target audiences and focus on ways to market specifically to them, not plaster your brand everywhere - remember, it’s not about you, it’s about your customers

Principles

To assess the state of our brand, gather all of your marketing and sales materials, along with employee and investor communications, and ask yourselves these seven key questions:

• Is my visual brand consistent across all items/materials?
• How many product/service names do we have?
• How many logos, symbols, and icons (or versions) do we have?
• Is our messaging clear, consistent and compelling?
• Do we have a consistent “voice” across all items/materials?
• Does this all look like one company?
• Are we conveying the image we desire to project?

Examples

The inclusion of the company name as the post title, the URL, the logo and the repetition of the company name in the copy creates a post that is visually overwhelming and well and truly over-branded

How much can we remove to make the above post clearer. The copy can become the title, the logo already indicates the brand and the URL could be included in the accompanying post content