Red Door Interactive's Reid Carr argues that you shouldn't push your brand's identity too far when testing new creative.

Companies advertise to sell a product or service. That advertising may be subtle, to brand the product, or it may be a little more obvious in focusing on the merits of the product or service. In the first case, branding is used to develop affinity for the item and solicit emotional connection. In the second, the ad focuses more on the merits of the product, making it more sales-y in nature.

While some companies go straight to ads that are focused on sales (since that is what they ultimately want to do), branding can also be an extremely effective way to increase sales over the long-term. And, in fact, more focused, sales-oriented promotions still can and should be a part of a branding campaign.

Branding, in its most basic form, is one part the creative that drives it and one part an effort to maintain consistency in all promotions marketers perform on behalf of the company. The creative has to deliver emotion to the viewer in order to connect them to the brand. Then, the company should solicit that emotion from the customer every time he or she sees something from that brand. Following this simple plan can help to increase the weight and impact of marketing efforts by building on the established brand and perceptions of the target audience.

One rule is key: when it comes to developing a brand, the whole brand must be more valuable than the sum of all its campaigns. 

The place where the sum of the campaigns is greater than the brand is where the campaigns start to lack consistency. To the viewer, each time that campaign runs, it is as if the company never ran a campaign before. The company is speaking to different people about different things in a different way, prompting the question, “Have we met?”

Now, the reason that I am bringing this up within the context of creative testing is because when people test their creative to get the best response for their campaign, they often lose sight of the big picture. Often marketers overlook that they are also cultivating a brand with each email they send, each homepage they test, each direct mail piece posted and each banner ad served up.

To get the best overall, long-term company value, marketers need to be considerate of their brand before they put together the variables for their tests. While a single piece of creative might perform better in a different color, or in a different font, it may be doing more harm than good if it strays from their company’s brand. The piece may say something about the company that the marketer did not intend for it to say.

This is an easy trap to fall into when developing marketing materials to test. The creative is broken down into so many pieces that they can become like Frankenstein's creature. It is important that each Frankenstein be critically reviewed for brand consistency as an individual piece.

This is where a corporate branding style guides come in handy. For those not familiar, some companies develop guides -- covering logo usage, corporate fonts, corporate colors, placement, et cetera -- from which employees and agencies can make decisions about how to carry out the brand in almost any execution. Some go as far as to provide a controlled vocabulary glossary for products, industries and methodologies, as well. These guides are useful for ensuring that all communications, both internal and external, protect the brand, versus sending out comic-book printed newsletters and neon tiger striped logo variations -- unless, of course, that is the brand.

With or without a style guide, marketers need to identify first who they are and to make sure that whatever marketing vehicles they choose to represent them to their target reflect that. Secondly, they need to determine who they are not, and make sure that nothing goes out to that effect that might misrepresent them. 

Misrepresentation can be found in the littlest things. It can be in something as simple as a red envelope on a direct mail piece that may confuse the consumer about the entity sending the correspondence if he or she is used to receiving blue from your organization. While this type of change could have an immediate positive effect on sales, it may also cause people to forget who the company is and start leaning toward competitors when they can’t picture your name. Another common scenario is testing different taglines too many times on too many different pieces to the same target, causing uncertainty in the consumers’ mind about what the company does.

If a company falls into the trap of leveraging completely different creative too often, without regard for the variables they test, their creative begins to lack a pulse or an emotional aspect of their brand. From there, the company turns into a direct marketing and creative-testing machine where the only way to keep it going is to keep testing and optimizing the pieces, rather than to let the brand do some of the work.

Marketers need to do anything they can to ensure that what they put in front of their target market reflects how they want to be perceived. While creative testing can tax the boundaries of the brand, protecting it is an essential part of marketing that can make the next tests easier and extend the power of future campaigns that maintain the brand. 

Reid Carr is president of Red Door Interactive, helping clients -- such as the San Diego Convention Center, SkinMedica, BeneTrac and Sharp Systems of America -- to lay out strategies for their online presence and interaction activities. Before founding Red Door Interactive, Carr formed the interactive arm for the San Diego-based PR agency, McQuerterGroup. Prior to that, he was chief operating officer and accounts director at PBJ Digital, a bi-coastal Interactive development and incubator shop in Los Angeles; before then, Carr handled account management in both the Venice and Playa del Rey offices of TBWA/Chiat/Day. He has a BA from the University of Oregon's advertising program.