10 Ways to Ruin Your mHealth Brand

Your “brand” is your stock in trade. It’s what separates your company’s product or service from all the others. In the mHealth industry, your brand’s value is not only in its image, but in how your “brand” listens to and responds to its clients and customers. Gone are the days of “push” marketing alone … social media has created a whole new way to interact with your brand’s fans (and its detractors). You must be agile in your ability to make your brand stand out from the crowd in the best possible way, and respond to questions and problems before you have a full-blown crisis on your hands. But there are many ways you can sabotage your brand without even knowing it. Here’s a great list I’ve condensed from ragan.com. See if you are guilty of any of the top 10.

1. Pick a boring name. Your business name is meant to set you apart, to be different from your competitors’. So why be “Italian Restaurant” when you could be “Maggiano’s”? With a unique name, your brand has the opportunity to set out its definition to the public. When you pick a boring name, you miss out on that opportunity and sell yourself short.

2. Don’t know who you are. It’s near impossible to successfully communicate your brand when you don’t know what it’s about. Is your brand the grocery store with the best prices or the upscale market with the most hard-to-find specialty goods? When you’re not sure, your potential clients won’t be, either.

3. Be deceptive. When an advertisement makes viewers think something about your brand that isn’t true, you come across as deceptive; that ruins trust.

4. Change your branding all the time. Along the lines of being inconsistent, constantly revamping your brand can destroy its power. If one month you’re the fastest and the next month you’re the friendliest, all you’re really telling the public is that they should be as confused as you are about who you are.

5. Break your promises. In a lot of ways, your brand is your promise: “we care about customers,” “we provide solutions that work,” “we bring more traffic to your website.” So when you set your brand up to do something and then can’t deliver, it’s as serious as breaking at promise to your client—which is a surefire way to destroy trust.

6. Don’t interact. Today’s social world demands interaction. When your customers are talking about you online, they’re affecting your brand and how you’re perceived to readers. So ignoring their conversations takes away part of your power and control, leaving others to take your image and run with it.

7. Be selfish. The fastest way to turn customers off to your products is by making your messaging is all about you. Forget what’s in it for the customer or why they should care—just keep talking about yourself and what you want. Likewise, ask for favors, but don’t be generous.

8. Focus on marketing speak. Winning customers is all about wooing, interesting, and educating them in a way that draws them toward your products and services, so they can feel that it’s happening naturally and they enjoy what you have to say. So a great way to destroy your brand is to ignore this and instead constantly overload your audience with typical marketing-speak, loud and in their faces. Campaign anywhere and everywhere you can online, not in a way that’s winsome but in a way that demands to be heard.

9. Provide poor customer service. Whatever your industry, service is a crucial component. When they’re treated poorly, customers will lose interest fast.

10. Act apathetic. Don’t respond to emails. Don’t interact on social media. Show your potential clients you don’t care about them, and they won’t care about you, either.

A brand is so much more than a visual presence. Give yours a voice and a personality to bring it to life. If you approach your brand as a living being, rather than an inanimate object, you’ll be more likely to build your brand rather than ruin it.