Brand Integrity
One of our main focuses at Unity Business Solutions is to maintain brand integrity for our clients. So often, organizations allow their brand to be compromised by allowing team members to create presentations that do not fit within the standards established in the original branding plan. In fact, often times there is NO original branding or marketing plan to work with. Small organizations rarely create a branding guide (or plan), but sadly even larger ones don’t do a great job creating or adhering to this standard either.
A good branding guide has more than colors and logo uses. It will include proper messaging techniques from your organization’s value propositions to elevator speeches. These guides should not be too long and cumbersome, but should be concise and to the point. They should also be dynamic and reviewed often (at least once a year). Certain standards will always stay the same, but promotional techniques and campaigns will change. All vendors that work with the brand should have a guide and certainly, every team member should not only own one, but should really understand it. Regular team reviews of a dynamic branding guide is pivotal to engage all team members to buy-in to your corporate brand. Making your team members aware of these dynamic changes in your marketing and outreach efforts also keeps the excitement at a high level. A good branding guide also becomes a tool for human-resources. This guide ultimately captures the culture of your organization and in essence should be followed for all facets of operations.
Remember, your product or service is not your organization’s brand and neither is your logo or your business card. These pieces are all part of the puzzle that Unity Business Solutions strives to pull together to build a strong foundation for you to grow, but your brand is the genuine “personality” of your organization. The bottom-line is that your brand is what people say about your organization when you’re not in the room. What are people saying about your organization? Is your organization positioned to move ahead? Do you need help putting these pieces together to move YOUR organization in the right direction?
