A strong brand is one of the most valuable assets an organisation owns. To work effectively it must be applied consistently and well. Emma Cooper, our Director, explains what you can do to help your brand come alive.
We always liken a brand to a stick of rock. So wherever you look in an organisation there has to be a constant, clear message! Ultimately your brand needs to permeate everything you do. And the whole team has a part to play in making it come alive.
Getting a brand right matters. It’s likely that you have taken time and care to develop your logo. You’ll have invested in your look and feel, and your website and sales materials. You’ll have considered your key values and messages. You will also have expectations about how you want your team to act and behave and how you interact with your clients and customers. Ensuring these these key elements of your brand are captured so that they permeate through everything you do is a key part in creating a powerful marketing and comms strategy.
Your marketing toolkit
So if it’s understood that your brand is a valuable tool, and has to sit at the heart of all of your activities, how do you help protect it? One of the main tools is to ensure that you have a strong set of corporate identity guidelines. This vital part of your marketing kit allows you to formalise your logo design, provide rules about how, when and where it should be used, set out your choice of corporate colours and imagery and offer examples of your brand in use.
Ultimately a set of brand guidelines, sometimes referred to as corporate identity guidelines, help explain what your brand stands for, how it’s expressed, and how the creative elements fit together in all communications. It should be used when you commission, design or deliver any kind of brand communications.
By having this tool in your marketing kit you can help safeguard the consistent application of your brand at every stage, and with every project. You can also use the guidelines to check back whenever you produce new marketing tools. They help guide every member of the team and ensure that new employees also stay on brand!
The importance of brand guidelines
The other important element when it comes to protecting your brand is to empower a team of brand guardians. These are likely to include your marketing team. It’s important to make sure management and the Board are waving the brand flag too. Only then can you be sure that your brand can do the important job which it needs to, helping guarantee that it plays its part in resonating perfectly with your team, customers and the wider world.
We’ve helped companies across a range of sectors to develop and refine their brand communications. To discuss any aspect of your branding give us a call on 01243 214175.
