ChangeManagement It is not your corporate brand that is your brand – it is your employees.

It is essential to have a coherent corporate brand or Corporate Visual Identity (CVI) if you will, however making sure it is distributed and embedded into your employees’ daily lives is an equally big part of the process than creating the CVI itself.

 

Formulating your company’s CVI is of great importance. Meaning that your customers need to be able to identify your brand instantly when seeing a logo, product or any general output from your company.

However, roughly 61% of companies are submitting reports of “rogue” content throughout their organisation – meaning company employees are creating content that does not align with current Corporate Visual Identities (CVI), hence the risk of off-brand output and misleading content.

Additionally, top 3 worst case scenarios regarding inconsistent branding are confusion in the market relating to your company, damages to your reputation or brand, and jeopardisation of the brand trademark.

Brand Fragmentation

By all means, “rogue” content is not uncommon, it is merely a symptom of the fact that the company brand needs to be properly “translated” into the everyday tools and methods company employees are utilising, otherwise they will go “rogue” if their needs are not met through their company available resources.

Moreover, the insights also point to the fact that brand fragmentation throughout organisations actually do exist in many cases, and it does have an impact on the coherence of your brand not to mention your business performance.

When asked to evaluate the effect on revenue if their brands were always presented consistently, companies reported an average of 33% potential increase in revenue!

So it is safe to say that focusing on the anchoring and alignment your brand and specifically your CVI has somewhat of an importance.

Brand HealthCheck

A CVI fresh out of the design studio is not enough, you must make sure that there is a plan in place for the distribution, embedding and enforcement of your CVI – not only across your company platforms but also via your employees.

Your people is supposed to be well informed and have easy access to all the relevant core elements of the CVI in order for them to automatically embed the cornerstones of the CVI in their daily work where most of them communicate and create documents, presentations and e-mails.

If you manage to perfect this part of the process you will essentially establish a crowd of brand ambassadors working positively on spreading the word and utilising the CVI as it was intended. Much faster and perhaps at a lower cost.

Should you be interested in learning more about the state of your brand and your current level of implementation compliance in your company documents, SkabelonDesign can help you out with a ‘Brand HealthCheck’, covering 4 areas, which will provide you with both insights and a mapping of opportunities for your next steps in your CVI journey.

Ambition Check

What is your organisations basic approach to document culture? Are you currently communicating, training and presenting your users with clear expectations towards document use and to what extent?

CVI Compliance Check

Your brand is valuable. Is your organisation utilising your brand, all the way into the production of documents and presentations in MS Office? How does your template and content setup correspond to your design guide?

Usability Check

How easy is it to work with your templates? Can employees with limited design knowledge work within the boundaries of your brand? The usability check focus on how easy it is to work in your templates while staying on brand.

Reality Check

Do you know how your users work with your templates and content? How their finalised documents and presentations actually end up looking? What is the point of templates, if they are not being used as intended in the end?

Listen, learn, implement and anchor your design in your organisation. And you can empower them to be great brand ambassadors.

Remember, it is not your design that is your brand – it is your employees.