How To Use Brand Identity Guides For Proper Brand Management?

This article by Renate Sandland Henriksen originally appeared on our Alliance Partner, Brandmaster's Blog and we wanted to share with our readers.

Your brand is a living, breathing thing, which means it’s constantly changing. It’s also very susceptible to external factors like news, trends, and current events.

Most companies would agree that branding is an important element to their business growth. But how many companies actually focus on brand management? A study shows that branding often falls to someone in Marketing. The question then is, how many other tasks does this someone have? 

The Paradox of Brand Management

The extent of brand management in a company is diversified and there is no right or wrong on how to execute this. However, there are some key ingredients that are necessary and there are many pitfalls that determines the success of brand management.

Without the necessary focus, managing a brand will quickly become a left-hand task. Before you know it, your brand is abused by your colleagues, your brand voice is lost, and your brand personality is having a crisis.

Regardless of size and resources, a brand is a company’s most valuable asset. In a study by Millward Brown, they found that strong brands commanded 13% price premium over weak brands.

In other words, the stronger your brand, the better are your chances of getting a good price and increase revenue – Brand management matters!

Also read: A strong brand is your most valuable asset when scaling your business

Take Control of Your Brand

We now live in a world with a heated pulse where journalists, influencers, and social media users (just to mention a few) influence virtually every narrative, brand management is how you can take control of your business’s expression to the eyes of the world. It is using your branding and brand assets to communicate value and build loyal relationships with your followers, fans, and customers.

In short, your brand needs a brand manager to ensure its success. Don’t let your brand be like Kanye.

Brand management is about the investment you do in building your brand. Making sure you achieve the desired visibility and market position. Important elements in achieving just that, is brand consistency, clarity, differentiation and more.

To get there you need a strategy and a plan, and you need to stick to it. Simple? Not really. It boils down to how the management perceives brand building. Is it essential, or nice to have? Will they dedicate the necessary resources for you to manage your brand efficiently? 86% thinks that presenting a brand consistently is important, but only 49% indicate that they succeed with consistency.

So, let’s assume management is backing you 100%. How do you make sure your brand management is implemented throughout your entire organisation and delivered to your market as intended?

Brand management is an extensive subject to cover, but by touching a few elementary matters, you will have a better understanding of how healthy your company’s brand management really is. Use it to take control of your brand; 

Make sure your organisation understands your brand

Your colleagues are your biggest brand ambassadors. If they are not onboard with your brand strategy, how can you succeed? It is crucial to ensure your colleagues knows their role in your brand strategy and how important they are to the success of your brand management. And just as important, where can they find all the information they need without asking you?  

Make sure you have brand rules in place

Your colleagues need to know how to use your brand, from a-z. Establish proper brand rules that are easy to understand, easy to use and available.

Make sure you have efficient and dynamic workflows

The marketing space changes fast. Avoid bottlenecks by ensuring you have the proper tools in place to secure seamless workflows for efficient brand management. Allow easy access to brand assets, templates and information and allow self-service workflows. Nobody is well served with you spending all your time on email requests from your colleagues. Reduce the bottlenecks and spend your time on valuable long term activities instead.

Make sure you are reliable and valid

You need to ensure that the information you provide your colleagues with is always updated. If the information they have is no longer valid, and they keep using it, your brand will quickly suffer damage. And your marketing department will undergo a reliability downturn.

The common denominator for the above is to establish a solid brand identity guide that will cover everything about your brand in one joint piece that you distribute to everyone in your company. How you do this, will determine the extent of your success.

Bring Your Brand Management Online With A Brand Identity Guide

Just like your Adidas built the brand identity of your middle-school-star-athlete persona, your design is what will build the brand identity of your company.

Your corporate design assets are the tangible elements that will determine how your brand is perceived. Things like your logo, your packaging, your web design, your social media graphics, your business cards and the uniforms your employees wear.

In other words, nailing your design by having a flexible system for all employees = nailing your brand identity = building a successful business that’s an accurate representation of who you are as ONE brand.

A large part of brand management is to establish valuable brand identity guides. Elevate your brand to the next level, with beautiful, branded guidelines that will allow your organisation to have access to your brand and assets 24/7. 

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