Orchestrating Identity: Leading Unified Brand Strategies in Local Government
Learn how skilled leaders conduct the diverse elements of sub-brands to achieve strategic harmony and enhanced public perception
For local government communicators, it’s one of the eternal issues. How do you manage multiple brands and their associated logos? It’s common for a city to manage a tourism program and/or a downtown district and/or an airport, all of whom probably have a brand identity distinct from the primary city brand. You’ll also have law enforcement and fire departments that have their own distinct graphic identity via a badge and/or patch. And other departments will want to build their brands, too.
It makes sense. You’ve got different basic functions and different primary audiences. Yet, you have a single entity with oversight responsibility and ownership over them all. And all those sub-brands have a diluting impact on what I’ll call the Big Brand.
I contend that high-performing organizations — employees of whom this newsletter targets — should be paying attention to this problem/challenge. Do you want to sound like an orchestra playing Mozart, with the many different instruments in harmony, playing together to create a work of art that moves the heart? Or do you want to sound like an orchestra that’s perpetually tuning up?
This, the latest in our government branding series, explores this issue of brand dissonance.
A handful of folks are making beautiful music together, and I’ll show examples below of how it’s done right. Most are not. It’s not intentional. It’s usually a matter of how responsibilities and organizations evolve and grow over time. Dealing effectively with the problem/challenge takes real skill and leaders with backbone (a recurring theme in Good Government Files, I know. Law enforcement types would call that a “clue”). I also believe you need outside help to get everyone on the same sheet of music, which is why we’re returning to the experts we talked to for last week’s post regarding website design, the experienced and talented Polly Thurston and Mike Steckel of Mighty Citizen.
Problem Identification Made Easy
A simple way to show leaders and other organizational stakeholders the dissonance problem is … to show them dissonance problem. Literally. An audit will make the case that brand creep has, over time, infected the organization to the point the Big Brand suffers from too many expressions of too many sub-brands.
“Everyone wants the shiny new logo, especially for their pet project or department or whatever it is,” Polly says. “But it dilutes the overall brand power of whatever the entity is. We’ll just do an audit of all of the current materials or brands that somebody has and show them visually in a slideshow. ‘This is what you’re putting out there.’ And because of the lack of visual connection, people don’t know some of the benefits they’re getting from your organization.”
She cited one association they worked with that had an online forum that was super popular, but none of the users connected it back to the Big Brand.
“People loved it, but they had no idea it was a product of this association,” she said. “When we did focus group (and) stakeholder interviews, they had no idea because it had its own name. The association logo wasn’t anywhere on the site. The emails that went out associated with it had none of (the Big Brand) logo on it, just the logo for the little forum. So, people were saying, we love this forum, but they were canceling their membership with the association.”
Added Mike: “One of the people I was talking to said, ‘I don’t know who does this, but boy, I look at this every day when I first login to work.’ And it was like, wow. She was pretty involved in the association and had no idea.”
Fixing the Problem
Once leaders are convinced of the problem, they should tap the comms chief to lead a multi-department, multi-disciplinary team to make a way forward. It’s well worth the investment to hire a consultant to help put guardrails and governance policies in place. You’ll want someone with government experience, like Mighty Citizen, or North Star, or Cooksey Communications, or JPW Communications, or DFW StratComm, or Granite Sky Creative Group, or Slate Communications, or Tripepi Smith. You need that disinterested third party to deliver the hard truths, and also to overcome the Curse of Knowledge we referenced in last week’s post.
It’s a tricky business and there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, Polly said.
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