Do Your Documents Portray a Consistent Brand?
A recent Twitter tweet said: “Every document that touches a customer is marketing. Are all your documents sending the same message and properly representing your brand?”
With all the attention companies give to branding, advertising and marketing, I suspect they do not pay much attention to their brand consistency across documents.
Marketing literature is most often more or less aligned with the company or brand message. But companies have a plethora of other documents, outside the jurisdiction of the marketing people, that should also support their brand.
The elements you should be looking at are
– Content
– Visual appearance
– Tone-of-Voice
Content is most often dictated by the purpose of the document. In many cases there are even legal requirements for the content, such as on invoices. But you can always include an institutional text that describes the essential benefits of your company or brand in a nutshell.
Visual appearance plays a significant role in documents. Your house typography and graphics should be aligned with your brand image. Liberal use of white space makes the documents easier to read and lends them a professional air. Consult your visual designer for details.
Tone-of-Voice is the most important element, however.
For example, if your brand is friendly, customer-oriented and warm, do your invoices include a “friendly” element, such as “Thank you very much in advance for making the payment by the due date” instead of only stating the interest on arrears?
Do your reminder letters speak in a warm tone — or in your legal department’s voice? If your brand is supposed to be friendly, your first reminder shouldn’t assume the customer has deliberately delayed payment, but rather that your invoice has not arrived or there is an accidental glitch in the customer’s handling process.
Are your white papers speaking with the brand voice or the R&D engineer’s voice?
And so on, you get the drift.
Documents may not seem a priority during a downturn, but they definitely deserve attention. If you’re concerned about portraying a consistent brand, the whole range of your documents are an important component in achieving that.
