Communication & Branding
As a foundation for developing a Communication & Branding Program, our approach incorporates principles that help your workforce adopt new changes with energy and commitment.
- Alignment to Corporate Strategy: It will be extremely important to communicate the relevance of the project to the overall corporate vision. Messages and branding graphics should be aligned to the corporate vision. The messaging should include a clear statement of the corporate vision as well as the benefits that this initiative will produce to achieve that vision.
- Leverage Executive Sponsors: Executive-level support is essential to project awareness and acceptance by the stakeholders. Executive and other sponsors will be valuable spokespeople for the initiative.
- High Levels of Awareness: Each organization will have different levels of communicating with regard to frequency and openness. Frequency of messages should ensure a high level of awareness about the program, regardless of current cultural norms.
- Open Forum for Open Communications: Stakeholders should feel comfortable and confident to share their ideas and concerns about the program. The communications & branding team must create an open forum to support this interaction.
- Promote Value Proposition: At the core of gaining support for the program, the stakeholders want to understand “what’s in it for me?” Messaging should promote the project value proposition in terms of the impacts and benefits to the stakeholders.
- Seek Feedback: Multi-channel communication is critical to understand what is being communicated, where there are miscommunications, rumors, etc. Feedback is essential to manage and direct the stakeholder behaviors/reactions.
- Incorporate Social Media: Social media can be used as a distribution channel for information as well as a feedback mechanism. It provides valuable insight to individuals as well as industry groups. Don’t forget to incorporate some of these tools in your program.
