Five banana skins for marketers to avoid in the coming year

So, first full week ‘back’ in the new year, and we are awash with predictions, resolutions and other valuable efforts to set the scene for success in 2025.

There’s great merit in spending time working out where you want to get to, and how you want to get there – and if part of your thinking for the year ahead is about building a more powerful brand, then chapeau to you, it’s a worthwhile investment.

However, if, like me, you spent a bit of time getting beaten at Mario Kart over the holiday, then you’ll be aware of what happens when you slip on a banana skin, and how it can throw your best ambitions off track.

In service of robust plans for the year – and not being one to pass on the opportunity to land a Nintendo-inspired metaphor – I’m offering up these New Year Banana Skins For Brands™: the slipperiest mistakes businesses want to avoid sliding around upon in 2025.

1. Seeing brand building as optional, rather than something which happens whether you like it or not

As long as you have a business – an organisation making some sort of commercial transaction between itself and others – then you are building a brand.

That brand exists as physical brain matter, manifested as memories and associations, inside the brains of existing and potential customers. It gets built by all the interactions that a customer might have with your business.

The things you sell, the price they sell for, where customers find them, the people who are selling them, the other people who have bought and used them – all these things, and more, build memories and associations as brands in people’s minds.

It’s impossible to avoid that psychological reality and businesses have a choice: either guide the creation of the brand with strategic intent, or leave it to build on its own, without control.

You might prefer to avoid investing in it, or choose to make a strategic decision to underinvest, or to invest in building it differently, but your brand is being built whether you like it or not.

If you hear people saying “we don’t need to do brand building” or “we don’t really do brand activation”, then remember that it’s not an option. It’s not about ‘needing’ to build the brand, but rather about deciding how you exploit and adapt the ways in which it is building anyway.

The memories and associations are being created; it’s about how powerful you want them to be.

2. Thinking that marketing, advertising, branding and design are interchangeable

The banana skin created by jargon and misinformed commentary is an industry epidemic, and a symptom of that is the way the terms ‘marketing’, ‘advertising’, ‘branding’ and ‘design’ are regularly and mistakenly used interchangeably.

You see this when people talk about brand building and then go on to describe advertising or social media executions, and when brand owners say things like “we built our brand without spending a penny on marketing”.

If you’ve got a product, a website, a retailer relationship, a sales team, a price and if you communicate with anyone about any of those things, you’re marketing – even if you’ve never spent money on an ad or run a social media post.

Is the KPI still a good indicator of performance?

Similarly slippery is mistaking brand building for brand assets. When someone uses terms like ‘distinctive brand assets’, it is a good sign that they have come across or been influenced by someone who knows how brands grow (pun intended).

But there is a difference between the design of assets, in all their forms, and their deployment as part of, but not all of, brand building.

The asset is the branding iron, and the brand is the mark it leaves behind – a memory or association – and not all memories and associations are left behind by brand assets.

If you doubt this, then consider the brand impression which can be left by a service centre call, and without using any particularly distinctive brand asset.

It’s safe to say that a business which uses the terms ‘advertising’ and ‘marketing’ and ‘branding’ and ‘design’ interchangeably risks closing in on a banana-skin moment.

3. Developing brands externally for customer results, without considering the impact internally with colleagues

Brands are commercial drivers. Build the right memories and associations, in the right ways, in the minds of your customers and it will positively impact your top and bottom lines.

However, to see brand building as a purely external activity misses the opportunity for it to have a huge impact internally (and vice versa).

Going back to the example of an interaction with a customer service team, consider: does it reflect how you want your brand to show up in the world and the associations you want it to build?

If you’re a retailer, how is your brand impacting store colleagues’ pride, their motivation and their interactions with each other and with customers?

If you’re a service business or an agency, are your teams pitching and presenting in a way that reflects how you want your brand to show up?

What about the employee experience you offer, or how you on-board new colleagues? Does everyone understand what the brand is all about and their role in supporting it?

The work of brand building with colleagues, and the interactions between them and customers, is deep and difficult. It goes beyond just developing a set of guidelines, policies and brand-bibles, then expecting people to turn up excited about their jobs and demonstrating the behaviours that will build your brand through every interaction.

