Businesses spend a great deal of time and money establishing a brand, and it makes sense. A lot goes into creating a strong brand presence:

• A user-friendly, well developed and maintained, search engine optimized website
• A well managed and consistently analyzed social media presence on all major platforms
• A consistent stream of valuable content marketing material that helps establish your company as a thought leader in the industry
• Professionally developed and printed traditional marketing materials that reinforce the Internet-based message your website and social media are sending
• Clean, consistent imaging, across all marketing platforms, including colors, fonts, a logo, and design work that appropriately represents your company and its purpose

Creating and establishing a brand, however, is just the beginning. Just as the company itself needs nurturing, attention, and planning in order to grow and succeed, so too does the brand, and the two are actually quite different.

• Your company is your actual business – your accounts, your clients, your employees, your product, your service.
• Your brand is your image – how people perceive you, the voice that speaks “from” your company, your marketing, your reputation.

So, while the hierarchy of your entire company is usually mapped out with flow charts that let everyone know who is responsible for what when it comes to serving clients and growing the business, brand management is often left to the marketing folks, and that is a major oversight.

Brand management is about more than knowing when to update a logo or keeping the social media fresh. Brand management is about a uniform image you work to protect. That means everyone is responsible for brand management:

Boots on the ground: Your service technicians, sales team, and other customer-facing employees are responsible for brand management. Even off-duty, if someone is so much as wearing a shirt bearing your logo, they need to take the responsibility of representing the company to heart.

Words on the web: Facebook and Twitter are the two largest social media platforms, and, as such, they’re the best places for engagement as well as the most dangerous places to have disgruntled employees or customers. Twitter, in particular, has a reputation for backfiring on companies. Be sure that there are always multiple people monitoring your Twitter and Facebook accounts so that you can catch hashtag pirates and negative posters quickly and control any damage before it gets out of hand.

Wheels on the road: Your company vehicles should always be clean, well maintained, and driven in accordance with all local laws and regulations. When consumers see a speeding, dirty vehicle with your brand’s name on it, they perceive that your company doesn’t care about quality, safety, or other people.

How do you manage your brand? What kinds of brand management activities do you delegate across your organization?