One of the inherent responsibilities when you are in charge of sales and marketing (at least with a small business) is overseeing branding, and more specifically brand identity. That used to mean logos, which lead to flyers in the mail and magazine ads, then it meant a fancy website, and now it is the giant umbrella that is inclusive of anything that reflects your brand’s identity. That is inclusive of both the good and the bad. The bad? Yelp reviews, an employee tweeting out a picture of them standing on containers of lettuce, or the front door not working correctly blocking a wheelchair bound patron from entering. Yes, this is part of your branding strategy. Like it or not your branding has to be both proactive and reactive and despite your best attempts to portray all of the wonderful things your brand has to offer it only takes one drop to poison the well.

Here is the hardest part. It is not usually the giant blunders that are detrimental to most businesses, yet it is the subtle missteps, mix ups and misses that do enough to erode your brand. They are small events and often go unnoticed in a big marketing machine, they spread slowly and quietly across your users until one day you realize your brand name stands for something you never expected and stopping the runaway train becomes a monumental feat.

Now I get to pick on someone. The genesis for this article was two parts (photo evidence attached as proof). The first part was coming home to the annoying sway of not one or two trash flyers on my gate, but three. Now it must be noted I feel like flyers and more specifically door hangers are a poor marketing strategy...for me. While it might be a good ‘shotgun’ type approach that is good for some consumers and brands it’s not my cup of tea. So the trifecta on my gate was kind of the death blow and it got my mind wandering about what Groupon To Go was expecting their message to be when they paid a third party for this service. I thought about the things that my organization puts out as a company and how different my intended message might be from the received message. Is there really a good way to judge the success or failure of any particular effort? It was then two days later while walking my dog that the door hangers reappeared. Photo evidence attached. This has nothing to do if I like hangers or not, but now it appears as if Groupon To Go is littering on my street. Again, I know it's not the intended purpose and they don't even know this is happening, but in a vacuum I have been so annoyed with Groupon To Go that the brand is dead to me. It is a completely irrational response, but one that could be felt by other consumers...even some that have blogs with bigger followers than mine.

So, I appreciate Groupon To Go letting me pick on them a little to illustrate a point. Every organization needs to have a resource to evaluate their brand, marketing, service, etc from an outside perspective. It will not always be pleasant hearing someone criticize your brand but it will be valuable information to see how the world actually sees you versus how you see yourself through the rose colored glasses.