Managing Your Brand: Brand Identity
In our previous discussion, we talked about how the whole of your organization bears some level of responsibility for managing your brand. (If you missed that one, click here.)
Now let’s talk about marketing’s role in this constant and ongoing process.
Broadly speaking, your marketing team should handle three general areas of managing your brand:
- Crafting & maintaining your brand identity
- Monitoring & understanding your brand
- Educating those who own your brand
We’re going to cover each of these in its own post, starting with brand identity.
Brand identity includes many of the pieces laypeople think of when they discuss brands and branding, such as your name, logo and more. It’s also one of the more important collection of assets that your company owns.
As previously mentioned, your brand is an immaterial jumble of thoughts, feelings and opinions that influence a person to buy (or not buy) your product. Think of your brand identity as the container that holds that immaterial jumble together and gives it a place to live. By taking a thoughtful and structured approach, you can contribute to both the shape and prominence it takes in your audience’s minds.
It's worth noting that a successful brand identity can be very loosely or rigidly defined.
Over my career in B2B marketing, I’ve worked with a lot of companies that use a simple, one-sheet reference guide to define brand identity in terms of their logo, tagline, colors and fonts.
I’ve also worked with many that go a bit further, creating a brand book that sets standards for things like tone of voice, use of imagery, placement of design elements, templates and so on.
At the far end of the spectrum, I worked with one company that used an 8-volume branding guide with separate books for advertising, apparel, trade show booths, building/office design, etc.
While there’s not necessarily a right or wrong degree of scope, I favor an approach that defines no more than it has to, but then works towards 100% compliance with those standards.
As you work with your marketing team to evaluate and refine your approach to managing your brand identity, keep the following do’s and don’ts in mind.
Do keep it flexible enough to be effective.
This is especially important to companies doing business globally. While some elements should be universal, you need to build in enough flexibility that your brand identity can be applied across a broad range of cultures. Otherwise, you may find yourself facing the choice of either allowing one of your subsidiaries to break the standards or forcing them to use something that doesn’t work in their market.
Do develop templates.
Make it easy for your organization to present a consistent brand identity by providing templates, especially for any externally facing communications (e.g. presentations, landing pages, business cards, signage, etc.) This helps establish and ensure a quality standard, as well as reduces the risk of well-meaning team members creating items that look like they’re from an entirely different company.
Don’t change it.
This isn’t an absolute, but’s a great starting position. Big changes can occasionally offer significant benefit, but are extremely challenging and present many opportunities to damage your brand. Small changes frequently generate a lot of cost and confusion with little to show for it. Take the default position that you’re not going to make changes to your brand identity, and only reconsider when you have a compelling, data-driven justification for doing so.
Don’t go overboard.
If your brand standards are overly prescriptive, you’re most likely going to end up in one of two situations. Either portions of them will be ignored by your team, or you’ll end up with an identity so polished that its scrubbed clean of any trace of human personality.
Tune in next time, when we’ll cover how your marketing team can help you monitor and understand your brand.As always, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at info@fact-house.com or via our contact us page to get in touch with any questions or if you're looking for a marketing partner.
