Chapter 12: The Toolbox of On-Brand Exercises

Overview

When adapted to your particular brand and organizational culture, the exercises in this toolbox can start the process of helping your staff understand branding in general, your brand in particular, and their role in delivering it.

When reviewing this sampling, we recommend that you do not read the exercises one after another. They will blend into each other, lose meaningful context, and put your brain in process overload. We suggest you first determine what you want and need to accomplish. Then go to the toolbox, find headings that interest you, and choose what you need. Read those exercises carefully, and adapt them to your unique brand DNA.

You will need dozens of these types of exercises in order to maintain high levels of staff engagement with your brand. You don't want to repeat the same exercises over and over again. We collect exercises on our Web site, http://www.brandedservice.com. Our invitation to organizations and readers of this book is to share approaches they have devised so we can post them on our Web site. This way, every organization will have a brimming toolbox of exercises that can be adapted to its brand needs.

Brand awareness exercises for staff are divided into four categories:

• Brand knowledge: What are brands all about?

• Brand specificity: What is unique about our brand?

• Brand assessment: Are we on-brand or off-brand?

• Brand delivery: What does our brand look like in action?

On-brand exercises for managers are divided into three categories:

• Brand support for staff

• Brand reinforcement communication

• Brand alignment

Four exercises are also included to ensure your sales approach and messages are on-brand.