Part 2: Brand Activation That Ignites Momentum | Beverly Cornell

Welcome to Wickedly Branded: Marketing, Magic, and The Messy Middle, the podcast where real conversations meet real strategies. I'm your host, Beverly Cornell, founder and fairy godmother of brand clarity at Wickedly Branded. With over 25 years of experience, I’ve helped hundreds of entrepreneurs awaken their brand magic, attract the right people, and build businesses that light them up.

Halfway through Season 6 of the podcast, we tackle one of the biggest reasons entrepreneurs stall: getting stuck in “almost there” mode. Your brand might be close, but if it feels off, inconsistent, or outdated, it will hold you back from showing up with confidence. In this episode, Beverly shares the top three reasons this happens: misaligned voice and visuals, outdated branding, and lack of consistency, and how you can fix each one. If you’ve been hesitating to fully activate your brand, this is your sign to align, simplify, and step forward boldly.

Three Key  Marketing Topics Discussed:

1. When Voice and Visuals Don’t Match: If your Instagram is playful but your website feels corporate, you're sending mixed signals. Consistency across platforms is key to building trust.
2. Outgrowing Your Old Branding: As you evolve, ensure your branding keeps pace. Refresh your messaging and visuals every 12–18 months to reflect your current identity and future aspirations.
3. The Cost of Inconsistency: Differing fonts, colors, and styles can make your brand seem scattered. A brand kit and consistent templates foster cohesion, enhancing recognition and confidence.

Dare to be Wickedly Branded

Transcript

Beverly: 0:11

So we are halfway through season six, and you've been listening to our incredible guests. I'm sure you've picked up a ton of new ideas and inspiration, but here is one thing that I want to make sure you understand. None of that matters if you're still feeling in what I like to call almost there mode. You know what I mean? Your brand is close, but something feels off. It feels maybe a little stuffy, a little corporate, a little too much chat, GPT. Maybe it feels like your competitor. It doesn't quite click with you and who you are and where you've become. And because of that, you hesitate to put yourself really out there. You hesitate maybe to go on a podcast. You hesitate to go to hand your card out at a networking event. Today I'm gonna share the top three reasons that this happens and what you can actually do to fix it. The very first reason is that your visuals and your voice are not speaking the same language. Maybe your Instagram looks playful and super casual and just like you, but your website sounds like a corporate brochure from maybe 2010. Or maybe your colors are bold and edgy, but your coffee is soft and underrated and you're not really asking for the sale. When this happens, your audience gets mixed signals from you and mixed signals kill your momentum and kill your sales period. So here's a way to fix that. I want you to audit all of your platforms, every word that you show up. So if you show up in an email, if you show up on Instagram, LinkedIn, everywhere, you show up and ask yourself, if someone looked at this and read my words, would they feel like it came from the same exact person. And if the answer is no, then, it's time to start aligning. So one thing I've seen here even with marketers is that they have different handles on different social media sites. That's super confusing. So what is one phrase, one word? If it's your method, if it's the name of your business, what is the thing that you can have across all of the platforms so that it's the same no matter where they go? That's a great way to start and then to create a about us or a description that is the same across all the different channels as well. The second reason is your brand hasn't kept up with you. You've grown, you've evolved, but your branding is still stuck in the early days. I see this all the time. You have refined, you have grown as a business person. You have gotten a little bit more sophisticated. You understand the market better, you understand what you're doing better. And you have so much more clarity and maybe you've even changed your niche. You've gotten really hyper-focused on your customers, but your website still looks like your first Canva template. Now what can you do to fix that? Every year revisit your messaging and your imagery and make sure they still match the business you're running now, and the one you want to become. Not the one that you had when you first started 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Yeah. I see you. I was that person a couple years ago. I look at my stuff and go, Ooh, actually, I just, I have my very first business card here. It's not bad, but it's not where I am now. And if I'd stuck with this. It wouldn't look like we have become something that we are today much more bold, much, much more daring to be able to exist as wickedly branded versus Beverly Cornell Consulting as a freelancer. The third reason is a lack of consistency. Your brand feels like. A patchwork quilt that my grandmother made. You're using different fonts in every graphic. Your social media doesn't match your proposals, and your emails have no visual tie to your brand at all. So here's a way to address that today. Create a brand kit in Canva. There's a little section in there that says Brand kit, put in your colors, your actual hex code colors if you have them, the fonts you wanna use for the heading and the subheading. Any logos and icons and rules and examples of how you want your brand to show up. And then you have to actually use it every single time. We create template kits for our clients all the time so that they can take them and use them and maybe change their background a couple times, change some direction We'll build a kit, we'll build the templates so that they have them ready to go to use them going forward. So if you need help with that, we can certainly help you with that, but you can certainly do this on your own as well. I want to remind you, activation is not about perfection as a recovering perfectionist. It's about creating enough alignment that you can confidently show up. Now the perfect brand does not exist. If it did, gosh, we would be on the hunt for it, but it evolves. It's organic, it grows with you as you grow and evolve. In my last episode of the season, I'm gonna walk you through a simple 90 day plan to fully activate your brand step by step so that you stop stalling and start showing up because your brand can't connect with the right people that you love to work with and love to help if it's hiding in what I call the almost there mode. So let's change that. Let's be bolder. Let's make those baby steps. Let's get out of our own way with perfection and dare to be wickedly branded.