A strong brand image is essential in todays competitive market. So does all your company documentation reflect a strong and consistent brand image?
IDENTITY AND BRANDING
Successful organisations recognise that creating and maintaining an identity forms a vital part of the value perceived by others. This identity should normally be based on a set of values that distinguish the organisation from others.
This is then related visually to a set of images and other stimuli in order that the customer, prospect, user or other interested party associates particular messages with the organisation. This whole is termed brand, and there are numerous companies which support and assist organisations in defining the images and appearances that will help reinforce the values sought.
"A strong brand position means the brand has a unique, credible, sustainable, and valued place in the customer's mind. It revolves around a benefit that helps your product or service stand apart from the competition.” Scott Davis, Brand Asset Management
ELEMENTS OF BRAND IDENTITY
Brand development should include a consideration of the organisation’s strategy, together with analysis of potential customer reactions and the competitors to develop a distinctive identity that resonates with the customer.
Some really innovative brand research has been derived from Lindstrom and his "Brand Sense” concept. The constructs of his theory are that Sensory branding:
¨ Stimulates your relationship with the brand
¨ Allows emotional response to dominate our rationale thinking
¨ Offers different dimensions of a single brand
¨ Helps achieve a strong, positive, loyal bond between brand and consumer so the consumer will turn to brand repeatedly
¨ Assists emotional engagement, so there is a match between perception and reality
The essence of Lindstrom's work lies in what he terms the "Six Sensory Steps.” These include (1) sensory audit, (2) brand staging, (3) brand drama, (4) brand signature, (5) implementation, and (6) evaluation. Through this discovery method, an organization can unveil aspects of its current offering or find new avenues to exploit. This process, according to the author, will enhance brand loyalty and deepen existing relationships.
The Step that is of most relevance here is the “brand signature” – those elements which when combined provide a unique combination indicating the organisation. This part maps onto the actual deliverables of a traditional branding exercise which will consist of elements which provide sensory signals to a customer. Thus visual signals such as colours, images and logos are a primary part which may be supplemented in some cases by sound, touch, smell and taste signals ( e.g. retail / leisure organisations ). According to Lindstrom the best brands will have elements that exist in their own right, and recognition can be triggered by one element on its own.
In this context it is worth observing that not all of these stimuli are available at the same time. For instance a professional organisation may be restricted initially to visual signals ( advertising, documentation, flyers ) with other signals only forming part of the customer experience at a later stage ( e.g. during visits to offices ). For documentation the elements should include not only a logo but also the typefaces and layout to be used within reports and a Microsoft Word Template is often included.
BRANDING AND EXISTING MATERIAL
The way in which the branding is exploited often varies more than may be commonly imagined. This variation may driven by cost or by complexity; as the implementation process of making sure that the business identity seen by others involves many disparate elements, which may be subject to other constraints.
For instance a process will be undertaken of making sure that the various physical assets assume their “new identity”, which may involve painting and application of images and logos onto existing assets as well as the procurement of additional signage to adorn the outsides of offices etc. This process is likely to be influenced by the natural turnover and replacement of assets ( e.g. what is the minimum remaining life of a vehicle that makes it worth repainting it ? ). There may also be regulatory or political pressures that affect the way in which this can happen. In the UK for instance the appearance of signs on buildings may require planning permission, and there are suggestions that anti globalisation activities may turn their attention to branding activity and that the latter may need to be adjusted.
For stationery there will be similar issues as existing stocks and a switchover period may be necessary. There will also be produce life cycle issues that would make reprinting to reflect a new branding identity uneconomic.
For electronically stored assets, although the process ought to be easier, it can become much more difficult. Most organisations now have a huge legacy of documents in Microsoft Word format. The format of these documents may be of variable quality and include branding from one or more past iterations ( particularly if corporate mergers or acquisitions have taken place ). Use of this material can therefore be more difficult than it should be as the challenge of adjusting the format can require specialist expertise in the use software packages themselves, and may be deemed uneconomic.
In many organisations, therefore, the consistency with which formats of material from past documents is altered to suit branding mandates is largely a matter of chance depending on :
¨ The quality of existing documents.
¨ The level of Word expertise available at that point.
¨ The extent to which altering the format is deemed worthwhile.
¨ How any appropriate Microsoft Word template(s) were used.
¨ The number of recent rebranding exercises ( mergers / acquisitions etc. )
BRANDING AND NEW MATERIAL
It is only fair to point out that new material may not be that much easier than existing material. With the electronic sources and cheap storage now available it is comparatively rare that an important organisational document will represent the original creative work of one author who started with a clean sheet of paper and worked until completion was achieved. It is much more common to find that an existing document is taken as the basis, altered and merged with a range of other material ( web, email, original work ) found by one or more authors. Whilst it may really be a new document it would need considerable work to eliminate the formatting history of the various contributions.
CUSTOMER REACTIONS - DOES FORMATTING MATTER ?
As a part of marketing spend advertising is typically dominant, but there are those commentators that believe that traditional advertising is becoming less effective and that organisations need to become more imaginative in communicating and reminding customers of the values that underpin their brand.
Where communication with customers or prospects is continuing and uses documentation it is open to discussion whether a more subtle approach in producing consistently branded documentation would be effective in promoting the images of the selling organisation.
Prospective customers are likely to experience a range of reactions to a document, some of which are rational and some of which are emotional. The rational reactions are more easily defended and understood by most, but the emotional reactions may be just as important in giving an overall impression of the selling organisation. Thus whilst formal evaluation checklists are sometimes used, this will only form part of an overall evaluation and other more subjective issues are likely to be included at some point.
Lack of consistent appearance within documentation can also be taken to indicate a less well coordinated company. For example : if two organisations are competing and one has documents which have a well organised consistency of appearance; whilst the other has written documentation whose appearance varies, it will be hard for a prospective client not to draw conclusions about the relative consistency of approach of the two organisations.
Sadly format is easily exposed as a weakness in the documentation supplied at high cost to support a corporate presentation. It can take much less skill on the part of a reader to spot a change in font size than to identify a false premise in a complex argument. It also isn’t necessarily as visible to the reader of an electronic document as to the reader of the equivalent paper based document.
For documents being produced to demanding deadlines the need to consider format comes at exactly the wrong point in the life cycle. The final content and shape of the document is being considered by the senior personnel in the light of late breaking news just at the point that a content freeze to ensure consistent format would be appropriate.
WHAT ABOUT INTERNAL DOCUMENTS ?
Many brands, even those which have a carefully crafted tone for their external communications have done much less to promote or encource the use of that tone internally.
Whilst language and content play a crucial part on the tone, the format and other subliminal indications also play a valuable part.
It is also the case that most organisations that are document intensive leak those documents unintentionally from every part of their organisation. Whilst most sales proposals and marketing documents have been traditionally considered to be important, a mass of other communications also contain branding ( or anti branding ! ) elements, for example :
¨ Invitations to Tender
¨ Whitepapers
¨ Reports
¨ Letters
¨ Agendas
Some of these may be considered to be purely internal, but will leak out when :
¨ external companies and personnel are invited to meetings.
¨ content is reused.
¨ the shape of the organisation changes, perhaps with outsourcing taking over parts of the organisation.
The state of outsourcing is a particularly important one as the supplier of the outsourced service may be responsible for many documents that would have appeared in the “branding” of the commissioning organisation ( e.g. IT outsourcing ).
Michael Seddon is a foundering member of Kutchka Limited which specialises in providing software to help people get the most out of Microsoft Word, especially in producing consistently branded and well formatted documents. Find out more at http://www.kutchka.com/
