A hundred people making the same mistake isn’t a compliance problem. It’s a systems problem.

At one global enterprise I worked with, the branding was having a crisis. Every department, operating group, and regional team had their own version of the company logo. Some had their department name under it. Some had their operating group. Some had their team. The typography was inconsistent across all of them, and no single PR agency globally was in alignment with another.

And the colors were everywhere. The same logo ranged from fire engine red to pink depending on who made it and when.

The instinct was to treat this as a compliance problem. People aren’t following the brand guidelines. Send another memo. But when I dug into it, the root cause was technical, not behavioral. There was no approved RGB color specification and no digital master artwork. The brand guidelines had been built for print. When people needed the logo for a website or a presentation, they recreated it themselves and eyeballed the color. They weren’t being sloppy. They were working without a standard that fit the medium they were working in.

As part of a global SEO and brand realignment I was leading, I brought in a designer experienced in corporate brand guidelines at this scale and commissioned a streamlined set of standards built around the company’s identity priorities. We reduced the logo sprawl down to one master logo, two operating group variants, and a handful of controlled carve-outs for specific use cases like environmental branding, and a couple of regionally required variants that I recall.

Then my team built out a digital version of the brand guidelines with downloadable master artwork for every medium: web, letterhead, presentations. For web logos specifically, we created pre-sized assets at every standard dimension with a clear rule: if you need a size we haven’t provided, you contact Corporate Communications. You don’t make it yourself.

After rollout, I’d routinely spot-check logos across the company with an image editor’s color picker. Trust the process, but verify the pixels.

The lesson is the same one that shows up everywhere in operations: when a lot of people are doing the same thing wrong, the problem usually isn’t the people. It’s the system they’re working in. Make the right thing the easy thing, and you’ll spend a lot less time chasing the wrong thing.

I’m always amused at conversations that lead into how a specific demographic has a special or implied, exclusive understanding about a specific communications technique. Just because someone knows how to upload a video to YouTube, this does not make them a Social Media expert (nor does it make someone an eCommerce expert because they sell doilies on Etsy).

For some people, today’s youth who knows how to upload a video to the Internet is akin to yesterday’s youth who used to help set the VCR. In each ones time they were both considered tech geniuses regardless of their actual skills.

As the adage goes: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

This applies to perceptions of any skills competency. Just because a person has an understanding of something you don’t understand, that does not make them an expert in a subject matter (and them being an expert in one aspect of a technology doesn’t immediately make them an expert in all aspects).

Bringing this back to the topic of communications. New doesn’t always involve doing something different. While the tools may change, the fundamentals have always remained the same.

Believe it or not, social media is just one of many tools available to achieve your goals and those old tools? Well, in some cases, they are still just as viable for communications as the new tools. Old is new. New is old. Rinse, repeat.

So now that I’ve introduced you to thinking about Brand You or as we’ve been calling it, your persona, let’s think about what I’ve said and consider how this applies to a businesses.

Haven’t you noticed? Companies have personalities. Companies go to great lengths through advertising and marketing to establish a brand identity (persona) knowing that more often than not you’re going to buy something from either someone you identify with, someone you know or someone you trust. When companies inundate you with messaging they are trying to establish this relationship on a pseudo subconscious level so that you’ll gravitate to their product when presented with a comparable set of options.

Here is an easy thought exercise for you the next time the TV is on. Actually watch the commercials. Based on time of day, day of week and commercial content you can almost always identify who that company thinks is watching the show that you are watching. In theory the persona they are attempting to identify with is supposed to ultimately be you. So that either you or someone you influence will buy the item (eg, kids and toys).

Now a more challenging one. Go to your cupboard or refrigerator and look at what you have in there. Ask your self “why did I first buy this <fill in the blank>?”. Inevitably for alot of people there will be something that falls under the “that’s what my mom bought me as a kid and it’s my favorite” category. Think about that…

Companies have two ways to bring you in as a customer. Positive referral from someone you have an relationship with or by creating a relationship via marketing so that, as I said above, when confronted between product A or B you go with what you know. All they have to do is get you to buy once and if you have a satisfying experience on your first try you may never try the other products. That’s one battle down in the war for your brand loyalty.

One extension of building brand loyalty is through lifestyle associations. Take for example the soft drink/soda business: Mountain Dew = extreme sports, Sprite = hip hop, Pepsi = young and young at heart, Coca-Cola = happy people, or Fresca = dieters. Companies play this card as one more relationship angle based on your personal identity with the hope that if you want to identify with your crowd you’ll buy their product. Sprite used this masterfully several years ago when they went after the Urban/Hip-Hop crowd or Mountain Dew with the extreme sports crowd.

Now maybe you can understand why companies go to great lengths to protect and promote their identity/persona/brand image. Or why when a company’s image is so badly damaged they change their name and logo and try to reinvent themselves. Good or bad, sometimes it works.

Worldcom -> MCI -> Verizon

THQ -> Atari

Enron -> CrossCountry

Philip Morris -> Altria