Maximising the ROI from your brand
Doing a ‘rebrand’ is a large and discrete body of work — but it’s only the very beginning. Successfully repositioning a brand on the other hand is an ongoing journey. An organisation’s ability to fully embrace the brand as an ever-present, living, and breathing part of the business, is crucial to ensuring maximum return from a rebrand investment. Whether you have a newly refreshed brand or one that has stood the test of time, there is much to be gained by considering how your brand is performing in the following areas.
BRAND ROLL OUT ACROSS TOUCH POINTS
Ensuring all items are addressed in a rebrand is a challenging one (but assuming you nailed that) the second challenge is ensuring integrity over time. Organisations can be large and unwieldy, and so too can the plethora of elements that require consistent maintenance to ensure they are on-brand and effective. Consider the various channels (both on and offline) your brand has and the variety of items that exist within those channels.
Are they still being created with careful consideration?
Precision in terms of messaging?
Customer-centric content?
Conveying your most important points of difference?
It is very, very easy to get swept up in the day-to-day‘ box ticking’ even in a small company — let alone a large one. Clarity and consistency are the two key components of branding. Don’t let consistency drag you down, that’s where the magic starts to happen.
BRAND EMBEDDED WITHIN THE ORGANISATION
Just like a brand is alive, so too is your organisation. It’s full of those wonderfully complex assets called humans. Bring together just the right mix of humans in just the right way and you have a unique superpower that is yours alone, no two cultures, and no two groups of people, are entirely the same. It is mission critical to not only introduce your brand in a powerful and effective manner (whether you are launching a rebrand or simply onboarding a new team member), but also the brand needs to be brought to life day in and day out through the fabric and rituals of the organisation. You must recruit, coach and manage your team with values-led conversations, and we highly recommend a weekly ritual of ‘value nominations’ where staff nominate others for displaying a value and share a little story. It raises visibility of what is happening in the day to day, it gives people acknowledgement for living and breathing the brand and as a leader it makes your job easy — everyone will know the values, and look outwards (and inwards) with a values-lens. And remember, you must lead by example. It doesn’t stop at values either — does everyone understand your greater purpose, your most desired customer? Do they know how to speak about the brand from the same song sheet as their colleagues? Building an engaged and brand-led team is the fastest way to ensure an optimum customer experience.
BRAND AT THE BOARD TABLE
Brand is not a function of marketing, brand is (or should be) at the heart of the organisation. There are many decisions that happen within an organisation and too often they are not considered from a brand perspective. Effective brand building is about the long term view — building equity over time. Does this mean tactical or quick win decisions can’t happen? No, it doesn’t. But it does mean it at least needs consideration from all angles to make an informed, strategic decision. Your brand strategy needs to be a regularly used resource as a guiding post for decision making across all aspects of the business. For more on this topic read Why you need a chief brand officer.
BRAND-LED MARKETING
The days of interrupting people and calling it ‘advertising’ are well and truly over. Today, the goal is to be the content they don’t want to be interrupted from. Every step of the way you need to be thinking about your audience front and centre — you need a deep understanding of them and to build your marketing around delivering them value. You need to be weaving in your story across both time and place to create an evolving, meaningful relationship. If you are still busy telling everyone how good you are and why, it might be time to review your marketing and tell a bigger story.
BRAND ASSETS AND TOOLS
Ok so it sounds like there is a lot of work to be done to build a brand-led organisation. The good news is it’s worth it, with brand-led organisations outperforming their competitors by 82%. The other good news is there are tools to make the task easier.
To manage your organisation’s brand effectively you will need:
- Brand strategy. Longer form document plus a shorter one page reference.
- Brand guidelines. Summarising your brand palette; a ‘how to guide’ with example pieces of collateral in context, to demonstrate implementation.
- Tone of voice. Documenting your brand’s language, tone and any specific instructions when it comes to the written (or spoken) word.
- Assets. Ready to use logomarks, fonts, graphic elements and imagery for any internal or external parties that need to work with the brand.
- Templates. Any important items should be addressed professionally and available as templates for use in the wider business.
- Brand guardian. It’s important that there is a central source that is championing the brand, understands all the nuances and can guide the business in terms of ensuring everything is ‘on brand’. This can be a branding agency that offers branding advisory services, or an appropriately skilled internal resource.
Maintaining a brand is no small feat. Give yourself the best chance of success by making sure all items are accessible from a central source, updated when necessary and designed to be easy to work with and meet the specific needs of your organisation.
Now we’ve talked through the rebrand and everything that happens around that to make your organisation truly and successfully brand-led, feel free to let us know if there’s another topic you’d like us to tackle.
Written by: Jodie de Vries
Published: July 19, 2022