Partner Article

How to Take Care of Brand Compliance in Your Organization

In 2012, HBR published a survey report that looked into the factors that drive customers to behave and believe in the things that they do. According to this report, an overwhelming 64% of customers cited ‘shared values’ as the reason they have a relationship with a brand. Given this massive impact that a brand’s value can have on a customer relationship, it is critical that business organizations ensure consistency and uniformity in their branding efforts.

However, branding consistency can be a problem when your marketing efforts are disjointed or are handled by affiliated third parties. Take McDonalds as an example. A whopping 82% of the company’s outlets today are handled by franchises. In other words, the local marketing efforts at a majority of the McDonalds outlets are driven by third party entrepreneurs, not the organization itself. Ensuring consistency in branding and messaging across these thousands of outlets is an immense challenge.

There are other reasons why brand compliance can be challenging. Marketing activities like SEO, SEM, social media marketing, content marketing and PR are routinely outsourced to qualified third party agencies. Ensuring that your contractors drive a consistent message across these various channels can make or break your marketing efforts.

Centralization of marketing data

One of the most effective ways to ensure total brand compliance is through centralization of your marketing data. This is possible with the help of cloud-based repositories that host all your brand assets in one place. In effect, updating your logos, flyers or your marketing bible in one place is sufficient to push the latest updates to all your employees, franchisees and contractors.

This is how it works - contractors and affiliates are traditionally provided with a ‘bible’ that is essentially a repository of all relevant marketing information. This includes information on what kind of promotions are permitted, how the promotions must be executed, the messaging that should be used, and also other details such as the latest logo and coupon codes. Making sure that all your contractors and affiliates have the latest information can be challenging. A centralized repository requires all stakeholders to access content related to marketing from one cloud-based database. This way, updating this repository is sufficient to push forward the latest changes to everyone.

In-house brand auditing

No matter how well-intentioned your contractors and agencies are, chances are that their marketing messages are still not one hundred percent compliant. Inconsistency can creep up from several sources. For instance, someone editing an older presentation to create updated copy may fail to update the logos and colors. The role of an in-house brand auditor would be to look into every marketing document and communication that has been released and make sure that brand guidelines have been strictly followed. If your organization does not have the bandwidth and resources to hire an in-house brand auditor, you may also consider making this a key performance indicator for your operations manager.

Monitor stakeholder track record

From an agency or an affiliate’s standpoint, brand consistency is only a small component of what they do. Also, some stakeholders may require more hand-holding than others. From the marketer’s point of view, ensuring brand compliance needs to be an active and continuous process. It is important to set up a track record monitoring system that measures the compliance (alongside other marketing metrics you want to measure) from your various agency and affiliate partners. This way, it is simpler to identify contractors who are not performing and penalty clauses may be invoked upon these partners.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Stan Daniels .