Edward Boatman • Feb 13th
The perception of your brand plays a large role in its success, which is why it’s important to curate and present your brand the right way. From choosing the right visuals to using the right tone and voice, every decision you make about your brand has an impact. Having a set of rules in place makes it easier to present your brand in a consistent manner.
This is known as brand governance, and it’s one of the key aspects of branding. Brand governance is a system of processes and language that ensures a brand is consistent, and in line, with the brands guidelines. Brand governance helps everyone within your organization understand the role they play in your brand and how they should represent your brand. Check out this guide to learn more about brand governance, why it’s important, and how to manage brand governance.
Brand governance is about how you use your brand guidelines to guide internal and external brand communication to ensure consistency. This brand consistency is typically achieved through brand compliance, which means everyone within your company needs to understand and follow your brand guidelines.
Effective brand governance is an essential part of collaborating both within your company and externally. When you’re working with various sales channels, partners, and stakeholders, brand governance keeps everyone on the same page.
A lack of brand governance and consistency can make your brand easy to forget. When all your brand communications look and feel the same, people recognize your brand and you start to become a household name. If your brand isn’t consistent, it’s tough for your target audience to become familiar with your brand.
Managing brand governance is a key part of creating a strong brand, but that doesn’t explain why it’s so important. There are several benefits of brand governance that make it worthwhile, from increased brand recognition to a better customer experience. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest reasons brand governance is important.
Brand governance is an essential part of brand consistency. You want people to recognize your brand by the things that make it unique — from your colors and logo to your voice and tone. Think about some of the biggest brands that use recognizable logos, colors, fonts, and slogans to draw customers’ attention. Without those elements, those brands aren’t instantly recognizable.
Ensuring everyone complies with brand guidelines makes everything your brand does more consistent.
Source: ActiveProspect
It is not uncommon to discover the disconnect in consistency when the product or service starts to grow or has a reband. For example, in 2018, online messaging software, Skype, went through a rebrand. Unfortunately for them, the new official logo did not carry through to the app experience, or to the website, causing a disconnected experience for users. This can spell trouble quickly if members of all teams are not on the same page.
We talked about how consistency plays an important role in brand recognition, with iconic brands like Coca-Cola and Apple being excellent examples. When you improve brand compliance, you’re also increasing brand recognition. The more you use your brand guidelines to guide your content, the more people will recognize your brand by your visual assets.
Getting people to connect with your brand is important, but it’s not as easy as it seems. Think of some of your favorite brands that you have a strong connection with — there are probably only a handful. Even if you frequently purchase a brand, you might not have any real connection to it.
Brand governance helps create strong connections with customers. People will recognize your brand by its visual elements when you use them consistently, which makes your brand a fixture in the minds of customers. Plus, people tend to trust brands they’ve built a connection with. Failure to connect with your audience can be tied directly to brand governance, too, as seen with the Google social network, Google+.
Source: Adilo
Despite having memorable brand marks and being seamlessly connected to other Google products, it failed to deliver because it did not understand the needs of the audience, causing the social media platform to miss the mark on forming connections with its audience.
Internally, brand governance helps employees connect with your brand too. Thanks to this connection, internal teams can take more ownership over the role they play in your brand.
Whether you’re working with your sales team, a creative partner, or a stakeholder, consistency is key when you’re collaborating as a brand. Brand governance is one of the most effective ways to simplify collaboration.
Effective brand governance improves internal and external consistency, so everyone can follow the same framework and processes to ensure your branding messages are consistent. As you develop better brand governance, it helps you determine how to represent your brand to create positive perceptions.
When it comes to enforcing brand governance and compliance, there are several individual parts that work in unison. Each key element plays an essential role in brand governance, so it’s important to make sure you have them in order.
Your brand assets are what make your brand unique, from the name of your brand to the colors, fonts, and logos you use. Because brand governance is about consistent brand messaging, you need to start by having your brand assets in one place.
Lingo makes it easy to create a centralized hub for your latest brand assets, so everyone can quickly find what they need and maintain consistent branding.
Your brand strategy also plays a role in the brand governance process. Your brand strategy is the long-term vision you have for your brand, including your target audience, brand values, and specific goals you’re trying to achieve as a brand.
Brand guidelines are another key element of brand governance because they help ensure internal and external teams are using the right branding and messaging. With Lingo, it’s easy to create detailed brand guidelines that include all your brand assets and brand messaging guidelines. You can even use tags to allow people to quickly search for assets and information within your guidelines.
If you want to enforce brand compliance and governance, you need to monitor brand communications to identify compliance issues. Routine audits can help you identify inconsistencies in branding, especially when your brand is communicating with the public through marketing.
In addition to monitoring for brand compliance issues, it’s also important to correct those mistakes as soon as possible.
Last but certainly not least, you should provide brand governance training so everyone knows how to represent your brand. Ongoing training and education can also help you get everyone up to speed on the latest changes to your brand guidelines and messaging guidelines.
Effective brand governance isn’t rocket science, but it’s not as easy as telling people to represent your brand in a particular way. In this section, we’ll look at some brand governance tips you can use to simplify brand governance.
Whether you’re working with your sales team, stakeholders, or external creative partners, people need to have an idea of your brand values and messaging guidelines to remain consistent. To make sure everyone is on the same page, offer clear and detailed brand guidelines to answer any questions collaborators might have. For example, you might give visuals around the do’s and don’t of how your logo should be treated.
Lingo offers a simple solution for digital asset management, allowing you to create simple brand guidelines to keep everyone on the same page.
You can’t ensure brand consistency without reviewing content before it’s published. If you want to make sure internal and external partners are in line with brand guidelines and messaging, create a process for reviewing and approving content before it’s shared with the public.
Your brand guidelines aren’t going to stay the same forever — and they shouldn’t. It’s important to be open to change based on feedback and the performance of your brand. You don’t just have to listen to stakeholders, either; you can probably find employees across every team who can offer input on your brand.
Brand governance offers a long list of benefits, but it all starts with having the right brand guidelines. Lingo makes digital asset management easy, allowing you to create a centralized hub for your brand guidelines and assets.
With Lingo, you can create brand guidelines that are unique to your company. When you share your guidelines, everyone can use the version history feature to make sure they’re reviewing the latest guidelines to create consistent content.
Book a free demo to find out how Lingo can help you master brand governance.