How to plan for effective internal adoption of a brand management platform part 1

For tips on conducting research and creating a brief for a brand management platform please check out our previous blog posts;

How to conduct effective research for a brand management platform
How to prepare a brief when sourcing a Brand Management platform

In this post, we’ll look at some of the elements that’ll help you prepare and plan for an effective roll-out;

1. Why you need employee adoption of your platform

2. Choosing your platform

3. Getting started questions

4. Implementation questions

In part 2 of this series, we’ll focus on laying out your internal roadmap and testing while in part 3 we look at rolling it out and internal adoption.

Why you need employee adoption of your platform

The success of your platform depends on people in your organisation adopting the brand tool to create their designs from your templates. The more active users are in the platform the better your return on investment is and the more KPIs you’ll hit.

Effective initial internal onboarding will help continued engagement in the long term. Some benefits of more designs being made through the platform are:

• Costs of producing each design decreases
• The brand value increases through growing brand awareness
• Time to produce each design decreases
• Productivity increases through a simplified workflow for creating designs

Choosing your platform

Right from the off you need to choose your platform wisely. In the first place, you will have identified the existing challenges and chosen the best solution to tackle this.

The new platform should;

1. Be really simple to use
2. Not require extensive training to get started
3. Facilitate self-learning by doing
4. Easy to access through known channels
5. Resolve the shortcomings of the old platform if you’re replacing an existing one

You should know the platform;

1. Will solve problems with design creation across the organisation
2. Will meet user needs identified through discussions with end-users
3. Has been trialled by key people across the organisation, not just management
4. Is a suitable replacement if replacing another

Involving key people at this point will help to create advocates, make them feel valued and will bring numerous benefits to the project.

Getting started questions

Once you’ve decided to go ahead with your template platform there are some immediate questions to consider which will help with employee engagement.

1. What are your key dates for getting everyone using the platform?
   1. Is there a meaningful date ahead?
2. How will you measure adoption success?
   1. Some ideas are; percentage of users, amount of designs created, cost/time-saving etc.
3. How much carrot or stick will you use? What’s realistic?
4. To what extent do people already understand the benefits of a strong brand and brand consistency?
5. We recommend running product demos and then letting people ‘learn by doing’.
   1. Are there any users that would struggle with this approach?
6. If you need to provide training, what is feasible given time and money constraints?
7. Do you need to phase out any existing systems? How will you close them off and inform people?

Replacing an existing brand management platform

If you’re replacing an existing brand management platform there will be a few more considerations;

1. How different is the new brand management tool?
   1. Does it have extra/new features?
   2. Will the layout and/or look and feel be completely different?
2. Will the same type of templates be available straight away or will users need to get used to having access to a different set of templates?
3. Are the templates similar to use?
   1. Will you users need support to use the new templates?
4. How will you measure the success of the new brand management platform?
   1. Can you measure success in the same way as the last one?
   2. Are there other methods of measurement that are available in the new platform?
5. How will you communicate the change?
6. How will you support and engage users in the new platform?
   1. Advocates are great to help you out here

Implementation questions

During the setup and configuration process, you should answer the following questions.

1. How will people find the platform? What is the entry point?
2. How will your team manage feedback, enquiries and complaints? Do you need to set up a dedicated email address?
3. Will you require a managed workflow where artwork needs approval before downloading for use?
4. If so, who will approve and who will be managed?
5. Are teams needed or will everyone have access to the same templates?
6. Will you carry out a phased release (recommended for larger organisations) or make it available to everyone at the same time?
7. When are you planning to run product demos? If you have decided to train what is your training plan?

When working with BrandStencil we’ll help guide you through these during implementation.