Episode 3: How To Communicate, Manage and Develop Your Brand Identity

How to communicate, manage and develop your brand identity; Permit me to rephrase this into two sections, namely;

1. The key ingredients of any brand.

2. Brand Management Techniques.

THE KEY INGREDIENTS OF ANY BRAND.

In this section, the four cornerstones of any good brand will be outlined using examples from the business world.

Defining your brand: If you’re thinking about how to rebrand your business, its products or services, you want to assess where your brand stands at present, there are a few key aspects you should consider:

       i.            The big idea – what lies at the heart of your company?

     ii.            Vision – where are you going?

  iii.            Values – what do you believe in?

   iv.            Personality – how do you want to come across?

If you can start to answer these questions with clarity and consistency then you have the basis for developing a strong brand.

Let’s take each of these in turn.

·         The Big Idea

The big idea is perhaps a catch-all for your company or service. It should summarise; what makes you different, what you offer, why you’re doing it and how you’re going to present it. The other ingredients are slightly more specific, but they should all feed from the big idea.

The big idea is also a uniting concept that can hold together an otherwise disparate set of activities. Ideally, it will inform everything you do, big or small, including customer service, advertising, a website order form, staff uniforms, corporate identity, perhaps right down to your answer machine message. To pin down your own big idea you will need to look very carefully at your own business and the marketplace around you, asking these types of questions:

How can you stand out?

What is your offer?

What makes you different?

What is your ‘personality’?

What do consumers want or need?

Is there a gap in the market?

To aid this process it’s usually very helpful to get an outside perspective on things too, so consider working with a management consultant, business development consultant or design consultancy.

Once decided, the articulation of these ideas can be put into action through branding techniques such as design, advertising, events, partnerships, staff training and so on. It is these activities that set up the consumer’s understanding and expectation of your company; in other words, your brand. Once you’ve set up this brand ‘promise’, the most important thing is to ensure that your products and services consistently deliver on it.

·        Vision

Generating a vision for your company means thinking about the future, where you want to be, looking at ways to challenge the market or transform a sector. A vision may be grand and large-scale, or may be as simple as offering an existing product in a completely new way, or even changing the emphasis of your business from one core area to another. Although, corporate visions and mission statements can often appear to be little more than a hollow dictums from top management, a well-considered vision can help you to structure some of the more practical issues of putting a development strategy into action. If you’re clear on what you’re aiming at, it’s obviously easier to put the structures in place to get there.

·        Values

Like the word brand itself, the term “brand values” is perhaps a little over-used in design and marketing circles, but it does relate to important aspects of how people see your organisation. It’s what you stand for and it can be communicated either explicitly or implicitly in what you do. But imbuing your company’s brand with a set of values is tricky for a number of reasons.

Firstly, everybody wants the same kinds of values to be associated with their business. A survey by carried out found that most companies share the same ten values, namely: quality, openness, innovation, individual responsibility, fairness, empowerment, passion, flexibility, teamwork and pride.

Lastly, any values you portray have to be genuine and upheld in the way your organisation operates. Branding and design consultants can help you clarify what your organisation or business stands for and then they can develop ways for you to communicate that effectively. This might be through graphic design, language, advertising, staff training, the materials used in product manufacture and so on.

Branding and design consultants can help you clarify what your organisation or business stands for and then they can develop ways for you to communicate that effectively. This might be through graphic design, language, advertising, staff training, the materials used in product manufacture and so on.

Burberry is an example of a brand that for a while, lost its core values and was beginning to underperform.

Originally a luxury manufacturer of raincoats it had become near ever-present. The famous Burberry check was appearing on everything from dog leashes to t-shirts. Consistency of the brand had been lost, with customers around the world getting a different experience. In 2006 new CEO Angela Ahrendts brought luxury firmly back to the agenda, appointed a single creative director to oversee the brand worldwide and ruthlessly cut away the baggage that had begun to attach itself to the brand reducing the product line back to the luxury, high-end of the market. Coupled with a creative and considered use of new technology this has resulted in the revenue of the company rising from £106.4 million in 2006 to over £2,523 million in 2015.

·        Personality

Once you have established your ‘big idea’, vision and values, they can be communicated to consumers through a range of channels. The way you decide to present this communication – the tone, language and design, for example – can be said to be the personality of your company.

Personality traits could be efficient and businesslike, friendly and chatty, or perhaps humorous and irreverent; although they would obviously have to be appropriate to the type of product or service you are selling. It need not have anything at all to do with the personalities of the people running the company; although it could, if you want to create a personality-driven company in the way that Aliko Dangote is very much the figurehead for Dangote Group.

Here are a few examples of how you can start to control the elements of your company’s personality, conveying certain aspects to customers in different ways:

Graphic design: The visual identity – hard corporate identity or soft, friendly caricature?

Tone of voice: Is the language you use (both spoken and written) formal or relaxed?

Dialogue: Can your users or customers contribute ideas and get involved in the organisation? Or is it a one-way communication?

Customer service: How are staffs trained to communicate with customers? What level of customer service do you provide?

As companies grow, their personality and values are reflected more in internal culture and behaviour than through the characteristics of the founders. This personality then defines how the companies express their offer in the market.

TASK 1: Putting it all together

Using the key ingredients that we’ve outlined here – and bringing in consultants to help you define and implement them – will give you a solid understanding of your organisation’s brand, as well as strategies on how to present it to people.

Starting with the big idea, you can then go on to refine and set out your company’s vision, values and personality. And once these are all in place, you can think about hiring designers to turn your brand blueprint into tangible communications.

Stay tuned for the second part of this episode where I shall discuss the various Brand management techniques