Project Management: Working Behind the Scenes to Synchronize Your Brand - Issue: 2003 Qtr 3
Picture this. You’re at the national sales meeting equipped with collateral the sales team will use to promote your company’s new product line. You’ve worked diligently to bring everything together for deadline, and you’re feeling good about the way things look. Just then, you notice the brochure. Instead of blue and gold, your corporate colors look purple and yellow. You are mortified.
What happened? Well, it’s likely in the stream of production, with so many people touching your brand, something was overlooked.
Scenarios like this demonstrate the need for project management in managing your brand. Project management performs behind the scenes to establish processes that keep everyone moving in the same direction.
For instance, if there’s a project that needs to be completed, who opens the job? Who’s responsible for meeting deadlines? Who has authority to approve things? And, most importantly, who ensures that the brand is well represented?
Project management follows each job from initiation to completion and serves as a point of contact for answers to questions great and small. It keeps the brand in check by giving complete attention to the details surrounding the job.
Project management also employs a number of tools to keep a consistent tone and look through everything. Proofing systems, style manuals, key messaging documents, and color standards. They’re all useful when it comes to maintaining your brand.
And what about those brand colors mentioned earlier? If project management had been involved, with a strict color standards process in place, those colors would have been true.
Project management keeps everything in check when dealing with multiple suppliers. Coordinating status among team members and communicating feedback is another way project management helps to synchronize brand activities.
And what good is brand consistency if a direct mail piece is mailed late? Or a tradeshow booth features a photo of last year’s product? Again, project management is on top of deadlines and approvals.
It’s this combination of efforts that makes project management an important function in managing your brand.
Back to top