Whatever the brand is, building a brand is investment of time and money. Your brand is your identity in a sea of identities and like your finger print it should be unique, or at least true to you. There’s the misconception that a brand is just the visual assets, eg., website, logo, colors, and business cards, but it stretches far more than that. Your brand is all that plus much more.

So you want to know the five ways to kill your brand. Look no further than below. We’ve asked around town and here’s what we learned from the internet, our friends, siblings, and our very own experience (We got our mics first).

 

1. Have no target Audience

You know what’s absolutely great? Having zero ideas about who you should be talking to and trying to talk to everyone everywhere. If you want to kill your brand, you need to think about what kind of products you have and who wants them. For instance, a clothing brand may decide to focus on making clothes for men living in Nigeria who like Dad jokes and are 30-50 years of age. Instead of making making clothes for all men. Get very specific with this research. Choose a niche so specific that you’d be able to answer “what do you do?” in 1 sentence. For instance “We provide custom Development, Design and Consultation services that helps brands and businesses strengthen their public perception.”

Once you’ve got that settled the next step is to forget it all. Let’s not get carried away and forget that we’re teaching you to ruin your brand.

Go wide and go hard! Take your target audience and throw them down the drain. Market and advertise for everyone. Your blogs and social media should talk to the expectant mother and the coroner, the monk and the bartender, the over-weight guy in the corner and the track and field athlete because why not? You are trying to kill your brand after all.

2. Throw away your Brand Position

Like we said speak to everyone, here you want to sell to everyone. You see how Volkswagen, a car Manufacturing brand,  owns other car manufacturing brands such as Bugatti? They do that because they value their brand and aren’t trying to kill it. You can’t go around saying you’re making the “people’s car” Volkswagen – Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and give it a price tag of $1,500,000. You also can’t go around selling budget cars alongside ridiculously luxury cars because then, people won’t know exactly what it is you’re selling. They won’t remember you as a budget friendly company because the last time they saw your magazine, the cover was a $1,500,000 car. They also won’t remember you as a luxury company because the last time they saw your ad on TV it was for a budget, family hatchback.

However, if you want to kill your brand efficiently, you have to do exactly that. Make sure to sell to everyone and confuse the sanity out of everyone that sees you.

3. Ignore visual branding

You definitely don’t want to skip this step when killing your brand. Your brand is the public’s perception of who you are and this step takes away the “public”. Make sure to never make a Logo, website, flyer, brand style guide, nothing. You don’t need any of that. How do you kill a brand if you keep showing people that you exist.

You may feel like you really need your visual branding done so that people can see your brand and acknowledge you as a brand killer. Another nice way to go about this is to have your visual branding elements made cheaply with no research done towards what’ll work for you. Call up that your cousin in high-school or that your graphics designer’s friend’s friend (the cheap one) and have them brand you.
You want to show people that you’re cheap, and you don’t care about hurting their minds and eyes when they look at you

Finally under this point you want to make sure that you’re a knockoff. If you’re deciding a logo for a tech company, you could use the apple logo but take a second bite off the top. That’ll do it!

4. Poor temperament: 

Hahaha. Definitely don’t laugh with clients and customers. Be sure to put them in their place quickly. Which is far far away from you. Authenticity is great for your business but go a step further and really lay it into your customers. Be fantastically defensive and don’t be afraid to take a low blow. When a customer asks for the price of an item more than once, scorn their enquiry and make sure they notice. And if they still don’t buy, delete their numbers and block them. Never ever ask them for their reviews or reservations and make sure to send them a long long message to tell them off when you’re unhappy with how they or you behaved. That’ll teach them!

You don’t need their referrals or trust. Remember, you’re trying to kill your brand.

 

5. Make sure you look terrible on google

Do a quick google of your brand and if you like what you see, change it. You can’t look all professional online and be trying to kill your brand. It’ll be a struggle. Just as a good social media presence helps build your brand’s image, great Google results will also bolster your credibility and you can’t have that!

Do not hire professionals for reputation management or a branding company to get more positive results. That’s not what you’re trying to do. You want to kill your brand and

There you have it 5 sure fire way to kill your brand. Are you doing any of these? Killing your brand without knowing it? Well now you can do it with full awareness.
Just incase you’re asking, there’s many ways to set the record straight but firstly you need to take a step back and reassess your brand. You could consult with professionals who have experience with brand building to have a better understanding on what you need to do.