Protecting Your Brand As Your Team Grows

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When your brand grows, quite often you'll find that so do your problems. Inconsistencies between employees work can send mixed signals to your clients and ultimately lead to confusion, mis-selling and a diluted brand message.

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Clearly sticking to your mission will no doubt be very important to you; however, making sure that the purpose is communicated effectively to your team is critical. Everyone needs to be on board with your aims, and without knowing where you are all shooting, hitting the target will be a great deal harder.

Have Clear Objectives

It might seem obvious, but so many businesses have unclear aims when they start up. Often, companies play it safe. They may not want to invest too heavily in a particular direction and end up spreading themselves thinly across a series of underdeveloped ideas. Knowing what you want, and pushing for that thing is essential. Having the full backing of everyone you are working with is critical to achieving this; so set up your mission statement and make sure that everyone knows it backwards.


A Consistent Style

Creating a branding style guide is a significant way of determining your standard. Setting up an outline of favoured communication terms, how products, services and the company should be referred to as well as underlined basic grammar rules is pretty basic stuff and something that can be easily set up very early on. Get one made and get everyone behind it. Cover all bases that you are likely to visit, and allow yourself the opportunity to develop a sense of pride in the brand that you are building.


Create Templates

Using templates for communications such as emails can be very useful. Professional documentation templates are available, and managed services can be used to make sure that every piece of copy or content for your website, every email that is sent, and any internal memo or external press release that gets issued, follows a template.


Using Brand Imagery

Photos and graphics should match the brand's ideals. Having a concept of how everything that you produce as a company should look at feel is vital. Pick a colour that you want your brand to be associated with, and maintain a relationship with that exact shade- know it's the correct name so that you can find it on any colour palette. Similarly, fonts say quite a lot about a brand. They define how traditional or progressive they are. It will demonstrate if the value function or style, or a balance of both.


Logo

Logos are everywhere. We see them all of the time and often without realizing. Having a bold logo will help your brand develop, making it recognizable and lifting your name out from the page.

Once you have your logo, how you use it should be uniform across everything that you do — making sure that any designers working within your organization are clear about the rules that surround your company logo. Where your brand works with others, ensure that their use of your logo also maintains your standard too.