My Big Branding Mistake

I always have fun learning and making mistakes.

Now you might be thinking “What the heck?!” if you read the blog post I wrote a few days ago about the art of branding yourself and your freelancing business.

Yes, that blog post still stands. The way I set up ProfitMob was smart. The full branding of website, billing, project management, email setup and systems was smart. The problem was the brand wasn’t me.

I love purple. I love giving advice. I love to blog. I love helping people for free (shhhh!). I LOVE the feeling I get and give at Marketers Mojo.

And branding to me is ultimately about an overall ‘feeling’, a gut reaction to a company, it’s values, it’s morals, it’s presence that makes you want to do business with them.

Profit Mob is a whole different look, a whole different feeling, a whole different business and the brand does not fit me.

I think I learned a very powerful lesson by doing it, though and so I’m glad I went through that process.

Of course branding to me isn’t about being ‘fake’ or putting on a ‘show’ for the guise of looking big or something your not (as made very obvious by my guitar stunt the other day )

Some people can build brands based on what their customers want and not make it so personal.

Wal-Mart is a big brand but it’s not so personal to one individual.

To me, branding is personal and that’s just the way I do business, I’ll make no apologies for that.

Have you ever made a branding mistake? Do you have a brand? Have you thought about what kind of feeling your ‘image’ puts out there to others. Please share your thoughts in the comment box below!

p.s. I’m thinking I might even sell the whole ProfitMob brand to the right person. We should be able to transfer over the accounts on both Freshbooks and Basecamp. It’s a great brand for the right person. I also think I could put together a little workshop on setting up and branding your service business from the start – what you think? Just some thoughts…