Brand alignment is critical for a unified communication strategy within an organization. IdeaFORGE® is the ultimate platform for helping your organization unlock its ability to achieve MASSIVE Business and Digital Transformation Outcomes. IdeaFORGE® makes it easy for organizations to align their messaging and allow all authorized parties to have access to the most recent, up-to-date, and approved versions of content. 

In this post we will explore how simple changes in naming conventions can have a big impact on brand visibility and organizational alignment.

Simple things like spelling can make a big difference in public perception. For example, our technology IdeaFORGE® sometimes is spelled as Idea FORGE, or in other cases as Idea FORGE, depending on how people choose to capitalize. While on the surface this may not seem like a big deal, its just a small change in the words, it alludes to a bigger problem. How well is your team aligned, and how much do they care about your organization’s brand?

Organizational alignment starts with leadership from the top, and simple things like writing IdeaFORGE® in a different way, like Idea FORGE, can cause a snowball effect that has huge implications. In addition, put yourself in the shoes of a customer. If they are greeted with multiple different ways of spelling the name of a technology, there is instant friction between their remembering the name, and figuring out which one is right. Customers should not have to wonder simple things like “Is IdeaFORGE® the right spelling, or was it Idea FORGE?”

Beyond the additional challenges in remembering which spelling is right if both are seen, what happens when that audience member wants to tell their friend about the technology? A simple change in spelling can drastically impact search engine rankings. Your brand may rank first for the word IdeaFORGE, but it may have more competition with a different spelling variation like Idea FORGE, making it harder for your referral customer to find your site.

The most effective way to ensure challenges like different spellings do not arise would be to create a workforce culture that is proud to support the brand. The goal should be to make your employees, customers, and advocates proud to promote your brand in the way you want it to be shared.

A great way to support this effort is by making it incredibly easy for people to understand why your brand is positioned the way it is, and how they can promote it in that same way. One example of this would be to put together a simple one page brand guide which outlines proper spelling, general positioning, and relevant keywords that apply to your business and brand.

Here is an excerpt from the IdeaFORGE® brand guide which very simply covers proper spelling:

• CORRECT SPELLING: IdeaFORGE® (spelled as one word, with “FORGE” being all caps)
• INCORRECT SPELLINGS: Idea FORGE, IdeaFORGE, Iternal-FORGE, IternalF.O.R.G.E. 

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Looking beyond just the spelling of mission critical keywords, common phrases or ways of explaining information that are aligned and reinforce each other add to authority and brand confidence. For example if your sales representative is saying something different than your website when a customer is doing their research, which source should they believe? If these explanations differ too greatly, the customer may become confused and discount your solution. 

IdeaFORGE® provides an excellent solution to this problem, and offers a single source of truth to manage all of your major information about company brand, products, and services. Our technology makes it easy to organize and give structure to unstructured data such as videos, text documents, audio files, slide decks and other presentations, PDFs, and many other media formats.

By innovating a new approach to Master Data Management for Unstructured data, it becomes much easier to ensure all of these different sources of media within your organization are aligned. Because IdeaFORGE® acts as the single source of truth for this information, your new sales rep hire will be onboarded and learn the same terminology that is on the website, and in all of the marketing materials. If that content and language ever changes its easy for all sources, including the sales rep, to learn of the change and adjust their message accordingly, so you can be certain your organization is as “on-brand” as possible.