The 5 focal points of corporate identity monitoring

It may seem obvious, but the first focus is on corporate identity management behind the scenes. Often a corporate identity is seen as something that you invest in once to create a convincing brand. However, this is just the beginning. This is followed by managing the corporate identity, also known as corporate identity monitoring. Without corporate identity monitoring, employees, departments and branches will do their own thing, each in their own way. The result: inconsistency. Examples are: wrong color use, uneven alignment and incorrect placement of the company logo. The goal of corporate identity monitoring is therefore to ensure that every employee applies the corporate identity in an equal and correct manner. You can achieve this as an organization by giving training in applying the corporate identity and explaining the importance and background of your brand (brand). In addition, you can appoint a corporate identity manager who supports employees and can provide everyone with the right corporate identity aspects.

With regard to applying corporate identity management, the end user, the employee, is central. He or she is responsible for the execution, and with the emergence of new media channels, the correct application of the corporate identity becomes increasingly complex. To prevent employees from being overwhelmed by the options, you can provide them with a manual, the so-called corporate identity manual. It describes all color codes, logos and other characteristics and explains how these issues should be applied according to rules and guidelines.
Does your organization already have a corporate identity manual? Then you need to ensure that it is up-to-date and accessible to employees in order to stimulate their use.

The preparation of documents takes up a lot of time and often leads to mistakes (for example through copy and paste work) and inefficiency. Templates are the perfect solution for this. Templates are predefined documents that contain corporate identity formatting and some standard text. This means that the user no longer has to think about the layout and part of the work has already been done through standardization. This also means that more time remains for the (personal) content of the document. To create templates it is important that a good balance is made between standardizing and personalizing. In addition, the templates need to be easy to find. Having too many templates, makes it difficult to find the right templates, while too few templates will lead to too much impersonal standardization. Maintenance and accessibility are also crucial here, because the use of outdated templates is most likely to result in inconsistency in the corporate identity.

On average, companies renew their logo once every 20 years. The rest of the corporate identity, on the other hand, changes almost annually in the majority of companies. This could involve small adjustments (in color, alignment, etc.), but can give your communication a completely different look. To ensure that everyone can keep track of these changes, all tools, templates and corporate identity books must be kept up-to-date. With the arrival of the Cloud this has become easier. By using a Cloud-based document management system (DMS), all corporate identity tools can easily be adapted. This allows corporate identity implementation to be rolled out directly throughout the organization.

Document creation software helps your employees to efficiently create documents and templates. A software tool like iWRITER offers users the opportunity to add building blocks (such as route directions or appointment confirmation) to a document in Microsoft Word with a few mouse clicks. Convenient entry fields ensure that address information is automatically placed in the right place. By integration with your current customer database, this data can even be retrieved automatically. And perhaps even more important: while you as a user build a document, iWRITER ensures that your corporate identity is safeguarded! In this way you insure yourself as an organization of professional and consistent documents and the desired appearance of your brand. Do you want to know what document creation software has to offer your organization? Then try the free iWRITER 365 demo!