How to make sure your brand is implemented properly
Many B2B organisations invest significant amounts of money on creating their brand, a visual shorthand for their business which creates a distinct and recognisable face within the marketplace. They invite design agencies in to pitch, agonise over brand positioning, photography style, logo colours and typography, and then launch with a fanfare. Yet, despite that, numerous companies leave to chance how their brand is used across different business touch points – from offices and van fleets to press ads and brochures – and across different international marketplaces.
However, brand consistency is an absolute prerequisite as it helps to reassure all stakeholders that they will receive the same brand experience wherever they are, be it in a different office or country.
So why are countless organisations leaving the fate of the brand to providence? The single biggest reason is because their brand guidelines don’t work. These are often created as massive tomes containing every conceivable bit of rationale, information and specification – but they tend to end up on the shelves of the Brand Manager who commissioned them and the agency that produced them. They look great but are often too complex for providing the relevant information to those on the ground tasked with implementing or using the brand. There will be a large and varied population who need to know what to do, but not necessarily why – from senior staff delivering PowerPoint presentations, the accounts department sending out invoices, junior staff tasked with putting a sign on a wall through to agency account execs on the other side of the world putting together an ad for local press. We have to remember that for many of these people, applying the rules accurately and consistently is way down their list of priorities, and for many, yellow is yellow is yellow…… for a brand (and the brand team) only the right yellow is good enough. These people simply want/need to know what to do, not why.
So what should companies do to ensure that their hard earned values and brand integrity give the same messages wherever they are seen, ultimately building a stronger, better differentiated brand?
1. Review the touchpoints
Agency and client need to work together to understand every potential touch point and iteration of the brand. There could be hundreds of these depending on a company’s size and structure; from a global campaign using every conceivable comms channel, through to local charity sponsorship which requires a single banner. And don’t just think about now – plan ahead for activity that may be on the horizon, such as development of an app or additions to a website.
2. Cascade down
Global/national brand team needs to take ownership and control of overall policy, but then cascade it down to implementers. Brand implementation can be massively contentious. Somebody somewhere is making a set of rules that everybody is meant to abide by. As for anything visual, brand identities are open to the subjective response of everybody, but if you don’t get their buy-in to the importance of upholding brand guidelines, it simply won’t happen.
The temptation is always there to try to explain, justify and rationalise every decision. It’s an art to balance the level of soft ‘reasons why’ against the hard specifications needed to get it right. The ‘reasons why’ are massively important where interpretation is the name of the game, such as getting the tone of copy right in a commercial or a speech; but not so much if preparing a sign for the car park. So give relevant information, bespoke to each audience and the role they’re tasked with. Also, bear in mind that this is a continuous process as staff come and go and your business evolves.
4. Uncomplicate
Simplify your brand guidelines and take the time or space to explain them straightforwardly and clearly. You need bite size chunks, especially at the sharp end, as a facilities manager, tasked with installing brand accurate signs, will not wade through pages and pages of rules to find the information relevant to their job.
5. Delivery
Consider how best to communicate guidelines – email? PDF? App? Microsite? They must be very accessible to those who need them and new technology is making it easier. Today, we can create online guidelines that means in five clicks or less, an implementer can find the ‘Janet and John’ instructions tailored to their needs. And the beauty of levels based visual identity (VI) implementation is that rules can be kept consistent with ease. For example, now we can have one colour palette policy and links to it from all the other policies. So, if we update the palette it only has to be done once, not across several other policies, so saving money, time and management.
6. Limit options
Be clear about what part of the branding is fixed (e.g. colours, logo, typeface) and what is variable (e.g. photography) as an ad and a sign need quite different things. However, for the latter ensure you limit the potential for interpretation.
7. Audit
Have regular audits across your brand communications and touch points to identify gaps, loopholes and dubious implementation standards. The frequency of these depends on how big and complicated your business is, but it’s worth doing six months after launching a new visual identity and then at least every couple of years. The learning from these then informs your brand guidelines ongoing to limit the potential for mistakes, and of course informs you where the VI programme may need adjustments, development/refinements.
A strong brand is like a jigsaw puzzle. Whether it’s made of four pieces (a small business) or 4,000 (a global corporation), the picture doesn’t work if one piece is missing or in the wrong place. A well prepared set of brand guidelines helps to keep all the pieces in the box.
Simon Wright, MD at Greenwich Design