Once you have your brand (promise to your customer, vision, mission, values and strategy) established, it is important that you then take a moment to plot your branding development.

Branding is the creative representation of your brand.

It includes the visual presentation certainly, but also the written tone.

The most effective branding development takes into account the audience and the placement of the messages and marketing.  It shouldn’t be one size fits all.

I would encourage you to think of your branding like ripples in a pond.

The core of the ripple is your core, corporate brand – there is little wiggle room here for creativity.  As the ripples move away from the centre, there is opportunity to bring in more creativity, varied messaging and audience-driven presentation.

The ripples you can see here aren’t changes to the look and feel of the presentation and tone, but variations.

You need more flexibility on social because of audience expectations than you do on your website.

Your campaigns change quite frequently so they need to be quite detached from your core brand so that people don’t think your brand has changed when a campaign does.

Remember that written tone is as important in visual tone when developing your branding presentation.

You should have branding guidelines that include logo and font use, imagery and copy tone.

If your guidelines aren’t this comprehensive I recommend you build them out to ensure you don’t develop brand degradation.