If your business is undertaking a branding exercise, which departments should be part of the consultation?
- Senior Leadership?
- Sales?
- Marketing?
- Operations?
- Design?
- R&D?
- Engineering?
- Finance?
- HR?
- Legal?
- Customer support?…
The correct answer is all of them.
I’m not saying that you need to engage everyone in the nitty-gritty of strategic thinking and decision-making. If you did that, there’s a high chance you’d never reach any meaningful decisions at all.
HOWEVER…
You need input from all corners of the organisation to validate your strategic assumptions. That’s because the worst outcome of any branding project is disconnection. In other words; when your external voice fails to align with the internal reality.
All that does is create false expectations in the mind of potential customers, who will quickly discover that you’re promising value you cannot deliver. It also alienates your team from the branding process because they will be unable to understand the link between your brand and their day-to-day experience of your business.
To avoid this problem, you MUST road-test your draft brand strategy on team members from all corners of your organisation. It is the only way to surface potential sticking points before they become problematic. Those points must be discussed so you can understand the full implications.
After that, you have 2 choices:
- You alter your brand strategy to align with the realities of your operation.
- You alter the reality by implementing changes in your operation to align with your brand strategy.
Either option can work, but you MUST choose one. If you don’t, your branding project is already on the road to failure.
