Your brand is your promise to your marketplace. Developing and articulating is the first step to communicating the promise. But the second more critical step is for your organization to communicate your branding strategy consistently.

As a communicator, you have created, tailored, and promoted your branding strategy—ensuring it is superlative, important, credible, memorable, and tangible. However, you are not an organization of one. Do all the employees of your company understand and have the same passion for your branding strategy as you do? Probably not. In fact, in a large organization, some employees may not even be aware of your branding strategy —who you are and what sets you apart from others. Your brand is the means to help consumers choose your organization over the competition in a crowded marketplace. If employees are not informed and your branding strategy is inconsistent—consumers have trouble recognizing you, your awareness is diminished, and the enterprise value is diluted.

Corporate identity, your brand’s look and key messages, when implemented consistently, can help increase the name awareness and image of an organization—generating positive influence on the company’s performance. Implementing your branding strategy deliberately ensures that employees, customers, the media, and other stakeholders understand exactly who you are, what you do, and how you do it.

Communicating your branding strategy within the enterprise can be as important as communicating it to your marketplace. Setting brand guidelines and gaining internal consensus is the foundation that must be established to communicate the promise. A brand standards manual is a critical to give employees direction when representing your organization. The purpose of a brand standards manual is to establish guidelines for the three brand points of contact: visual, verbal, and behavior. The manual can provide clear, easy-to-use information to employees and corporate partners for use of the company’s logo; messaging; colors; formatting printed materials including letters, reports, memos, and faxes; layouts for signage and ads; applying the logo to clothing or accessories; as well as preferred phone greetings, email signatures, and apparel. Standardizing the visual, verbal, and written aspects will reinforce the branding strategy by making it more credible, memorable, and tangible.

Once the manual has been developed, you will need to determine the best way to publish and manage to it. In a small, centralized organization, the best way to present the manual may be in printed form, on a compact disk, or hosted on the company Intranet. For a larger, decentralized organization (or one that needs to communicate brand standards to third parties such as corporate partners and vendors) designated brand managers should be appointed. They must understand the importance of the guidelines and manage their applications. Having this internal brand management function will ensure adherence and build enterprise value.

A brand standards manual is an ideal way to help your employees and partners use your brand appropriately and maintain a consistent brand image to your audience. You worked hard to build your branding strategy. Bring it to the next level by building consensus and consistency within your organization as well as your marketplace.

© 2007 ADAMS