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What are the best brands doing to stay relevant, build trust, and create content smarter?
At Share Your Genius, we have the same questions, so we're tapping the best in the space for their answers—one voicemail at a time.
Join us each week for quick hits of insights from b2b marketers and leaders.
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[00:00:10] Amanda Smith: Every brand knows its voice 'til you ask each individual team to say it back to you. Scaling a brand voice across teams is tough, but it's not just because your company lacks a solid brand. It's because everyone interprets it differently. We're all humans. Then add in the layers of multiple locations, different leadership styles, and even change in customer needs, and suddenly everyone's speaking a slightly different language, all under the same logo.
[00:00:40] Amanda Smith: Allison Barber has mastered this at RISE. As a senior marketing leader, she has worked tirelessly to create a brand blueprint that wasn't just another document gathering dust on a shelf, but instead it was a living, breathing guide to the company's mission, vision, and values.
[00:00:56] Amanda Smith: She made sure every single employee knew what the brand stood for, how it spoke, and how it operated. Of course, I asked her, "How do you scale a brand voice across locations and teams?"
[00:01:09] Amanda Smith: Here's what she had to say.
[00:01:20] Amanda Smith: Hey Amanda. So good to hear from you. Wow, this is a question that I think a lot of people are asking, and so I'll give it my best shot. I hope this helps. So scaling a brand across teams and locations was something that I struggled with for a really, really long time. Here's what we've done at RISE and I hope it helps. We worked really, really hard to create our brand blueprint. It took a long time. It took a lot of iterations.
[00:01:51] Allison Barber: Here's what it looked like for us. Number one, we really took a stab at our mission, vision, and values. That is a really hard concept for CFOs and operations people to get their mind around.
[00:02:05] Allison Barber: We threw the spaghetti on the wall and a couple things stuck, and started the process of having some of that mission and vision in place. Then probably six to nine months later, we hit another wall where we started growing really quickly, and we had more employees coming on, and our culture started kind of shifting. Some of it was good and some of it showed us that there was still room for improvement, which opened the conversation back up again for us to say, "Okay, we have this mission, vision, and values.
[00:02:40] Allison Barber: How do we take that and really make it more clear?"
[00:02:43] Allison Barber: As Brené Brown says, "Clear is kind." So that took us into another exercise where we actually ended up surveying our customers, we surveyed our employees, we took the surveys ourselves as leadership team, and we just said like, "What are the things that you think RISE represents?"
[00:03:02] Allison Barber: What are the things that you enjoy about working here? Where do you feel like there's gaps or something is unclear. We then took as a leadership team and we said, "Okay, what are the things that we love about what we're hearing, and what are the things that do not feel in line with us as a company?"
[00:03:23] Allison Barber: We actually spent a lot of time internally in the marketing department and resources.
[00:03:29] Allison Barber: It's beautiful. It's fully branded. It's not like a Google Doc that says, "This is what we're doing. This is who we are." It's fully branded. It's a stunner. We are super proud of it. What we have done from there is we've taken that document and we have given it to every new employee. Wetrain for our culture. We share it with new vendors. We share it everywhere that we can share it, and we just say like, "This is who we are as a brand." Fromthere, we make sure that we're tying everything that we're doing back to that brand on a leadership team.
[00:04:05] Allison Barber: And you're probably thinking, "You haven't even talked about your team yet, you've just been talking about the brand," and I get it, but that is a really important foundational piece. If you can get the buy-in from the leadership team, and from your high-level group, that is going to bleed down and just flow down throughout their departments.
[00:04:29] Allison Barber: For us, what that looks like is when we're having leadership team meetings and there's an opportunity for us to figure out, "How are we gonna handle this, what are we gonna do?" We point it back to that brand blueprint. So that keeps us on brand, whether it's at our HQ location, whether that's all the way up in Minnesota when we're all in Indianapolis.
[00:04:49] Allison Barber: We have this same guiding principles, a group of guiding principles that we all point back to, that we all run our departments to. When questions come up, when issues come up, we're able to say like, "Hey, respect is paramount here. That was not a respectful thing."
[00:05:07] Allison Barber: Or, "This doesn't feel like it's respecting the people that we serve. This doesn't feel like it's respecting our teammates." And we can point back to that instead of saying, "I feel like this is what we should do." Or, "I wanna do this, I think this is gonna be a great idea." We can point back to, "Okay, this is who we are as a brand and this is why we're doing what we're doing."
[00:05:28] Allison Barber: I think the biggest thing in the day to day of keeping that brand across the board is going back to the why. Why are we doing this? It's because this is who we are as a company. So I hope that helped. If you need any clarity, if you need any cheerleading, if you need any moral support, you've got my number.
[00:05:49] Allison Barber: Give me a call. Thanks so much.
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[00:05:59] Amanda Smith: Thank you for listening. Want your podcast to do more? Subscribe to Genius Cuts because it's never just a podcast.