For far too long, marketing departments have been the unofficial owners of a company’s brand. But this leads to a narrow view of branding with conversations that centre around logo design, colour palettes and key messaging. This does your brand a disservice and stops it short of creating the kind of employee and
client experiences that it should.
Brand doesn’t live within marketing, or worse, within sales. Brand sits outside, at the intersection of business strategy, culture and marketing. We could go one step further and throw in operations and product delivery. The whole point is that brand is far bigger than most organizations give it credit for, bigger than most small to mid-sized businesses plan for.
Brand is the summation of all of the experiences, touchpoints and interactions your company has with your clients, team and greater community (including donors, volunteers, etc.). It starts with your core: your purpose, core values, target and strategy. Then the core is wrapped with how the brand is expressed in all its forms, including digital and physical expressions that engage all of the senses and are woven through your operations from business development through to research and development and product delivery.
What it isn’t is a logo. I repeat, brand is not just a logo. So, what does this mean? How can organizations make shifts to propel their brand?
Here are our top recommendations.
1. Leadership: Every company winning the game has one core element in common – they all have a leader or leaders who understand the importance of brand, branding and creating intentional experiences for internal and external audiences. If you are a leader, get behind the work needed.
2. Collaboration: Create cross-functional teams where marketing can work in collaboration with HR, internal culture committees, product delivery and leadership. Look at the opportunities for connection, look at your challenges and the solutions, holistically.
3. Accountability: Move outside the traditional organizational chart that places brand as a subset of marketing or even sales, and give it its own accountability. Consider where that accountability sits within the context of your organization. While many branding efforts will still sit with the marketing team, brand needs to sit outside (see this blog post on brand vs. branding). In a small organization, this might mean brand is the accountability of a founder or key leader. In a larger organization, this could mean an identified brand champion.
4. Start with Strategy: Start with strategy and revisit at a regular cadence. Consider how your brand shows up in every interaction. Audit your performance, make shifts as needed. Interview your customers and survey your teams, be intentional about gaining insights.
5. Engage your Senses: Consider how your brand feels, how it sounds, how it looks and even how it tastes or smells. Word through all your senses to create the experience you are after.
6. Work with an Expert: Partner with a brand development professional. Look for those who go beyond a typical marketing agency or design agency in favour of those with experience creating alignment in teams, facilitating strategic sessions and executing projects that bring together marketing, communications, culture and brand strategy (learn more about Fever’s approach).
While you’re here, be sure to check out some of our other posts about brand, like Brand vs. Branding and Building a Strong Brand.
