The Ultimate Brand Tool

Logo, tone of voice, color: it all comes together to form your brand’s corporate identity. Your corporate identity is the face your company shows to the world, so it’s important to ensure consistency across all communications – digital, print and broadcast. But that’s not always easy, since each and every one of your employees has a significant impact on the public image of your company. Their correspondence, reports, presentations and even casual conversations send a message to the public, so it’s important to make sure the message they’re sending is the right one.

Assuming you already have an established brand, ensuring the consistent use of your corporate identity may be as simple as giving your employees a little education. Without preparation or training in how to present your company’s brand, your employees’ communications are likely to vary as widely as their individual personalities and perspectives. One way to educate your employees about the brand promise, personality and visual standards of your company is to provide them with comprehensive identity guidelines. Used primarily as a reference, identity guidelines can include any and all information employees would need to accurately represent the brand.

To help Communifx, a promotional, analytical marketing agency, manage its new brand, Brady Communications created an easy-to-use reference guide for employees. This guide provides background not only on the character of the brand, but also the appropriate usage of Communifx logos, typefaces and other visual assets. As employees – and even outside firms – work on future Communifx communications, these identity guidelines will ensure that they are consistent with current materials.

Another challenge companies face with regard to identity guidelines is that, over time, they change. Printing and distributing hard copies – and redistributing when corrections have been made – can quickly become expensive and inefficient, particularly for larger organizations. What’s more, there’s always the chance that some employees may be working from an outdated copy.

To remedy this, Brady Communications developed an online identity guidelines product for companies wishing to put paperless guidelines at their employees’ fingertips. Instantly and easily updatable, this tool provides users with an easy-to-use Web site that can be accessed anywhere, anytime with a valid login and password.

After two significant acquisitions in 2007 that transformed the company from a U.S. leader to a global competitor, Mylan called on Brady Communications to refresh its brand and create an identity guidelines site that could be used by more than 12,000 employees worldwide. We created MylanBrand.com, which now serves as Mylan employees’ single source for everything from brand promise and messaging to logos and templates. The site is especially useful for organizing visual standards for Mylan’s endorsed brands, companies that have been acquired by Mylan but still retain some of their pre-acquisition identity. Complete with a search function, a library of downloadable graphics and the capability to upload good examples of branded work, MylanBrand.com is employees’ go-to source for corporate communications guidelines.

Whatever your company’s size or level of public visibility, your employees are the ambassadors of your brand. Identity guidelines are a proactive way to make sure that the full strength of your brand gets communicated every time – without getting lost in translation.