Branding – it’s not just for your brand team
It’s very important to engage all areas of your business with your brand. Why?
- It encourages a sense of belonging.
- It delivers a consistent brand experience to your customers.
- It’s efficient – set it up strong, remind people often.
But a brand is only as strong as its weakest employee. And while that may sound a little harsh, it’s true. Every single person in every department needs to understand what your brand is setting out to achieve, in order to deliver a consistent experience to your target audience.
Don’t forget these key departments when implementing your brand:
Customer service
Let’s start with a more obvious one. Why go to all the trouble of developing a brand for your customers to see, if the people they ultimately speak to in store, online or on the phone don’t understand your brand and what it stands for? As the customer service team interact with your target audience daily, these tactics can be implemented to keep your brand front of their minds:
- Have quick and simple visual reminders of your brand’s core elements – either on desks, or in employee-only areas.
- Set up an employee reward scheme that directly reinforces your brand values.
- Host bi-monthly or quarterly webinars or in-person events centred around targets in customer service, again reinforcing all objectives back to your brand values.
Legal and compliance
Everything sent out by your legal and compliance team needs to be clear, accurate and timely. But that doesn’t have to be at the expense of your brand’s tone of voice or creativity. There is a way to balance communications to be equal parts serious and engaging.
Carrying your brand’s identity and tone of voice (if a little tempered down in some cases) throughout all your communications, no matter the department, will create consistency, which in turn makes your brand more genuine. People don’t tend to like it when someone speaks to them one way, but then turns and speaks to another person in a completely different way. People prefer consistency – and it’s the same for brands.
While most of the documentation in legal, compliance, data and security departments will of course be functional and official, not all elements need to be that dry:
- Inject your tone of voice in the areas that you can.
- Introduce policies and comms in your consistent brand style, so that it feels familiar and engages your audience.
- Visual engagement is key here – tables, graphs, illustrations – simplifying vast amounts of information.
HR
How you communicate internally via your HR team matters just as much as how you communicate externally to your clients. Dealing with recruitment, training, employee-benefit schemes, line management – all of these should hang neatly off your brand. Your entire team will enjoy their working experience all the more if your brand engages them well. And that enjoyment will naturally permeate through to your customers.
Facilities
Office and retail environments took a bit of a hit in 2020. But for those employees returning to a physical workspace, it’s more important than ever to engage them. And that starts with your facilities team. It’s crucial to implement your brand effectively in the workplace – visual brand cues have a way of embedding themselves more strongly, and it makes people feel like they matter if you’re investing in their work environment.
Your facilities team needs to understand the significance of brand engagement, so brand workshops and regular updates are the best ways to ensure they’re delivering a great brand experience to all who sail in her.
Operations and Logistics
Let’s end on another obvious one. If the people responsible for enabling the delivery of your brand don’t understand what your brand’s purpose is, how can you possibly hope to convey that to your customers? Workshopping your new brand with your operations and logistics team is a great way to firmly embed it and ensure your brand experience is being delivered effectively to your customers. It’s also a great opportunity to gain feedback direct from the source.
In conclusion
For brands to connect with their audiences, the entire team needs to live and breathe it. By instilling clear values and purpose across the entire workforce, brands have a greater chance of developing genuine connections and longer lasting relationships.
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