Interview: Branding Basics for Beginners with Julie Gibbons of tractorgirl [3/4]

It’s just part of it and it’s very fluid and it can change and shift with your business as your business changes and grows –  your brand can change and grow too.

You know, so when I first got my logo, it was based on some very basic requirements, I got that but there was a shadow
under the three boxes and then there was a tagline included and all that, and as I grew and knew more about my business and started using it in lots of different places and I was like “well that doesn’t work”, so I wiped that out.

We were talking color pallettes before, and so I started with just using my teal and then very occasionally using my blue and green.

But now I use them fairly evenly because it gives me variety and you were saying the same thing with your colors palette.

Now I use the orange and the yellow and it’s the same palette, I just emphasize different colors.

Yes, the color changes the feel of what I’m doing. Not overly though, it’s about growing and just kind of that subtle tweaking and shifting as your business grows. That’s all it’s about.

So the final thing is “your brand is not a tattoo”, which is my very favorite quote from, I can’t even say her name I’m so in awe, Karen Gunton, she’s just fabulous, and she said “your brand is not a tattoo”.

Your brand will change and shift as your business grows and shifts, but also, there’ll probably come a point in time where your, or they may come a point in time, where you feel like that brand is just stifling you and it’s time to completely change it.

But until that point in time, it’s really important to stay consistent with the [tangent – you’ve got flies next to you].
(laughter)

Yeah it’s really important once you have your branding your, you know, your cards and you can see your imagery style, and you know it’s what you want to project, once you have all of that, be consistent with it now because the point about branding is what it does is create consistency in people’s minds.

It’s about you projecting a consistent image so that they go through, your audience goes through that know-like cross-factor they will not spend money with you.

People need to trust you before they spend money with you, so they have to know and like you first, and the way to do that is to do it that way, consistency, and part of that consistency is built through your branding.

So, that is why you need to be consistent with your branding.

So stick to the same colors and fonts and your image style for a long time and as we’ve just talked about, you can change and shift a little bit, it can tweak a little bit, but that’s completely fine.
People know it’s still me, they still know that Lynette’s “Lynette”, and that’s you.

And then using a different one again or going back to your original, like, keep that consistency in the bounds and all that.

So if you’re chopping and changing all the time that means that you’re sending out a message of inconsistency. You’re sending a message of being messy.

I want someone who knows what they’re talking about.
I want someone who I can rely on.

Every time I put something out that’s branded, it builds into that thing about reliability as well. Consistency means reliability.

So, if I’m projecting something consistently, people go “ah, yeah, she’s really standing up for this one thing.” They know me for this one thing. Yeah, it’s all good.