Hi, welcome back. Today we're going to speak about the impact that brand guidelines can have across various touch points. So, let's start with a simple outline of what's in a typical brand guideline. Brand story, the mission and vision that target the customers, et cetera. The logo, the color palette, topography, imagery, best practices, the image book, the mood board to demonstrate possible images to use, and finally the brand voice, which can describe the language, the terms, the ways of speaking about the brand. You've covered those already in the previous modules, in this series. Each of these aspects of the brand guidelines should be considered by the teams responsible for the different customer touch points, to help them shape their interactions with customers. For example, let's assume a company's guidelines emphasize the company's extremely robust, safe, trustworthy solutions. Ideally, every conversation whether digital or physical, whether synchronous like phone, live chat, or face to face conversations, or asynchronous like email or website, should reflect these brand messages. So you can imagine how these should impact the ways that your colleagues are defining their interactions with customers at different touch points. However, and you probably guess where I'm going with this, it is rarely the case that things progresses smoothly as a branding and customer experience teams might like. At least some of your colleagues, like it or not, are just not going to use brand guidelines you've worked so hard to define. So let me explain. There are dozens of different touch points that are defined and owned by various teams and individuals in your company. In larger companies, it's likely that many of these colleagues will never have come across the brand guidelines. Maybe they are a recent hire or maybe they've never opened email that had to link to the guidelines or maybe they were working at a different company that your company had just had bought. Frankly, they also might be basing their decisions on outdated guidelines. So other colleagues might have a difficult time understanding how to connect the brand guidelines to their work. What about the roles where the interactions with the customers? Are face to face conversations. So consider for example client success role. This role typically focuses on sharing high-profile customers have everything they need to be successful, and ultimately stay loyal to the company and its products and services. Client success managers escalate their customer's issues, find experts inside your company who are able to respond to the client's problems. They identify potential problems before they occur hopefully. The context of this role ought to be that they act as champions of the company's brand message to the client. The reality is that they're under quite a bit of pressure to relieve customer problems as soon as possible, and often by any means necessary. Such incentives may often challenge their ability to have conversations with customers in a way that reinforces the brand. So another reality, a lot of brand guidelines are open to interpretation. Sure, fonts, colors, logo usage, and things like that are all pretty straightforward. But brand, guideline, components such as the brand voice are less rigid in definition. Most guidelines to define the brand's voice will recommend using certain terms in ways of speaking. So let's take some examples. One set of brand guidelines describe the company's voice with these terms: thoughtful, proud, or human. Needless to say, if I'm going to be doing a demo for a potential client or if I'm running an email marketing campaign or if I'm meeting with the legal team representing the company the customers company, my interpretation of these words, thoughtful, proud, or human, is really up to me, and a colleague reading the same brand voice definition for those words might interpret the words differently. There was no getting around the ambiguities of language. So whatever the brand voice guidelines are, assuming your colleagues are aware of them, the manifestation of those guidelines are going to be quite contextual. So in the next class, let's talk about even more difficult situations that prevent teams from using the brand guidelines. I'd also like to introduce you to some ways to build better alignment with teams that are or maybe ought to be using the bread guidelines. Whether you're in a brand team or a CX function, this class will really help you get the alignment that you need. See you next time.
