How to Implement the Brand Community Model

From building a strong brand culture to assigning roles and responsibilities, there are several tasks you need to complete to make the switch from traditional brand governance to organization-wide brand management. Here are just a few.

Define New Roles and Responsibilities

The first step is deciding who will be responsible for brand management and how much they’ll be responsible for. Obviously, your small group of brand experts (i.e. the brand team) should handle brand strategy, brand asset creation, and training. That’s easy. But, you need to figure out how employees and teams will get involved.

In theory, sales reps should take control of their conversations with leads and customers. Marketers and designers should proactively explore new trends that will keep the brand relevant. Developers should embrace new techniques and technologies to build future-proof apps and websites. And HR, Customer Service, and Operations teams should create custom-branded experiences for the job candidates, customers, and partners they work with daily.

To give employees the right amount of responsibility, you need to know how experienced they are with branding and how invested they are in maintaining it. If you find that your entry and mid-level employees don’t understand or appreciate your branding, you shouldn’t give them the freedom to innovate right out of the gate.

Instead, you should give the team leader or manager the responsibility for brand governance within their team — and slowly increase employee autonomy as they’re trained by the brand team and their manager. You can learn more about responsibilities in our Brand Stewardship guide.

Teach the Core Brand Principles

The more control you have over key brand assets, messaging, and designs, the better you have to understand the brand’s underlying principles (i.e. what makes it unique and meaningful to customers).

But even if employees aren’t part of the brand team, they need to have a foundational understanding of the brand. That way, every project they work on (even small and seemingly insignificant ones) will reflect your branding — giving you a professional, seamless experience at every touchpoint.

The easiest way to get everyone on the same page is to hold an all-hands meeting or large group training session to discuss your brand’s purpose and highlight the key features of your brand identity. Since these topics form the foundation of your brand presence, this information will help your employees stay grounded as they accept more creative freedom.

Create a Brand Culture

As you get employees up to speed, you need to think about the type of brand culture you want to have and start creating it. Not only will this make brand management more enjoyable for your employees, but it will elevate your brand experience too. Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you start formulating your brand culture:

How do we want employees to think and feel about the brand? How can we help them think and feel those things, authentically? What should communication look like? How do we want teams to collaborate and co-create?

It won’t be perfect overnight. No culture is. But by starting early, you’ll have a solid foundation to build upon as your employees take on more responsibility for the brand.

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.