“A brand is more than a trademark. It is a trustmark. A brand is a covenant between the company and the consumer. A trusted brand is a genuine asset.”
– Larry Light, US brand consultant
Every brand has a voice – what is yours saying?
Brand Management is an integral part of any marketing strategy. It is about keeping your brand strong and healthy, and most importantly, making sure it is instantly recognisable to your client base.
Your brand is your identity. It tells the story of who you are and that story is what the outside world sees. Whether it is a type of service, the appearance of an outlet, the behaviour of your staff or a simple logo – every element combines to send a message. And you want that message to be strong, trustworthy, and above all, consistent.
Recognition leads to loyalty, and in order for your brand to be recognised, it has to be consistently applied. You may think this is not relevant to you, but brand elements can quickly become diluted, skewed or modified without you even realising it.
Take, for example, your logo. You may have had it specially designed, you may have worked with the agency to incorporate specific elements and colours to represent an idea or principle, and it is exactly what you want. It goes on your business card, letterhead and stationery.
Some months later you sponsor a charity event and the organisers thank you by putting your company logo in their programme. In the absence of any specific instructions from you, they use the logo from your business card, scan it and send it to their printers, who blow it up to fit the space allocated to it in the brochure and print it. You are not even at the charity event, so you do not see the final printed brochure. Your logo is there, but it is slightly blurred, and the colours are not quite right.
In addition, the organisers have given you even more exposure by having the same printers print a large banner with your logo on it, which is displayed carefully at the event. The logo at this size is pixellated, stretched and looks very different from the one in the catalogue, which is already different from the one on the original business card. Unintentionally and through no real fault of their own, the organisers have undermined your brand image and have created visual confusion for your consumer base. In short, the integrity of your corporate image has been attacked, and the brand that people identify with, and trust, has been tarnished.
This may seem like an extreme example, but if a company has no brand management strategy to ensure that your brand is being correctly applied at every single level (staff protocol, office procedure, social media content, print media, promotions and promotional items, uniforms…the list is endless) essential elements, which make your brand what it is, can be lost in translation. This creates confusion, and confusion loses customers. Simply put, the story you want to tell is not what your target audience is hearing.
A trusted and recognisable brand is an asset – and that asset needs to be managed and protected to ensure that it is consistently applied.
A style guide is a source document for company employees, suppliers of your product, advertising agents (in fact, anyone who promotes your brand in any form whatsoever) to use that defines exactly how your brand should be applied. For example, with your logo, it specifies font size, type, exact pantone colours, shape, any number of other factors that make your visual brand strong and recognisable. In the case of employees, it defines dress code, customer interface procedures, code of conduct. Depending on how big your organisation is, your style guide can be as simple or as complicated as you need it to be.
Your brand delivers your corporate image. It tells a story, and whenever that story is told, it needs to consistently send the same message.
I am here to help you with that message, and to ensure that is a message that people identify with and trust.