5 signs you need help with brand fragmentation.

1. Nobody knows where the brand guidelines are saved.

Yes this might seem obvious, but if your brand has 10 versions of the logo in circulation and new team inductions don’t include a session on the brand and its importance, then you’ve probably got an issue. A brand isn’t the sole responsibility of a marketing team, it should be part of the whole organisation and embraced by everyone internally. If your business doesn’t buy the brand then it’s unlikely anyone outside of the organisation will.

2. What PowerPoint template?

Okay, so this is a bit of a brand agency nemesis but PowerPoint is always a sure sign that your brand has lost its way. The fundamental problem with good ol’ PPT is that whilst you start with a comprehensive set of slide templates, there’s always the option to do your own thing… before you know it, you’ve got some additional colours, drop shadows, no white space, and some questionable italics going on. Empowering teams is always a good thing, losing control of the face of your company isn’t. If you’ve got a crazy amount of feature creep on presentations, then it’s time to get back to brand basics.

3. Marketing Vs Sales teams.

It’s nothing new that sales teams often need to promote events, products or the brand – but can often become frustrated when the marketing collateral doesn’t give them the exact message they’re looking for. After being turned down on the request of a bespoke piece of collateral several times, the sales team will often take matters into their own hands – after all they need to sell. But… this is when it can get a bit dangerous. This is a frequent cause of brand fragmentation and it’s not uncommon to see logos being created for one-off activities, or brands within brands, and a whole host of random typography. See point 1 above.

4. Business rarely stands still and as your business evolves your brand should too.

Branding is all about being appropriate to who you are, what you stand for and who you’re looking to engage with. That can change over time as you grow and so what was appropriate five years ago, might not be the case now. Here’s where a brand audit helps in determining your perceptions Vs that of your customer base.

5. What you offer has evolved.

In a very similar vein to point 4 above, if your business has developed new products or services, or needs to stretch into other, but complementary markets then the brand should facilitate this. If it doesn’t you’ll probably end up with a ‘make-do’ but that’s when fragmentation of the brand happens, and you’ll end up with a weaker brand proposition and experience as a result.

How to solve the problem?

Invest in a brand audit roughly every five years to ensure you’re not divesting of your hard-won brand equity. If you have diversified too much and the brand is looking visually fragmented then you’ll need to revisit your brand guidelines, ensuring they are updated to accommodate and challenge what's in circulation; or you might need to go to the extent of a rebrand.

When you start the process of a rebrand it’s important to manage this across the business. You’ll need stakeholder engagement and board-level buy-in to really ensure the brand is embraced internally. At Truth, we operate a tried and tested approach: auditing what you have now and challenging the customer journey, a design sprint using our Truth Lab™ framework (ensuring you include a good representation of the business and collaborate to inform the brand positioning), and progression to a brand identity system that not only supports where you are now, but also where you want to be.