Do you have a Brand Champion?

What is a brand champion? Larger organisations often have one – and it is an important role that has the responsibility for promoting and protecting your organisation’s image.

A brand champion has responsibilities both inside your organisation and externally.

They may be part of the team who creates and develops the brand, which also ensures they have 100% buy-in to ensuring that everyone in the organisation ‘gets it’. Even if your brand champion is picking up the baton for an existing brand, they will need to be a manager, often one of your senior team, who have the authority and understanding to carry out this critical role.

It’s all about education

The brand champion’s first role is to encourage brand loyalty internally. The brand ethos and values need to be bought into by everyone who works in the organisation. It’s more than just a mission statement framed on the manager’s wall, it’s a way of working and it’s important that every employee feels that their organisation is worth working for.

Outside the organisation it’s about creating a strong personality for your brand, so customers, suppliers and competitors recognise it and respect it.

The brand champion is responsible for ensuring the senior team (and the Board) act in line with brand values in all the decisions that are made.  That means that the designated brand champion may need to have considerable diplomatic and persuasive skills!

The devil is in the detail

When the brand is designed it’s good practice to have a brand guidelines document drawn up – and to ensure everyone in the organisation not only knows it exists, but has a working knowledge of what it says.

Brand guidelines cover:

• The logo design and the way in which it can be used
• Your brand colours
• The fonts that represent your look and feel
• Your ethos and values you want to convey
• The words and phrases associated with your brand

In fact, anything that is used to represent the organisation.  This is all developed to include the way your website looks, the kind of information you present and the language you use.  It sounds picky – but it all contributes to an image that is one everyone can stand behind proudly.

The brand guidelines should be a document that everyone knows where to find and actively uses to ensure every time the company brand is used it presents the right message, not just an approximation.  It says ‘This is who we are’.  

Any external agency that you work with, marketing agency, social media managers, printers, PR experts – anyone who represents your brand – should all be familiar with your brand guidelines.

Why is this important? Because it sends a subtle, but powerful, message and everything your company produces tells the same story – that your brand is professional, consistent and valuable – and stands out from your competitors.