Use Regular Brand Check-ins to Create a Market Advantage for Your Clean Energy Brand

While brand priorities shift over time, foundational brand tenets should not. Regular brand check-ins allow you to balance consistency with evolution.

One of the most difficult tightropes to navigate when managing a brand is determining what can shift to meet a constantly changing clean energy landscape and what remains unchanged to build a solid, recognizable foundation. That an effective brand is built with visual elements, messaging, strategy, and emotion makes that tightrope even more tenuous.

Why bother? In a single word – advantage.

Consider a company that gives little to no thought to the fundamentals of their brand – the roots. The company doesn’t want to be “trapped” by defining a brand. They don’t want to feel “restricted” in their creativity. They’re fast moving and want their brand to keep up.*

What they miss out by not doing this work is two-fold. More than two-fold, but we’ll stick to two for the purposes of this post.

Brand consistency boosts revenue

Consistency helps us form that picture of an organization strongly in our minds. Our brains naturally group like things in order to better remember them, while also using the least about of energy.

Look at phone numbers or social security numbers. We remember the longer strings of numbers as three groups, not as nine or ten separate numbers. It’s more efficient.

This same energy saving principle is at work when we employ consistency in branding. A logo doesn’t mean anything on its own, but consistently associate it with certain messages, and the logo becomes a visual shortcut in our minds to recall those messages.
The impacts are measurable. 33% of businesses report that brand consistency helps them boost revenue by 20% or more.

Keeping your clean energy brand on track

A mistake organizations often make with branding is to let the results of branding work collect dust on a shelf. They go through the process of branding or rebranding, deploy the visuals, and call it good. They use their logo and colors, refer to their style guide when working with other organizations, and leave it at that.

Visuals are a key part of branding. And as a visual person, my favorite part. Branding is so much more. Using that foundational branding work as regular signposts to check in along your path keeps you moving towards your vision, while allowing for variances of the market.

Especially during market turbulence - something us clean energy folks never experience, right? – taking the time to perform brand check-ins is important. Check-ins allow you to correct for “drift” as well as ask questions about choices serving brand tenets and needed shifts.

This doesn’t need to be an onerous task. Small check-ins monthly, with cumulative reviews quarterly and yearly should be easy to perform once established.

If you think of your branding as having three components – non-negotiables, evolving, and responsive, it makes it easier to define what to include in a check-in. For example, your brand values are non-negotiable and should permeate all materials without compromise. Whereas when establishing a visual identity, the elements may start out as non-negotiable, but migrate to evolving visuals as new technologies come into play (or acquisitions, or product shifts, etc.). And a marketing campaign, while complementary to brand values, is responsive to market needs, product offerings, customer profiles, etc.)

How do I perform brand check-ins?

The following assumes you’ve articulated your brand. If you have not yet taken that step, reach out to me for guidance. If you have articulated your brand, gather your vision, mission, brand values, customer profiles, value propositions, and style guide.

Depending on the size of your organization, you might opt for random spot checks or all materials review. Remember to include internal as well as external materials, as well as materials from all departments.

Monthly

3. Check brand values

Do materials convey your brand values? Which values are conveyed? If not, why?

Spot check and record the results. If you see issues that can easily be fixed, such as someone going rogue from the style guide, work with them to guide them back to being on brand.

If you record shifts, make note to check in to see if these shifts are happening the following month. It may be a fluke, or it may be a larger shift that needs to be addressed in branding documentation.

Quarterly

You may choose to engage in a wider spot check on a quarterly basis or simply use the information you recorded the previous three months.

1.  Review the previous three months’ worth of check-ins. What trends do you see? Do you need to address creating new customer profiles? Does the style guide need a supplement or slight revision to address technology evolutions? Are there departments that would benefit from a branding lunch-and-learn?

2.  Are your materials contributing to forwarding your vision and mission? If not, why?

3.  Are there any brand concerns you should be on the lookout for over the next quarter?

4.  While branding has a longer-term impact on revenue, and can also take longer to see results on said revenue, are you seeing positive upticks in brand recognition, better leads, customer interactions, etc?

Annually

With the data in hand from monthly and quarterly check-ins, as well as the coming year’s goals and priorities, you can begin an annual brand review.

1. How have your branding efforts promoted your goals as noted in your mission and vision? If they haven’t, why not? If not, what can you do to shift your efforts back on track?

2. Does your style guide still meet your organization’s needs? Are there edits that can/should be made? Or is it time to look at a refresh?

3. Are your customer profiles still accurate? Has your audience shifted? Have your product/service offerings shifted?

4. Related: do your value propositions still resonate? What messaging needs to shift? If any?

5. How have your brand values come through over the year?

6. What is one branding win you can showcase for the year?

7. What is one branding lesson learned that will help you refine your brand in the coming year?

8. Relate the coming year’s goals to your vision and mission. How can brand efforts support those goals?

9. What branding efforts will keep going into the new year and which efforts will you let go? Are there new efforts you’ll add to the mix?

While this work may happen in conjunction with a marketing plan, it is not the same as a marketing plan. Branding impacts all departments. It is internal. It is external. It works hand-in-hand with marketing and sales.

By taking the time to perform consistent, regular check-ins on your branding, your clean energy company can take advantage of the benefits organizations see when utilizing branding consistently.

*Yes, these are all excuses I’ve heard when discussing branding.