Avoid Brand Fragmentation By Using This Strategy.
If your brand is experiencing brand fragmentation, you already know how much of a nightmare it could be, both internally and externally.Ciao Ragazzi,
I just delivered a brand strategy last week to a brand doing amazing things out of Chicago.
They check all the boxes in my book.
✓ College apartment founding story
✓ Incubated in Austin, TX
✓ Funded by Mark Cuban after appearing on Shark Tank
✓ Massive retail penetration
✓ A product that truly solves a problem
✓ A unique and irreverent voice
Yet, through their massive growth over the past 7 or so years, they never really defined who they were and more importantly, who their audience was.
The fear of this becomes the idea of brand fragmentation.
Brand Fragmentation occurs when different departments within the company have their own interpretation of the brand, leading to inconsistent ideas, messaging, and visuals across channels.
If your brand is experiencing brand fragmentation, you already know how much of a nightmare it could be, both internally and externally.
It creates a confusing brand experience for your audience as they are being served multiple different messages in multiple different formals, probably with multiple different font and color variations.
So, how do you avoid brand fragmentation?
Invest
Investing in brand strategy is step #1. As we spoke about in past posts, your brand strategy is the long-term plan to outmaneuver competition through radical differentiation.
It’s setting goals and working backward on a plan to achieve those goals.
It’s defining your audience, reasons to believe, positioning, strategic pyramid (purpose, mission, vision), etc...
It’s defining your visual identity including your logo, colors, fonts, graphical styles, etc.
It’s defining your messaging strategy including taglines, calls to action, impact phrases, etc.
Police
For most of us, we’re law-abiding citizens. We follow the rules written in the Constitution and therefore, don’t get busted for doing anything illegal (hopefully).
Think of your brand strategy as the Constitution. It’s the rules of the brand. In order to have your employees, vendors, partners, and even audience follow the rules, you must deliver it to them in a way they can understand.
You need to deliver a comprehensive brand guidelines document. It could be called a million other things (brand book, brand bible, brand handbook, brand playbook, etc.) but there need to be guidelines put in place to ensure everyone is following the rules set forth by the brand.
The last thing we want is chaos in society and with our brand.
Reward
When we keep tabs on our brand, magic happens. It flourishes and the reward we receive as business owners is tremendous. We’re able to put more trust in our employees and partners. Our vendors are not running rogue pulling a logo out of Google images or trying to imagine who your intended audience is.
More importantly, our audience rewards us by joining our tribe and becoming evangelists of our organization. This kind of movement doesn’t come from a loose willy-nilly style brand. It comes from a brand that has set up the proper guardrails and has put all the pieces in place to ensure it thrives.
This is my hope for your brand.
If you’re looking for someone to help align your brand and then put together the framework/brand guidelines/brand book to ensure it followed by all, I’m here to serve you and help your brand win.
Just reply to this email or holler at me on LinkedIn.
✌️ Steven
P.S. Studio announcement coming soon. 🎧🎙