Over the course of my career, I’ve been a brand custodian for global brands and start-ups, rebranded 50-year-old companies and launched shiny new brands. Managing brand communications has become increasingly complex along the way. The reasons center around three trends that present both challenges and opportunities for brand and marketing leadership.
1) Brand Co-Ownership
If you’ve been actively managing a brand in the last 10 years, you’re acutely aware that brands are no longer managed by you exclusively, but shared with all your constituents – prospects, customers, shareholders – pretty much everyone who has occasion to touch your brand. Enabled by social media, stoked by blogs, encouraged by customer reviews, your stakeholders own your brand as much as you do.
2) Next Gen Marketers
New hires in marketing departments throughout the world brim with smart, digitally savvy young professionals who are as likely to have basic photography, design, and web-coding skills as they are to be working towards their MBA at night. Is it any wonder that more and more branded content is developed in-house when all that talent is ready and willing to take it on?
3) Distributed Content Creation
Most of the marketing leaders we work with maintain multiple relationships with content providers, from subject matter experts for copywriting assignments to marketing automation providers for online lead tracking and nurturing. Add in advertising agencies and public relations firms, and you have numerous individuals and groups responsible for maintaining your brand image over multiple marketing channels.
Avoiding Brand Chaos
Whether your brand communications is managed internally or by an external resource or resources, it’s imperative that your brand team have a crystal clear view of your brand in all its facets. The most common and effective tool for communicating a brand’s values, voice, messaging, and visual vocabulary is a reference piece, variously called brand guidelines, brand standards, or simply a brand book.
Brand books come in all shapes and sizes, but they are created with the same purpose in mind – to inform content creators and achieve continuity in all brand communications.
I’ve worked with brand books in all sizes, from a simple 8-pager to a client’s 72 page tome. The basics start by defining a brand’s visual elements:
- Logo design and usage
- A color palette that includes primary and secondary colors
- Typographic standards
Additional options include:
- Primary visual elements
- Photography style guidelines
- Photographic and infographic library
- Primary densign elements and applications for specific communications
From there it can get nuanced, often addressing brand voice elements such as tone and personality:
- A ‘reason for being’ statement that goes beyond boilerplate language
- A messaging hierarchy that includes a brand positioning statement, elevator message, and supporting messages that drill down on the primary value of the brand’s offerings.
Brands today take different approaches to brand management. Some companies embrace brand fluidity, creating visual options within a loose structure, while others tightly define all facets of their brand. How your brand approaches the challenge will likely fall somewhere in-between these extremes. Too few rules, and brand communications become subject the whim of the designer, too many and they can stifle creativity and engender a bland sameness.
Back when Apple used their ‘rainbow’ apple logo I happened to be chatting with a guy sitting next to me on a flight to Chicago. It turned out his job was to supervise logo print reproduction throughout the U.S., checking to make sure each of the 6 stripes of color matched the brand color palette precisely. It seemed a bit obsessive, so I’m guessing Steve Jobs had something to do with the policing policy at Apple – perhaps the only time he could be accused of doing things ‘by the book’.
