Bill Gates famously said “Content is King” back in 1996 and digital businesses globally have been lording it about ever since but what happened to brand architecture along the way? Sure, it’s fun to engage with brands on social media, it is positively exciting to see your twitter followers grow exponentially, but what if you can’t see the difference on the bottom line?
Get back to brand basics, have a declutter and a quality-control check. Putting as much effort into your brand as your content will make your business shout far louder than the competition. The hardest working brands are consistent in tone, messaging, style and have committed staff who value the company and live the brand.
Here’s CJAM’s intense ‘nutri-bullet’ hit for brand health:
- Provide a welcome pack to every member of new staff, however large or small your company. Your welcome pack should make a new employee feel that they are becoming part of a unique family, with its values, ideals and missions all aligned, no matter what job they do or where they sit or stand. At a take-away fast food restaurant, the school leaver on trial behind the till and the cleaner may be the only two employees with an opportunity to communicate your brand values to the consumer.
- Share your brand and your successes, make everyone in your company part of what you do well. Brand loyalty can’t be bought, bribed or faked. Consumers are savvy and know how marketing works. There’s a world of difference between a lazy ‘yeah, that suits you’ and ‘good to see you again Mrs D, that dress you were after just came in, I’ve put it in the changing room for you’. Employees that feel valued and love their job, love their brand and are the best marketing investment you’ll ever make. (Watching an episode of Secret Millionaire will also make this point).
- Be consistent. Does you brand have the same look and feel in every single place it sits or speaks? The chances are your website is future-proof with all the bells and whistles but someone somewhere might be driving around in a dirty van laden with graffiti, with your brand blazoned all over it, cutting up a school mum for the fourth time in as many miles. Not healthy for your brand, at all. There may be a disgruntled employee in customer service who has failed to secure a leaving client because she just wasn’t the right person for the call or didn’t have the right skills or information to rescue the client. Who does answer the calls for your business? If your business relies on sales via telephone, this should your be your absolute focus for recruitment.
So how do you know how yours stacks up?
- Carry out some very enlightening mystery shopping
- Run a series of client satisfaction surveys
- Run a series of employees surveys and review of new employee procedures
- Carry out a full creative communications audit to identify inconsistencies
If you would like to give your business brand a full health check-up or refresh, or if you’d like to be reassured that your brand is singing at every touch point, CJAM Group would be delighted to help.
