While you might feel as though your branding is something that’s primarily important for relating to your audiences and creating a cohesive image for your business across various channels, it does have a practical purpose. It goes beyond you simply being able to utilize your branding for your own means, though, deviating from what your brand has established could be detrimental to the image you’ve carefully cultivated.
Building up your brand in tandem with your decision-making can help this harmony to feel more organic. That way, when you do make certain decisions one way or another, you might not have to make them so carefully considered each time.
Brand Personality
If you’ve worked hard to cultivate a specific personality for your brand, making decisions that fly in the face of how that personality is expected to act will likely backfire. Sometimes, this might be as simple as how you approach monetization when you’ve made a point of contrasting yourself against brands that demonstrate more egregious practices in this regard. API monetization is a good example of where this kind of variety can be seen. Instead of a pay-per-use model, you might think that a freemium option that doesn’t gatekeep access to your gateways makes more sense.
Audience Interactions
You might have a strong idea of what you want your brand personality to be, and while you work to embrace that persona, you might find that your involvement with your audience might be more two-way than you expect. Rather than you solely delivering content to your audience, the interactions that you have with them might help to shape your tone of voice and aspects of your personality. Part of this is because of how your subsequent actions feed into audience expectations. Make a business decision that proves to be a giant hit with your audiences. You might then change course to lean into similar directions in the future – as you would if something you did push away certain members of your audience or caused controversy.
Values and Supporting Causes
There are also likely to be various causes that you support outside of your own business. This might be as simple as trying to be environmentally friendly, or it could be that you associate with a specific charity. Whatever the case, there is a difference between merely paying lip service to these causes and actually using your position to try and make a positive difference.
In the case of climate action, your brand could be accused of greenwashing, where a business uses the illusion of positive climate action to win favor, only to not be doing anything about it. Even worse might be if audiences feel like you’re not only refusing to engage with the issue like you say you are, but actively causing harm. To use the prior issue of the environment again, contrasting your words with actions that damage the environment could lead to significant backlash online and a reduction in the positive perception of your brand.