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3 minute read
What is brand compliance?
Your brand is the identity and personality of your business. It reflects your company’s voice, tone, and values.
The way companies choose to brand themselves varies, but all companies must deliver a consistent, cohesive, and trustworthy experience to fully exhibit the power of brand image. But how do companies ensure brand consistency across different channels and partners?
Brand compliance ensures all elements of a brand are aligned and consistent. It is a set of rules, guidelines, and policies that help companies maintain a uniform identity across all their communications. This includes their products, services, and employees. Brand compliance allows companies to create a favorable impression of themselves and their products to their target audience. Additionally, maintaining proper brand compliance protects your brand from false claims and advertising.
The bottom line: brand compliance is about staying in control of your brand’s identity, values, and quality standards.
The Importance of Brand Compliance
Maintaining brand compliance is essential to building brand recognition and communicating consistent messages with clients through various channels. In today’s competitive markets, it is extremely important for brands to protect their image by consistently following their brand guidelines and values. What’s more, maintaining a consistent brand image has been shown to increase revenue by 33%, yet 60% of organizations report their digital assets don’t conform to brand guidelines.
While brand compliance is essential for branding success, it can be a requirement in some industries. In both healthcare and financial services, two highly regulated spaces, following brand compliance is extremely important because it can have an impact on actual lives. For example, providing conflicting information or direct misinformation about a medical treatment could not only lead to legal issues, but jeopardize the lives of others. In a situation like this, brand compliance is not only important for branding, but also to preserve the integrity of the company.
Ensuring brand compliance is a never-ending job as new products, services, and technologies are introduced on a regular basis. As companies expand, the processes necessary to maintain brand compliance become more complex and it becomes increasingly easier to lose control of the brand values. This can be a problem for some organizations because they may not have the time or resources to ensure that the guidelines of their brand and quality of their products are being maintained.
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3 Common Brand Compliance Mistakes
1. Lack of Communication
Lack of communication can harm your company’s brand more than you might think. If employees are not aware of the company’s branding guidelines, then they won’t know how to act when representing the company. They might not understand why certain things are done the way they are. This confusion can lead to mistakes from which the company’s branding suffers.
Enforcing a clear set of guidelines for brand compliance is critical in all levels of a business. It is common that companies have a set of brand compliance rules to follow, but they are not implemented or communicated to the employees in each department. The most successful companies enforce communication about brand compliance through periodic quizzes, classes, or training about ideals, logos, and more. This is a helpful strategy to keep your employees in the loop with key changes in company policy or branding.
2. Mismanaged Internal Processes
Mismanaged internal processes can quickly lead to brand dilution. Within every company, each department must follow the same brand guidelines in order to maintain a consistent image. Many compliance issues come from a lack of centralized brand guidelines or guidelines not being consistent in all departments of a company.
Cohesion is the objective when it comes to brand compliance and having the same company values across all departments and platforms is paramount to brand compliance. It is extremely common that a customer service department does not follow the same brand guides as the marketing department, resulting in miscommunication with clients. In order to streamline brand compliance, your company must follow a clear set of guidelines and implement them in every level of each department.
3. Inconsistent Messaging
This one may sound obvious, but it is a big mistake a lot of companies make and can become increasingly challenging as companies expand. It can be difficult to maintain a coherent tone across all channels, especially in today’s digital marketing environment. Having design inconsistencies such as different fonts, color schemes, or logos can lead to confusion among your customers. Moreover, having content inconsistency, such as different slogans or perceived values, can lead to misleading or deceptive content.
Keeping a singular, coherent message is not as easy as it sounds, but is an extremely important aspect of maintaining consistent messaging. Many companies fail to maintain consistent messaging simply by using different tones in their slogans and advertisements. Tonal discrepancies can lead to brand confusion and false representations of the brand image companies work so hard to build.
Streamline the Brand Compliance Process
Having a strong brand compliance system will empower you to control every aspect of your business's messaging and standards across multiple platforms. However, maintaining successful brand compliance requires a defined strategy, commitment on all sides of the company, and the right tools to execute your efforts. For that reason, brand compliance can be difficult to acquire.
To get it right, Symphonix is dedicated to helping your company align with the primary strategy for compliance and streamline your marketing efforts. Our online stores and proprietary technology provide each client with a customized portal to track inventory and costs of marketing materials.