Business leaders often talk about their people as their “greatest asset” – and I agree – but are they grabbing the opportunity to empower the energy of their colleagues to build their brands, or is there a banana skin on the road ahead?

4. Overestimating how much customers care about functional features and benefits

An oldie but a goodie, and worth repeating again and again and again: you are not your customer.

Your customers are disinterested parties, creatures of habit, with highly evolved brains constantly filtering out superfluous information, of which they are receiving more than ever before.

They move through life prioritising what matters to them, and what matters to them is almost never your brand, product or service, until they need it. Even then, that experience is a small bump in whatever rollercoaster of life they are on.

It’s that context which makes creativity and emotion so important.

To build brands – memories and associations in the brain, which drive commercial outcomes – you first have to capture the attention of people who are busy and overloaded, and you have to do it in ways which they will actually remember.

That’s what creativity and emotion are for; to capture attention and make things memorable.

Often the best ideas come while relaxing on an inflatable watermelon

People remember the meerkat more than the insurance feature it promotes. The politician on the waterslide captures more attention than their policies. The team or salesperson’s attitude resonates more than the features they sell.

What’s more, in most categories, each organisation is probably promoting something highly similar to everybody else in their category.

Features, benefits and functional messages are important – they help provide rationale and information for decisions people make about purchases – but on their own they are usually forgettable bits of information rather than branding devices.

Yes, they can also be made more memorable and showcased in ways which grab attention, but only through the effective application of creativity and emotion.

This is why creativity and emotion are anything but soft; in fact they’re some of the hardest tools to wield effectively.

Overlooking them and pumping out bland, functional – i.e. ignorable and forgettable – market activation is the banana skin you see in every media channel you come across.

5. Getting caught up in the day-to-day at the expense of the future

This is the banana skin which is most akin to a New Year’s resolution, but I think is perhaps the most important of all, and the one which marketing feels most at risk of slipping on.

The last few years have accelerated the level and pace of change in the world, and it’s not slowing down. As the world has sped up, so the marketing industry has had to keep up with it. In most places it feels like it’s been running faster.

The wave of volatility – including but not limited to Covid, Ukraine, the cost of doing business, the cost of living and the dawn of AI – has had a huge impact on the bottom line, on resources and on clarity of direction for marketing and brands.

As a result, the day-to-day feels relentless and the to-do list ever longer.

It is against that backdrop that brand building sits; an ever present action item on many to-do lists, requiring an upweight, an update or an upgrade.

It’s ‘big’ work, which requires time and attention and resources, but in the face of everything else it can feel like an unnecessary luxury; so the status quo gets accepted as ‘good enough’, or the work gets rushed or – worst of all – just never happens.

This is the ultimate banana skin for brands – the work which needs to get done but never does – because if you’re not clear today on what your brand is up to, nothing is going to become any clearer by delaying the inevitable.

As you look ahead into 2025, and consider how you want to feel by the time December comes round again, make sure to think about which banana skins you might be heading towards.

Asking yourself these questions feel like a decent start:

• Your brand is already being built whether you like it or not, so how are you going to put conscious thought into the intent and outcomes?
• Marketing, branding, advertising and design are all important but different, so how do they work together and complement each other?
• Brands can drive better results both externally and internally, so how are you going to join the dots between your customer and colleague experiences?
• Creativity and emotion capture customers’ attention and make everything more memorable, so how are you going to harness them to the greatest effect?
• The world is busy and the day-to-day can quickly overtake everything, so are you going to carve out time to ensure your brand-building efforts are fit for today’s world?

As much as anything else, setting a clear and sustainable vision for the future is an exercise in resource allocation, in considering how you are going to spend the finite energy and time available to you.

Predictions, resolutions, mantras, manifestos, rallying cries – whatever you use to guide you this year, make it something you believe in and are excited about turning your energy towards.

There are few things which occupy more space in our brains than the thoughts about what we might have done in the past or the fears about what might happen in the future. Neither have much grounding in the real world outside our heads, and both are well worth replacing with clarity of direction and excitement about what lies ahead.

Happy New Year everyone. Go. For. It.

Johnny Corbett is an independent marketing specialist who has worked in leadership roles for large corporate businesses, startups and agencies, in sectors including food and drink, technology, financial and professional services, politics and the public sector.