Your creative teams are clashing over brand direction. How do you maintain a cohesive message?
How do you keep your brand's message unified? Share your strategies for harmony in creative teams.
Your creative teams are clashing over brand direction. How do you maintain a cohesive message?
How do you keep your brand's message unified? Share your strategies for harmony in creative teams.
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Start with a well-defined brand guideline that outlines voice, tone, visuals, and values. Facilitate collaborative workshops to align teams on core messaging. Encourage open dialogue to explore ideas while reinforcing shared objectives. Assign a brand steward to oversee consistency and mediate conflicts, ensuring creativity thrives within a unified direction. Start with a well-defined brand guideline that outlines voice, tone, visuals, and values. Facilitate collaborative workshops to align teams on core messaging. Encourage open dialogue to explore ideas while reinforcing shared objectives. Assign a brand steward to oversee consistency and mediate conflicts, ensuring creativity thrives within a unified direction.
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I would begin by bringing everyone into the room (real or remote) and re-centering the conversation on: Is it aligned with the brand's purposed? Are we still talking to the audience, or just to ourselves? I think creative tension often arising from passionate teams. Each team has their own perspective but each with worthwhile insight. So, I will direct the conversation to be more about: "What’s true for our brand and meaningful to our audience?" While a shared brand framework helps, real alignment comes from meaningful dialogue and the reminder that creativity should connect. When in doubt, I like to ask the question: "What feeling do we want people to walk away with?" Usually, that brings everyone back down to earth.
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It’s valuable to bring in feedback from teams like sales or customer support, since they have direct insight into how customers see your brand. Encouraging open discussion and even some healthy disagreement—through things like anonymous surveys or “devil’s advocate” sessions—can lead to stronger ideas and a sharper brand message. But remember, too many cooks in the kitchen can slow things down and make your message less clear. The key is to balance diverse input with focused leadership, so you get the benefits of collaboration without losing direction.
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The Brand Manager and/or Marketing Manager have to go back to the brand positioning statement to see alignment of the strategy that the creative agency is suggesting. Especially one has to look at whether the strategy is in line with the defined target customers' consumer insight, benefits, values and personality, reason to believe and differentiation versus competition. Also one has to see whether the proposed strategy would add value to brand's perceived equity. Overall, the team must agree that the proposed strategy would provide a competitive advantage
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Creative friction is a sign of passion—but alignment requires leadership. I’ve found that a strong brand framework, paired with empowered teams and regular cross-functional syncs, keeps the message sharp and the culture collaborative.
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