When employees build their own banners, slide decks and documents in their own style, it is usually not a lack of discipline. The root cause is a brand system that isn't easy enough to use: either there are no templates, or they exist but are so complicated that skipping them is faster. This is a system design problem, not a people problem.
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Try to recall the last time you received a slide deck from a salesperson, a banner from the events team, or a brochure from HR.
Do those three documents look like they come from the same company?
If the answer is no, the usual reaction is to call a meeting, remind people about discipline, or resend the logo file with a note: "next time, remember to use the right colors."
But a month later, everything goes back to how it was.
See the root cause clearly
When employees design banners to their own taste, there are two ways to read the situation.
The first cause: staff are not following the rules. They need reminders and discipline.
The second reason: employees have no better option. There is no template, or there is one but it is so complicated that redoing it from scratch is faster.
In most cases Sinh Vũ has seen, the cause is the second one.
Employees do not break the standard because they want to. They break it because following the system takes more effort than following their own taste.
That figure says one thing: the problem is not a lack of guidelines.
The problem is that the guideline document does not translate into daily actions for people who are not designers.
Why templates exist but might as well not
Many companies have a complete brand identity. Logo, colors, typography, layout rules. Everything is there.
But when a salesperson needs to build a presentation for a client meeting tomorrow morning, they run into one of the following situations.
- No one knows where the template file is kept.
- You find the file, but the format won't open on your computer.
- It opens, but you don't know which parts to change and which to keep.
- After editing, fonts break or colors change on their own.
- The person who could help is busy.
At every step in that chain, employees have good reason to open a blank file and make it themselves.
Not because they are lazy. Not because they do not care about the brand. But because the right path is far bumpier than the do-it-yourself path.
A brand's biggest enemy is not a competitor. It is thousands of small decisions made by people who were never taught the brand's logic.
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap
Signs your system lacks operational capability
Sinh Vũ calls this a brand system that lacks operability. The identity exists, but no one except the person who designed it can use it.
Some common signs.
- The brand guidelines are a thick PDF that no one opens after the first time.
- The template only exists in professional design tool formats, with no version usable in Google Slides or PowerPoint.
- Brand colors aren't preloaded in the tools employees use every day.
- There is no fast approval process: anyone who wants an on-standard document has to wait, and anyone who cannot wait fends for themselves.
- Each department saves its own version of the logo.
These are not the numbers of small companies short on resources. This is a common situation in organizations that have already invested in their brand.
Consequences that build up over time
Every time a team member makes a banner on their own, the brand loses a little.
Not lost all at once. Not lost visibly. But lost.
Customers see a document from sales, a banner from an event, a post from social media. The three look like three different companies.
Each time this happens, customers' perception of the brand doesn't build up. It scatters.
Researcher Jenni Romaniuk (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute) calls consistent identity elements "distinctive brand assets."
These assets only have value when they are repeated often enough to settle into the customer's memory. When repetition is uneven, the assets do not accumulate.
Design a system that makes doing it right easier than doing it wrong
The solution is not more rules. It is not more meetings. It is not more reminder emails.
The solution is to redesign the system so that the right way is also the easiest way.
Wally Olins wrote that a brand shows up through four things: products, environments, communications, and behavior. Employee behavior is one of the four.
If you want the right behavior, you need to create conditions where it happens naturally.
In practice, this means the following.
- Templates for every type of document employees commonly need, in the tools they already use.
- Colors, fonts and logos are built in, with nothing extra to look up.
- Anyone using it for the first time produces a correct, on-brand document without having to ask anyone.
- Update once in one place, and every template syncs automatically.
In system design, that last principle is called the "single source of truth." Change the brand color in one place, and every document updates automatically.
No one has to remember, no one has to remind.
Questions to check for yourself
You can test your own brand system with a simple exercise.
Ask a new employee, with no brand training yet, to build a presentation introducing the company.
No further guidance. Just: “Find the materials and make it yourself.”
The result of that test tells you whether your current brand system actually works, more accurately than any review meeting.
If the result looks on-brand: the system is working well.
If the result looks like a different company: this is a problem to fix at the system level, not the people level.
References
Marq / Lucidpress, State of Brand Consistency (2021). Adobe, internal brand asset management survey (2022). McKinsey & Company, The Business Value of Design (2018). Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap. Wally Olins, On Brand.