Speaking of Clover.

Branding: The Benefit of the Doubt

This last weekend I was finishing up my weekly Saturday morning run, and I was struck by this sign a couple streets away from my house.

I loved the simplicity of the message. No need for excessive text, addresses plastered all over the place, or fliers all up and down the neighborhood. I knew with one symbol that there was a garage sale down the street.

Ben and I met with a couple of consultant friends about a year ago to go over our branding and advertising strategy for Clover. One of their biggest concerns they had with our strategy is that they felt we gave people “too much credit” in our advertising. They said by keeping our message too simple we were losing people. They believed that we had to do and say more in order to include the most people.

For example, one of the things they said to change was our tag line “Websites for Growing Ministries”. They felt it should say something like “Beautiful and Elegant Websites for All Ministries”. They felt that by including more adjectives into the tag line, we would help more people identify with the product. They also felt that by having too simple of branding, people would miss who we really were, and the beauty of our product… And that our current campaign of just stating what we were in a simple and clean fashion was giving our market “too much credit”, and not giving them enough descriptors to realize that they needed our product.

We absolutely appreciated the advice, and chewed over the advice for a few months.

But after these few months, Ben and I ended up on the exact same page as when we started Clover. We felt that even though business books and consultants might say that by adding more descriptors (or “bling”) to the message you include more people in your message and product, we disagreed. It wasn’t right for our message, and it wasn’t right for our audience.

If you’re looking for something (whether it be a garage sale or website provider), you’re not going to miss it. For those garage sale shopping that Saturday in my neighborhood, the multiple fluorescent pink arrows pointing to the same location could not be mistaken for anything other than what they were intended for. in the same way, a perfectly positioned simple message presenting a revolutionary website solution will not only bring attention to those looking for a website, but it will bring the attention of the RIGHT people. people who are attracted to elegance, straight-forwardness, beauty and simplicity.

So props to my neighbors who had the guts to give people the benefit of the doubt. I hope you sold every one of your old couches.