How do you ensure that the voice of your brand speaks consistently across media channels and stakeholder groups, transcends changes in leadership, and keeps your sales force from wandering off the reservation…so to speak?

Messaging governance is an essential component of any well-structured brand governance system (see our blogpost “Brand Governance — what’s all the buzz?). Simply put, governing your messaging means establishing practices and procedures to ensure all your organization’s communications stay on point. So what would such a system consist of, exactly?

First, you need a process for creating and managing a messaging platform. Ideally, a process-driven approach with task-specific technology would make it easier to develop, validate and track messaging for every key stakeholder group—both internal and external.

You’ll also want to monitor ongoing shifts in market conditions, composition or sentiment that may trigger a need to refresh, add or change messaging.

The proper care and feeding of your messaging platform requires someone in your organization, maybe even a team, to ensure ongoing administration and enforcement of messaging governance – a shepherd who can keep all those cats (or sales guys) aligned.

When there is a formal corporate messaging platform owned by the brand and not by a single person or department, the likelihood of coherent brand messaging succession increases significantly.   That translates to stronger, more consistent brand loyalty – and that’s what messaging governance is all about.

Using the latest messaging technology can make message creation, organization, consistency and access much more manageable for everyone involved. And it helps to operationalize and elevate messaging to its proper place – transcending departmental boundaries, and even surviving changes in management – all in the effort to increase or preserve brand equity.

Next time you’re feeling like you’re alone on the range, in search of a brilliant way to share the right messaging with the team… know that you’re not alone. There’s a wrangler on the horizon, with the technology to help you reign in the right message.  Check out 9align Message Mapper (9align.com) for a glimpse of technology specifically geared for messaging governance.

If your brand offering is not clear and compelling from your customers’ point of view, you may have a Brand Portfolio Problem. Brand guru David A. Aacker, in his book, Brand Portfolio Strategy, identifies a number of potential brand portfolio problems we should all be looking out for.

What are some other key indicators that you may have a Brand Portfolio Problem?

You may have a Brand Portfolio Problem if:

• You’re not providing adequate brand-building resources to those brands with potential to drive future profits, while overfunding your mature brands.
• Your current business and marketing strategy is being paralyzed by uncertainty regarding the future role of your key master brands.
• You don’t have the proper brand assets in place to support your business strategy moving forward, nor do you have a plan in place to remedy this situation.
• You’re watching your margins erode because of difficulty in identifying or achieving differentiation.
• Your key brands need an image makeover, or at least an energy transfusion, because they’re starting to feel dated, old and tired.
• Your organization isn’t responding nimbly to changing market dynamics because it lacks governance, resources or brand power. (Could a brand alliance be the answer?)
• Your brand assets are not being intelligently leveraged in order to turn around unsatisfactory growth.
• You’re missing the opportunity to leverage corporate brand assets such as your unique heritage and values.
• You’re not participating in a growing super-premium subcategory with high margins and product vitality, while your core market is turning hostile.
• You have more brands and offerings than your brand-building resources can support.
• Your offering is so confusing that customers can’t figure out how to buy what they need—and even your employees aren’t always certain how to guide them.

Does any of this sound familiar in the context of your organization? What brand portfolio problems are you struggling to overcome? Post a comment below sharing your top two issues and we’ll discuss strategies to help resolve the most common brand portfolio problems in future posts.

How can you ensure that your brand becomes—or remains—a long-term strategic asset? Brand governance is the new buzzword in managing brand equity, increasingly necessary in an age of fierce competition, growing uncertainty and consumer empowerment. But what does brand governance really mean?

Born of the understanding that strong brands don’t just create competitive advantage but actually have value that can be quantified on a balance sheet, brand governance is the systematic building and nurturing of that value by organizations. This system is built on policies, held together (or governed) by processes, which require tools—technology—to function efficiently.

If that sounds a little too jargon-y, let’s introduce a malapropism here to help you relate to it: Instead of brand governance, think of it as brand “governess” (thus the Mary Poppins illustration)—a brand nanny whose job is to ensure your brand grows up safely, intelligently, and reaches its full potential in the world.

The more important brand equity becomes to an organization’s bottom line, the more vulnerable it becomes to potential hazards along the brand experience path. And what hazards are lurking in the bushes waiting to ambush your brand? The one with the sharpest teeth, perhaps, is growing consumer sophistication that leads to intolerance for any gap between what the brand promises and what it delivers. Couple this with the growing number of distribution and communication touchpoints, then throw in the particular risks of social media, and you’ve got one treacherous path for your brand to navigate.

But, if you have the right policies, processes and tools (your nanny) in place, your brand has built-in safeguards.  Proper brand governance helps your organization develop an ethical framework for decision making, along with the transparency that’s essential for building trust, one of the three pillars of a strong (and valuable) brand.