“If you build it, they will come.” Well, that might be true of corn farmers in Iowa looking to play baseball with the White Sox, but when it comes to your company, it takes more than just building an organization delivering products or services. Even before your business is established, it needs to be branded. And once it is, that branding must be cultivated and maintained and expanded on a regular basis.

Building a brand is more like raising a child than constructing a baseball field. Brands have their own personalities and nuances that need to be nurtured. When the brand is young, you have more say in what its character traits will be. You get to dress it (logo, office décor, company dress policy and uniforms, etc), teach it how to talk (develop a tone for all communication) and instill the values you find most important. Once the business is older, it’s like bringing up a pre-teen or teenager. And like teenagers, there are more places it can find itself in trouble and potentially go wrong. Its personality is relatively established but still developing, and as more opportunities and challenges comes its way, your role becomes educating it on how to respond and conduct itself, giving it a little more freedom and learning how to operate from the behind the scenes.

Like being a parent, when it comes to branding, your job is never done. There’s always more to teach, more to give and more to convey. The challenge is to keep the brand in line with your original vision, making sure it stays consistent with all the values and standards it originally started out with, while giving it enough freedom to grow and evolve. Always take advantage of new opportunities, but don’t lose sight of who the brand is and how it’s portraying itself to consumers. Just like you would never force your kid who hates math but loves reading and creative expression to become an accountant, you never want to push a brand in a direction that’s not in line with its personality. And pretty similar to a kid who’s faced with constant temptation to jump on bandwagons and conform to whatever trend is most popular at the moment, there’s plenty of lure for companies to hop on whatever marketing movement is the flavor of the month, regardless if it’s consistent with who the brand is.

So let’s say you’re a retirement community promising a relaxing environment for seniors to live. Viral and text marketing, no matter how popular, is probably not going to be your best bet. Traditional mediums like print collateral, billboards and broadcast will be more effective for reaching your target, and more cohesive with your image. But if you’re a hot new bar looking to attract a college crowd, guerilla, viral and social media are going to brand yourself more consistently than a newspaper ad or direct mail piece. We’ll talk more about media placement’s role in branding next week, so let’s not get to hung up on that. The takeaway point for today is that effective branding is branding that’s controlled and consistent. Whenever you’re making branding choices (and that will every day, from who you’re hiring to what content you’re updating the website with) think about who your brand is, where it wants to go and go with what works best to maintain the brand and keep a consistent, reliable image that doesn’t throw consumers or make them think twice about who the brand is.