An established business knows its brand. However, they may not always be consistent or think to clean up their brand regularly. Branding is your identity, and typically, it consists of logos, business colors, fonts, mission/purpose, values, culture, and voice. As companies evolve, they sometimes struggle with keeping their branding updated across various platforms.
Cleaning up your brand doesn’t necessarily mean a full overhaul. It’s best to ask, “What is my target audience and what should our brand represent?“ When there are misalignments, it’s time to step back and make some updates. Maintaining brand equity—how your company is perceived and valued—is key to your relevance and profitability. Slowly shifting and updating your branding as needed can help your company align more smoothly with its brand.
Consistency, Consistency, Consistency!
Consistency across online platforms (social media and websites) is a great place to start. Go to your website or socials, then check for outdated pages, old profiles, old messaging, or missing links, and clean them out. Use your old messaging as a blueprint and make it new, refreshed, and accurate. Tighten up your branding and create an up-to-date company style guide. Ensure it contains correct fonts, your brand colors, and how to use your company’s logo.
Be true to your brand. If your logo is green, don’t let your team turn it pink for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, or orange for Halloween.
Overall, if you decide your brand needs an update, remember that it still needs to be true to its roots and be recognizable and appreciated by loyal customers. You are simply refining your brand, not rebranding.
Maintaining brand equity means your brand must:
- Maintain or improve its quality
- Hold value for the company and its consumers
- Be recognizable to consumers
- Not discourage brand loyalty
Don’t overcomplicate the process. Be diligent, and make sure your brand is upheld consistently.
NEW Google Review Guidelines.
Google Reviews has updated its 2026 guidelines to generate more authentic, unbiased feedback. This means that companies may not:
- Request specific employees be name-dropped. Specific employee or salesperson’s names cannot be asked to be included in reviews.
- Request a review on-site. This includes review kiosks or tablets. Any reviews solicited on a physical premises are banned.
- Set review quotas for employees. Internal staff performance cannot be based on reviews collected.
- Gatekeep reviews. Customers cannot be pre-screened—all customers must be welcome to leave reviews.
- Offer incentives. Incentives, such as discounts, loyalty points, or gifts, cannot be offered in exchange for a good review or the removal of a bad review.
Filtering or artificially boosting your reviews creates a biased overview of a company and can result in a business’s Google profile being suspended. A proper, unbiased review process should be open-ended, unpressured, and requested only after the customer has left the premises (via website, email, mail, or SMS marketing).
Want us to help with your Google Business page? Or help setting up a Google Review system?
Give us a call: 573-221-3635… or send us an email at info@poolecommunications.com.
