Branded building: does your workplace match your message?

It’s tempting to treat your company’s branding as an afterthought or, at least, largely limit your branding efforts to social media and digital media content. That would be especially understandable if your operations are largely online-focused, with few customers visiting your physical workplace.

However, preserving consistent branding throughout, not just your online presence but also your office can pay off handsomely – here’s why, plus what you can do to align your branding in this way.

It’s easy to lose track of your supposed mission

Even if you have typed out your company’s mission statement, printed it out in large text and then framed it all for prominent display, your staff’s promotional efforts could still veer off-course surprisingly easily. After all, there’s so much of which you need to keep track…

That “much” includes not only the digital content we have just mentioned but also ad campaigns and marketing materials such as posters, flyers and brochures. If you have different people working on different aspects of the branding, it can soon drift into incoherence, perhaps before you notice.

Consequently, your brand – or whatever it still comprises – could confuse customers, clients and even people inside the company, right up to the executive level. Hence, as advised in an Entrepreneur article, you should put together – and, across all of the company’s departments, distribute – a brand guide touching on subjects like the brand’s voice, tone, colors, iconography and fonts.

Apply subtle but clever visual flourishes in your workplace

In your office, the little things can make a surprisingly large impact. Consider the words of New York-based digital communications professional Betsy Rohtbart in a Forbes piece; she posits: “If your logo is a circle, why put it on a square door? If your logo is a square, why put it on a rectangle tag?”

Along the same lines, she asks: “If your name is long, why shrink your font to make it fit the sign on the building?” The implication is that you shouldn’t feel under pressure to decorate your workspace in the “traditional” way, as succumbing to this pressure could see you missing out.

Your company’s culture should be reflected in the workplace design – and that culture concerns the firm’s values and beliefs, not simply its logo or branding colors. Perhaps you could put up a photograph from when your team participated in a charitable endeavor?

Why is workplace branding so important, anyway?

That question could still have played on your mind if few consumers or clients visit your company’s offices or make it past the reception area. However, as indicated on the Metropolis magazine’s website, office branding can imbue your workers with a sense of identity and connection.

Therefore, it can help to ensure that those workers are all moving in the same direction – and, in this way, genuinely helping consumers or clients. You can further encourage this by investing in luxury office design to create a space that reflects a specific lifestyle and where people truly aspire to work.