Don’t Try to Brand Everything

Don’t try to “brand” everything 

Might seem counterintuitive: a comms and brand expert telling you not to brand everything, but let me explain.

A brand and the various ways it’s expressed throughout an organization’s marketing, offices, employee experience, digital footprint, etc., is meant to do a few things:

• Communicates and then backs up the company’s promise to its customers, employees and other stakeholders. [Purpose/Mission/Value]
• Defines and provides cohesion around the organization’s identity. This ensures people will more easily remember who the company is and what it does. [Awareness/Recall]
• Acts as the guardrails and guide to repeatability for how a company shows up in different spaces. [Consistency/ Reliability/Predictability]

Now sometimes people (usually not those in the brand and comms department) get a little excited and they want to start adding a “brand” to things like big projects, departments, teams, internal programs, and the like. Except usually when this happens, it’s not an expression of the company brand – it’s something else. 

I once saw a company create a name and visual brand for a major internal initiative and its project team. It wasn’t in the same color palette or aesthetic vibe as the corporate brand. They created a logo for it and even spent money on swag for this orphaned internal brand. When it got out in a public channel (because of course it did) some people thought it was a new product or feature (it wasn’t) and the comms team had to manage it like an incident. Do not do this. 

It’s fine to just call things what they are sometimes. 

When certain teams decide to go on a ‘choose your own adventure’ with branding, it causes confusion, can dilute the brand (causing a loss in brand equity) and erodes the brand promise over time. Not to mention it can cause an external problem that then wastes time and resources to manage. 

Think of it this way.
Say you make the best chocolate chip cookie. You have a recipe; it’s fantastic. Your kitchen and team have been set up and trained on making the cookie and everyone in town knows you make the best chocolate chip cookie. Well, then someone decided to add walnuts. Not terrible but could cause a problem if someone has an allergy. Then someone takes it a step further and adds raisins. Gross. 

Meanwhile, a couple of the bakers decided they want to express themselves by making and selling churros. Still a dessert, but requires totally different kitchen equipment and they got cooking grease all over the place and made the whole store smell. 

While flexing a company brand to build energy internally can be a great thing and an approach for that should be designed into the original brand strategy, a company brand is not an art project or a creative outlet for anyone in an organization. Talk to your brand or comms leader about why, how and when to design or flex the brand to meet internal objectives so that it’s done correctly. 

Need a more cohesive brand audit or strategy? Set up a 30 min chat with Kate to discuss your goals and get some advice.