Brand soup anyone?

Somewhere right now, an excited would be entrepreneur is googling “cheap logo design” or “free website builder” and texting a cousin’ to “whip up some business cards.” That’s brand soup.

What’s brand soup you ask? It is easy to spot. The logo says one thing, the website says another, the social media feed looks like three different people are running it from three different decades, and the ad campaign feels imported from an entirely different industry. The tragedy is that beneath the visual chaos, the business idea itself might actually be strong.

As a long serving creative type, what I’ve seen is not a lack of passion but rather a lack of professional execution. The person with the idea, living with or seeing a problem firsthand, has devised a solution and is prepared to risk savings, time and sanity to bring it to life. But what they usually don’t have is a coherent brand to complement a great idea.

A brand, despite how it’s sold, is not a logo, a colour, a font, or a clever tagline a relative thought of in the shower. A brand is the central idea of a business, clearly defined and then expressed consistently at every point of contact. It’s very personal. And it doesn’t operate well when the “I know someones” tackle different parts in isolation. The common DIY process for a new venture is familiar. Hire someone cheap to create a logo. Have someone build a site with a template. Use a social media specialist who has never seen either. And then ask a graphic designer for stationery that “pops.” It’s like commissioning a different architect for each room in a house and praying for Feng Shui.

The less glamorous, but more reliable, reality is that the first creative partner a new business needs is not a graphic designer or a web developer at all. It is a creative brand strategist (from which many graphic designers evolve to become). Someone whose role is to define what the business really offers in human terms, who it is for and who it is not for, how it is positioned against competitors, and what core idea and voice should drive every touch-point of the brand.

Once that foundation is in place, questions about shades of blue and fonts finally have context. The brand creator can then implement or oversee everything that follows. From the visual identity, tone of voice, website structure, social media approach, and the look and feel of advertising and collateral. The point is not that one person must do every task, but that one mind, or creatively aligned team, is responsible. One brand brain. One brand voice.

Entrepreneurs often protest that they “just need something simple.” Simplicity is not the enemy. Randomness is. Even the most stripped down brand still needs a clear point of view, a consistent tone and a visual system that repeats on purpose, not by accident. When a brand feels assembled from leftovers, that is how the marketplace will value it.

In the end, the choice is stark. A founder can invest once, up front, in a strategic process that creates a clear, strong, coherent brand from the top down. Or they can economize early, cobble together a patchwork of disconnected creative work, and then add “seasoning” repeatedly to find “flavour” in the resulting brand soup. One path builds something customers trust and remember. The other yields a creature its owner spends a long time apologizing for.

Cheers, mark.