How far do you go with branding?

Two of the aims of a brand are to represent the differences between you and your competitors and to manage expectations. It says 'this is who we are and what we do'. So if a customer's experience differs from the one that the brand promises we have a problem. Here we look at some of the issues faced when turning a brand's promise into reality.

The obvious starting point with any brand is to design a logo, literature, website and other things that people will see whenever they interact with you. Many organisations quite rightly invest in making sure that these things are done to a high standard and in a consistent way.

One reason that organisations are often good at these things is that they are relatively easy to control. For example, there might be just a couple of people who have the authority to make changes to the website. So the marketing department can ensure that the website, brochures, press advertisements and direct mail items consistently represent the brand.

But whenever there's less control (and more people involved) you run the risk that the brand starts to fall apart. As a result, you can end up with numerous places where your image differs from the core purpose and values of your organisation.

The classic problem is where customers receive several letters from various departments during the course of a year. The letters look as though they come from different organisations, let alone different departments. When this happens your customers might become unclear about the sort of company they are dealing with. Is it the company they see represented on TV and online, with its clear promises about the way it does business, or a quite different one that can't live up to the promises?

Looking the same, all the time

The main way that many organisations try to ensure a consistent application of the brand is to produce a 'brand manual' or 'style guide'. This should go further than just covering the use of the logo, including information on an overall house style and templates for a wide range of items.

Here are five 'rules of thumb' that we bear in mind when creating brand manuals for our clients:

1. Focus on things that make the biggest business contribution. If you include page after page of detail that bears little relevance to your brand and business goals you could discredit the manual in the eyes of employees. Focus on the most important items, such as customer correspondence and support for sales people in the preparation of tender and proposal documentation.

2. Explain the guidelines in a simple way. Many employees will have little marketing experience, and probably little interest in the niceties of marketing or design theory. So avoid lots of marketing-speak and make sure that people understand exactly what they can do to ensure compliance with the guidelines.

3. Explain why the rules exist. It's not enough to simply list the rules. You can only ensure buy-in if you also make the business case for a consistent delivery of the brand.

4. Leave some room for creativity. If the rules are too pedantic they might be almost impossible to follow. Look for opportunities to let people make common sense choices from a number of options.

5. Make it interactive. No matter how much time you put into preparing your brand manual the chances are that some situations will crop up that you haven't covered. So encourage people to get in touch with you when they have questions or suggestions about developing the guidelines.

'Living the brand'

As well as ensuring that the brand is represented consistently in terms of its visual identity, ideally you will want to make sure the brand values are delivered by the people in your organisation. The goal is to make sure that everyone in the organisation (and not just the senior team and marketing department) can articulate the brand values - and apply them in their particular role.

'Living the brand' is a bit of a cliché, but in fact it is very simple and it makes perfect business sense. For example, Virgin Atlantic's website promises that they 'like to challenge the mundane to give our passengers something a little special'. It's clearly important therefore that their staff understand this promise and that they know how they can contribute to delivering on it.

So how can an organisation take steps to ensure its employees ensure the brand promise is matched by real service delivery? Here are a few ways:

Recruitment

Make sure you are bringing in people who fit the culture and can turn the brand into reality. A company with a brand that's all about fast service might choose a different candidate than an organisation whose brand values are focused on traditional craftsmanship. Appoint the wrong person and you will end up having to spend more time on personal development that you bargained for. This is one reason why the human resources department in particular must understand the brand values.

Induction

The brand values (and the reasons for them) should be an integral part of an induction programme. Customer-facing staff in particular should hear about what is expected from them. And sales staff should be able to deliver a flawless 'who we are' presentation before they are allowed anywhere need a customer.

Training

Again, customer-facing people in particular must understand their role in making sure the customer experience lives up to what the brand promises. One recent example springs to mind where we at Titman Firth were impressed with a company whose website represented them as having high levels of expertise and a belief in personal service. Yet when we tried to get an answer to a relatively simple technical question we were treated in an offhand way. This is a good example of a 'collapsing brand'.

Consistency

In some organisations, it is the long-standing employees who deliver the brand, while there is little buy-in among new staff. The opposite can also be true, especially where there has been a recent culture change programme where long servers have been left behind. A big challenge for many organisations is therefore to make sure the brand is represented among all staff, and not just particular groups.

© Titman Firth 2005