How Many Brands Are You?

Brands work the same way, whether you are a company offering products and services, a celebrity or a nation. They are based on the perception people have of you based on sets of experiences they have with you. Which is why it is so important to simplify, focus and align those experiences so people believe you can provide something uniquely relevant to them, time and again.

Many companies struggle to make everything look, sound and feel like it’s coming from the same company. If there’s a healthy sense of freedom in the corporate culture, it’s tempting to get creative with product names, the corporate logo, even the way employee work spaces are designed. If your brand attributes and brand promise are clearly about wild fun, and diversity, and rampant inventiveness, then knock yourself out. Otherwise, you had better have clear guidance that explains to content creators, product designers and all brand evangelists, just who you are, what you stand for, and what expectations customers and employees should have in their experiences with you. Then you need to govern the quality and consistency of experiences to meet your high standards. This entails alignment of the brand attributes and brand promise to everything you design – wherever the brand touches employees and customers, whether it’s the product, the paint on the office walls, the ad campaign, or the music people hear when they are placed “on hold” in customer support.

How to achieve brand alignment across all touch points? Constant vigilance:

-       Clear guidelines on designing brand experiences

-       Periodic training for content creators on the visual and verbal language of the brand and how they must integrate

-       Promoting best practices.

-       A respected legal team to help with trademark or copyright protection.

-       A corporate culture that understands and appreciates the brand because people are inspired about the role they play as brand evangelists.

Brand management is more art than science. It’s an imperfect process in pursuit of perfection. A common temptation is to let the brand drift off into whatever bright shiny object an executive or a product team or a designer might believe gets attention right here, right now! The danger of too much creativity or change for change’s sake is the diffusion and disintegration of the brand. The natural magnet of your brand story weakens, employees and customers drift because they don’t know what to expect from you, and brand experiences can proliferate in myriad, experimental, costly, disconnected directions. The brand begins to die by a thousand cuts.

The challenge of getting everyone to agree about “who we are,” and align a strong master brand strategy to the business is especially important as companies meet market inflections. Of course, as the customer landscape changes, how brand experiences are designed and delivered changes, and the creative content that tells the brand story changes. That’s the time to test the alignment, consistency and clarity of brand experiences.

Ask yourself, your customers, vendors, partners, investors, what do you expect from us? And don’t just gather data – talk to real people and get their rational opinions and emotional feedback. Conduct a brand and marketing communications audit. Look at product design. Talk to your best employees and customers and ask why they are engaged and loyal. Or why they chose a competitor’s offering instead. Find out why people believe in you – why they’ve trusted you, and give you their attention (and their money), time and again.

The actionable insights you get are your roadmap to maintaining a strong, focused, relevant brand. You’ll get your brand story straight and be true to that very short list of who you really are, what you stand for and what makes you unique.