Brand consistency

Successful brands attract followers and create tribes, who interact with them and remain loyal through good times and bad. Think of some of the country’s major football teams, with tribes of diehard fans following them for decades, through all the ups and downs. 

Part of generating this loyal fan base is down to consistency of brand. People know your brand and recognise what it stands for - whatever the communication channel, whatever the interaction they are having, and however many years tick by.

But it’s not just about your customers, it’s also an internal concern: how do you create effective brand consistency inside your organisation - especially if you’re operating across multiple locations or a global workplace?

Often, organisations are good at clearly defining their brand for external marketing and advertising purposes; however it’s just as important to define and build your brand for your internal audience – your employees, business partners and suppliers.

But you can’t do this in the same way that you approach your external brand, by marketing or selling the benefits of your product or service. Your employees aren’t working for you because you’re the best product out there; their passion and loyalty is built through other consistent values you embody.

Helping your workforce understand who the organisation is, why it exists and how each of them fits in will encourage employees to feel part of something and form strong bonds with the organisation.

It’s also about ensuring the physical workplace reflects your organisation’s values and motivations, and do this consistently across locations: the place where we work is a massive untapped opportunity to express who you are as an organisation. 

To achieve all of this it’s vital to create brand guidelines for your organisation. Brand guidelines that address more than just external marketing, but include a layer taking into consideration the physical built environment – with enough flexibility to work across a global workplace with diverse locations. Bringing consistency to the employee experience in areas like the physical workplace will have a huge impact on employee loyalty.

So what can you do?

You need to work on defining the personality of your organisation. What are the characteristics of who you are? These go deeper than just colours and logos: you need to define the very essence of your brand – what do you set out to do and what are your values - so that can inform the built 3D environment. If you have a relocation or office refurbishment due even better: this is an ideal time to allocate time and budget towards writing brand guidelines and achieving brand consistency across your global workplace.

How can we help?

At RAW Brothers we have many years’ experience working with organisations all over the world on their organisational branding and how this impacts on their employees, their workplace culture and their physical workspaces.

We have explored and experimented across many different cultures and global locations. There are always challenges; stakeholders who challenge the approach, disagreement on values or priorities, disconnected results, or physical challenges in the built environment. 

But we believe passionately that it’s worth the effort connecting your brand personality to your people and your place, and we have tried and tested ways of working with all your stakeholders to achieve this. We’ll help you define your personality and internal brand, working on deep and thorough brand guidelines that address not just your external reputation but your global workplace and built environment. Ensuring a new level of brand consistency which will see a real impact on cohesion and growth.