When your company starts to wander too far from its primary mission, having a solid brand strategy in place helps you recognize it and focus on your brand promise. A comprehensive marketing strategy can keep you from making decisions that jeopardize your clients’ trust by mismanaging their expectations or breaching commitments. As your company grows, it’s critical to ensure that your entire staff is on board with your brand strategy and to guarantee it’s maintained and delivers to stakeholder expectations.
If your brand lacks identity, here’s why your team lacks purpose.
Typical Brand Identity Issues
A company suffering from a brand identity crisis can easily lead to low brand management, lack of efficient leadership, and poor communication. Being unable to interrelate a brand’s image with the team culture and expectations creates internal confusion within the team. Suppose staff and managers cannot understand what their company does, the target market and desired audience, their purpose, and how staff contribution fits the brand, then how can your team effectively sell your product/service offerings?
Consumers respect transparency when it comes to companies’ services, products, values, and goals. Providing your customers and stakeholders with inconsistent and inaccurate information about the brand is an easy way to kill your marketing efforts.
Customers and stakeholders also expect brands to understand their needs and help them find new products/services suited for their needs, with 48% of Americans holding these expectations. This means staff is required to produce performance and outcomes that align with the brand’s identity.
When a brand lacks identity, it creates issues when communicating to consumers and can spark inconsistencies in management. Management that is relatively ineffective in navigating their company through the complexities of determining its brand identity, poses a severe threat to its long-term viability. In most cases, the result is wrong positioning and alienation of potential leads and existing clients.
Company Culture
Future-proofing your business from failures and producing an organization that operates with integrity and authenticity forms the basis of your company culture and brand identity. Your brand promise and brand personality and characteristics are woven together to represent your company and its place in the market. However, if your company has a mismatched culture and brand, even productive staff members can be creating undesired results and have the wrong perspective on the company.
When thinking and acting in distinctive ways internally, you’ll be able to project the unique identity and brand image you want to communicate. Staff should be allowed to interpret and reinforce brand value when managing clients.
Aligned Brand Identity with Team Culture
When a company’s culture and brand aren’t interdependent, it’s often due to a disconnect between the team perspectives and customer expectations. The lack of awareness and engagement with your brand among staff is another sign of a mismatch between the culture and brand. Your staff should be aware of what distinguishes and differentiates your brand from competitors. Staff should know who the company’s target market is and what their significant demands and needs are (which should be outlined in your marketing strategy).
If your team doesn’t have direct client interaction, you can utilize the brand’s mission and values as decision-making filters and train them to deliver a positive customer experience. If staff believe they have no involvement in enforcing the brand and its positioning, it means your culture lacks brand identity and integrity.[*]
