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Build a Brand Community

You can’t take a community approach to brand governance without a community. So, naturally, one of your top priorities, as you make the transition, should be building a brand community. This consists of employees, partners, customers, agencies, influencers, and media outlets.

Since all of your employees should be involved in your brand community to one extent or another, all you need to do is decide which employees are experienced enough to fill a brand ambassador role. Designers and other brand experts on your marketing team are a great place to start. Externally, you’ll need to be more selective.

Members of the brand community should be evangelists or advocates who are passionate about your brand and eager to help you grow as an organization. For example, agencies that are responsible for recruiting influencers and creating branded campaigns on your behalf, resellers who promote and sell your products to their clients, and customers who love telling everyone (friends, family, and strangers at the grocery store) about your brand.

Building a strong brand community will take time, though. So be patient. As you consistently invite interested parties to participate in your brand management – either through your official channels or their personal ones – you’ll be able to scale your brand presence far and wide.

Offer Ongoing Brand Training

Employees can only be successful if they know how to do their job effectively. This is true for brand management too. To push the boundaries and evolve the brand without veering off track, employees need to know what the essence of your brand should look, feel, and sound like. And they need to be reminded regularly what the brand purpose is too.

Naturally, this means brand managers — in their new role as leaders and guides — need to regularly train employees at every level, in every corner of the organization. Here are a few ways this can be done:

Brand Newsletters (and perhaps best practices)

First, and perhaps most easily, your brand team can develop an internal newsletter to keep the rest of the organization up-to-date on key brand changes, announcements, struggles, and successes. And they can use it to offer branding tips, tricks, and best practices too.

If done right, and at a good cadence, brand teams will be able to engage employees more deeply in the brand management process and immerse them in branding terms, trends, and techniques they need to know.

Since this approach is the least intrusive — allowing employees to read and respond on their own time — it’s also a good way for brand managers to check in with employees bi-weekly or monthly.

Branding School

You don’t have to officially send your employees back to school or to a Bootcamp to get a degree in branding. But internal “branding schools” can be helpful if you want your employees to be well-versed in your brand strategy, and you want to unlock more of their creativity and innovation.

Here, your brand team can create a “curriculum” of sorts around brand management and “enroll” employees in weekly or biweekly “classes”. During these classes, members of your brand team can dive deep into topics like the brand’s mission, vision, and purpose; current best practices for different brand expressions; strategies for cross-functional collaboration; and more. They could even use a class to answer employee FAQs or demonstrate certain techniques.

If the brand team wanted to differentiate its “curriculum” by department, it could do that too — by assigning different brand experts to different groups or holding several team-specific classes every week.

Regular Brand Drop-In Sessions

Since employees will have different questions and needs at different times, a standardized “curriculum” or newsletter isn’t always enough. Brand teams may need to include some type of one-on-one coaching or mentoring. One easy way to do that is by holding regular drop-in sessions.

During these sessions, employees can pop in to ask questions and talk to brand managers one-on-one or in small groups. And brand managers can meet pressing needs in person by modeling branding techniques or demoing brand management tools and features.

As a result, employees don’t have to wait until a particular topic is taught in a brand class or discussed during a monthly training session — they can get the information they need on-demand.