Welcome to our new series “Exploring Brand Governance”. We want to dive into the topic of Brand Governance: discuss branding details, explain how it works, and how it can benefit your company.
What is Brand Governance?
We already touched on the topic of Brand Governance in previous articles. To sum up: what is hiding behind this term? Brand Governance is the model of brand management you use. It guides and monitors your brand consistency, makes sure that your brand identity is well understood and used, and recognized around the globe.
How Brand Governance can affect your company?
Research has proven that maintaining a consistent brand governance strategy in the brand’s visual identity can increase revenues by up to 33%. What is more, 41 percent of consumers rate the brand’s consistency as the most important factor when it comes to being loyal to a brand. Brand governance has a real impact on the two most important values from the business point of view and customer expectations: time and money.
How to build Brand Governance Strategy?
In the first article from the series, I would like to expand on the topic of building effective strategies for Brand Governance. The key is agility. There are no ready-made models that will work for every company on the market. In Admind, we always start with knowing our clients. We learn about their needs and adjust the model to what is required. The Brand Governance service can be introduced after the implementation of a new identity. Also, it can manage the currently used one.
To map the needs in the best possible way, we plan workshops and conduct in-depth interviews or surveys. By doing so, we can map the areas that need support and develop solutions tailored for the clients’ needs. This process allows us to determine how the Brand Governance service can work for a specific client and how it can be expanded in the future.
When building a brand governance and management strategy, it is important to remember who will use your identity in the first place. Namely, your employees. According to Lucidpress report (2019), 11% of companies claim that a lack of consistency in their identity embarrasses their employees.
Employees are responsible for creating visuals and communication, both external and internal, within the company. The Brand Governance team stays in touch with your employees to guide them, explain how to use the identity, how to translate their needs into projects, as well as to educate them about the identity, and make sure that they will be able to proudly use it.
How to build Brand Governance Team?
One of the determining factors is the size of the team, as it can also vary. It is scalable and adjustable. We work for global corporate clients, but the model is scalable and can work in smaller companies also. For our corporate clients, we provide support in the form of 1-6 person teams.
The size of the team is directly related to its scope. A Brand Governance team can assist in a general advisory and guidance capacity, but also with graphic design, approvals, brand assets management, website management, and other essential services.
So, how do we build these teams? Large corporations create dozens of materials daily, including print materials, digital projects like mobile apps, websites, newsletters, banners, trade show designs, workwear, vehicles, advertisements, videos, and many more.
How to provide effective advisory services in all of those areas? We build a team of brand experts that share the responsibilities of graphic designers and communication specialists. Within the team, we mix skills, experience, and cultures. It lets us educate employees about the brand, point to the right resources, and guide designs in the right direction.
Agility and flexibility are also important here. The team’s job is to make sure that everyone uses the identity properly. At the same time, adhering to strict brand guidelines may not work for every country, culture, and market. A good balance should be achieved between keeping consistency within the brand principles and creating solutions that translate well globally and can adapt when necessary. By creating efficient channels of communication between the brand community and the Advisory team, we maintain this necessary flexibility, as well as plan for the future of the brand and support brand managers with their daily tasks.
A well-chosen strategy for Brand Governance will protect your brand investment. Moreover, it will increase its value and market recognition, generate income, and save you time and money.
Admind’s Perspective
In Admind, we call Brand Governance “Brand Advisory”, as we believe it says more about our services in the key areas of brand guidance and reflects the inclusive nature of what we do.
Our mission is to support our clients in building stronger and influential brands recognized all over the world. We want to help them maintain that recognition through guiding principles. We believe that access to advisory experts and assistance in creating on-brand materials will increase the value of their brands.
Want to know more about this service? Watch the webinar on Brand Advisory.