Every department tells a different story

Cathal Smyth, Executive Director, Strategy at Bladonmore, explores why brands become fragmented – and why maintaining coherence depends less on tighter central control and more on bringing brand and specialist communications expertise closer together.

Most companies talk about having one brand. But the communications that shape that brand are produced all over the organization.

Marketing, investor relations (IR), human resources (HR), sustainability, corporate affairs and internal communications all produce communications. Each function has its own objectives, specialist knowledge, and pressures. Each develops its own ways of explaining what the company does and why it matters.

That doesn’t mean they’re getting the brand wrong. They’re solving different problems for different people. But it does mean that the brand may be owned in one part of the organization while being built every day in many others.

Brand-neutral doesn’t mean brand-free

Not everyone producing corporate communications thinks they’re doing brand work.

Marketing should. HR increasingly does, particularly around recruitment and employer brand. Internal communications often does brand-adjacent work, particularly when it’s on culture and values.

Other functions may see much of their work as relatively brand-neutral. IR and sustainability teams are often more concerned with communicating information accurately and meeting the needs of specialist audiences than consciously expressing the brand.

But brand-neutral doesn’t mean brand-free. Even communications whose primary purpose is factual involve choices about what the company emphasizes, how it explains itself, what evidence it uses, and how it presents its priorities. Those choices contribute to the story the organization tells about itself, whether or not the people making them think of that as branding.

Brand decisions are often made by people who don’t think they’re making brand decisions.

When communications projects become brand projects

There is another version of the same problem: communications projects that turn into branding projects.

An annual report develops a creative concept. An Investor Day gets its own visual identity. A sustainability or transformation program acquires a name, theme, and graphic language. There can be perfectly good reasons for this: the initiative matters, its owners want it noticed and a distinct identity can make it easier to communicate.

The problem is cumulative. Each decision may make sense on its own, but gradually the company acquires a collection of overlapping stories, propositions, identities, and campaigns. Over time, these can add up to different versions of the same organization.

Why specialization creates fragmentation

The simple reason for this is that expertise specializes. Each function develops deep knowledge of its own audiences, subject matter, and communications needs. At the same time, brand specialists bring a different kind of expertise: positioning, narrative, identity, and how the pieces should add up. Both matter, but the difficulty is that they don’t always meet.

Traditional brand agencies can reinforce that separation. Even when working on corporate brands, their center of gravity tends to remain positioning, identity, messaging, and marketing. They may consult widely during the development process but often engage much less deeply with the specialist communications through which the brand will subsequently be experienced. IR, sustainability reporting, or employee communications can easily become things to which the finished brand is later applied.

The specialist agency world mirrors the organization itself. IR, sustainability, HR and reporting teams all draw on advisers with their own specialist expertise. Each brings valuable knowledge of its audience, subject, and communications format.

That creates an interesting tension. The agencies with the deepest brand expertise may have relatively little knowledge of some of these specialist audiences and communications. The agencies that understand those audiences best may have relatively little expertise in brand.

The result can be another source of fragmentation. An agency brought in to solve one communications problem can become an agent of entropy, adding another narrative, identity, or interpretation to the organization. Or it can do the opposite: connect its specialist knowledge back to the wider brand and help different parts of the company remain recognizably part of the same whole.

The brand isn’t finished when activation begins

Some of the problem lies in how we think about brand development and activation.

Brand projects usually involve consultation across an organization. But there is a difference between interviewing people to inform a brand strategy and involving the people who will ultimately have to make that strategy work for very different audiences.

That involvement should start earlier. Departmental teams know things about their audiences and communications that a brand team or brand agency cannot know in the same depth. Their expertise can test the emerging brand before it is treated as finished.

The same applies at the other end of the process. Brand activation is often conceived as rollout: the new brand has been agreed and now the rest of the organization needs to understand it and use it correctly. There are presentations, training sessions, templates, and guidelines.

But applying the brand to real stakeholder communications will inevitably expose things that weren’t apparent when the strategy was developed. Working with functional experts at this stage shouldn’t simply be about interpreting a finished brand for their audiences. What emerges should be able to challenge, refine, and add to the brand itself.

These teams aren’t simply another audience for the brand. They’re active participants in building it.

Every department is a brand department

Different parts of a company should communicate differently. Trying to make every communication look and sound the same solves very little. The challenge is whether those differences still add up to the same organization.

That depends less on central control than on connecting the people who understand the brand with those who understand particular audiences, issues, and forms of communication.

Every department that communicates is, in that sense, a brand department. Not because it should own the brand or create its own version of it, but because the decisions it makes contribute to how the company is understood.

The job isn’t to stop that happening. It’s to make sure those decisions are properly connected.

If you’re thinking about how brand can better connect your communications functions, get in touch.

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