The Chartered Institute of Marketing Construction Industry Group (CIMCIG) is a forum for its members to share knowledge, skills, information and best practice. In our continuing series of articles for construction marketers, CIMCIG committee member Rick Osman of Highwire reminds us of the value of your brand and its vulnerability to easy-to-use technology.
?Bend me shape me, anyway you want me,
Long as you love me, its all right?
Well not if you?re a brand. A brand is about consistency and even seemingly small variations in your brand?s image will affect your brand?s credibility. If you love your brand don?t bend it or shape it anyway way you want to.
?PowerPoint presentations that were not just bad but were truly awful, brand damaging abominations that undermined years of hard work?
Not just for big companies
Your brand is your most important business asset. It is not just giant global companies which ascribe a very high value to their brand. Whilst the Virgin, Coca Cola, Adidas etc brands are undoubtedly worth billions, no matter your turnover the good name of your company is one of the most important assets you have.
No matter how much your brand is loved or respected or valued by your staff you must still be careful that it does not become devalued by careless or unthinking actions. Consistency is essential to maintaining the value of brand which is why inconsistency will inevitably reduce the value of your brand as a sales tool and as a business asset.
Technology makes it easy
As technologies become more varied and easier to use the opportunities for your brand image to be abused grow every day. At one time MS PowerPoint was often seen as the biggest enemy of a consistent brand image. The program?s ubiquity and ease of use meant that any member of staff could knock up a PowerPoint presentation without the need for input from professional designers and writers. Often the resulting sales tools were useful but frequently the presentations were not just bad but truly awful, brand-damaging abominations that undermined years of hard work and brand management.
It was all too easy to resize, recolour, bend, squeeze and tweak a logo fit the space available; all to easy to use a host of different typefaces, weights and sizes; so simple to incorporate a piece of amusing clip art or a funny picture from the Internet.
The result is that your brand values are at best shown in a slightly skewed manner, at worst completely overturned.
Thoughtless tweets
Today the options available to muck up a brand have moved far beyond PowerPoint. Social marketing has been a global phenomenon not just for people and their leisure activities but in offering opportunities for a new kind of marketing. Social marketing makes your brand both more valuable and more vulnerable. Thoughtless tweets associated with your company, throwaway jokes on Facebook, snide comments on YouTube, inappropriate links can all conspire to damage your brand?s reputation. Do you want your companies semi-official Twitter feed to lead to followers to a dancing dog? Or worse?
And if you don?t pay attention to such things it could get worse. The advent of BYOD (bring your own device) whereby staff use their own iPads and smartphone for company business will further reduce whatever control you might be able to apply to your brand image.
A contemporary conundrum
And therein lies a conundrum of contemporary brand management. You want your company, your products, your brand to be talked about and you want to encourage customers to write comments and recommend your products, yet at the same time you must be aware of the dangers of letting others control your company?s image.
It is easy to lose control of what is happening. Just as it was easy to let staff loose with clumsy brand-destroying PowerPoint presentations so it is easy to let staff use new technology to muddy your message and maybe provoke adverse comments.
To protect what could be your most valuable business asset you need to ensure that everyone understands its value and the potential that staff access to technology has to damage it.
Amen to that.
Rick Osman is a partner in Highwire, http://www.highwiredesign.com/, a design and marketing agency that specialises in the construction industry and one of the team that created http://www.hotel-standards.com/ as well as being a CIMCIG committee member.
Source: http://www.cimcig-blog.org/2012/08/the-cimcig-column-keeping-the-value-of-the-brand/
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