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Mel: When your employees hear the word brand, what do they think of? Is it just shiny logos, fonts, and colours, or is it more than that? And if it is more, are they applying it to their internal facing work as much as they apply it to their external facing work? Reputation and brand start from within and both go hand in hand, and yet all too often we leave the brand to the external stuff and we just go wild internally.

But in a world where trust is eroding inside and outside of organisations, a lack of brand consistency can be a big risk to your business. So why is brand consistency in internal communication so important, and what can you do to build it? That's what today's episode is all about Hi, friend, and welcome to a new episode of Less Chatter, More Matter, the communications podcast.

I'm your host, Mel Loy, and I'm recording this episode on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people [00:01:00] here in Meanjin, also known as Brisbane. And on today's episode, we're going to tackle one of the biggest messes I see in internal comms, a lack of brand consistency. Now, that's not to say the inconsistency is driven by the internal comms team.

It's usually far from it. It often comes from managers who aren't aware of brand guidelines or project teams who want to create their own mini brands for their projects. Now, it's all g- done with good intention, or it's inadvertently done. But at the same time, we are also dealing with decreasing employee engagement across the g- globe.

Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workforce report found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, down from a 23% peak during '22, '23. And this is the lowest level of engagement since 2020 and the first time that engagement has declined for two consecutive years. [00:02:00] Of the rest of the workforce, 64% are not engaged, 16% are actively disengaged.

Now, Gallup puts the cost of this low engagement at about $10 trillion in lost productivity worldwide, or about 9% of global GDP And this problem of disengagement can be further compounded by being inconsistent with your brand internally, which is why we are going to unpack it today, and then I'll give you some ideas for how to address it.

So let's get stuck into it. The first thing to remember, and the first thing to educate everybody else in, is that your company's brand is so much more than logos and fonts and colours. They're the icing on the cake. What's holding the cake up is the real guts of the brand. These are your brand values, your brand pillars, the things you want to be known for, what you stand for, what you're aspiring to achieve.

Your brand is every touch point a person has with your business. So [00:03:00] it's the voice you use in your written communications, on social media, on phone calls. It's the language you use when you speak about yourselves, what you do, who you do it for and with, and it's the same tone of voice and language, whether you're talking to people inside or outside of your business.

When people don't know how to speak that language internally, you can be pretty sure they are not speaking it externally. So you need to be assessing how your brand is showing up internally. Have a look at the big things like your group wide channels, emails and messages from the CEOs and C-suite.

They're a good place to start because they set the tone for everyone else. Look at how the brand is being applied across your digital channels like Viva Engage, Teams, your intranet, whatever it is you're using. If you're using tools like Copilot and you're allowing people to use Copilot to help them draft emails and content and report, is that tool trained to speak like your brand?

And in [00:04:00] in-person events, what is the language that people are using, and does that need to be made more consistent? This is all about doing a little bit of an audit and identifying where you need to make sure the brand is properly implemented so that you can find that consistency internally. So that's point number one, that brand is more than the shiny stuff.

Now, point number two, speaking of being properly implemented, it's all about consistency. Brands only work for you if they are consistently applied. If you start to get a bit creative with the colours, the logo, the language, the tone, then you will start to erode trust, and we know trust is the most valuable commodity you own.

If a person doesn't trust their leaders, they won't hang around a company. They certainly won't do the change that you want them to do. If a customer doesn't trust you, they won't buy from you. And there's lots of elements that go into building trust, but how your brand shows up consistently is a big part of that trust pie.

Put yourself in [00:05:00] the shoes of a person who is receiving letters from your business or looking at social media. And then let's say one or two of those pieces of content looks a bit different or sounds a bit different from the others. Now, in today's world of AI, deepfakes, and fraudsters galore, would you start to question the legitimacy of that content?

And I would say you probably would, because it's not quite the same as what you're used to. The same thing applies internally. If there's inconsistency, you start to erode the trust in the messages being sent to your people. You start to erode the trust in your leaders, and you start to erode the trust in your company as an employer more broadly.

And this consistency is more important than ever when you are in a time of change or crisis. This is where your bank of trust that you've built up will start to be drawn upon big time. So you want to make sure you've got some good deposits in there. The twenty twenty-six Edelman Trust Barometer looked at trust levels among employees [00:06:00] worldwide, and eighty-two percent of employees said they believed their organisations should promote a shared sense of culture to build trust.

And a good way to promote shared culture is to have a consistent brand showing up. So if you want to give yourself the best chance of navigating change with as few bumps in the road as possible, or weather the crisis storm when it happens, you need to have built that shared sense of brand and culture.

And once again, consistency is key. So do a bit of an audit and see where it's not showing up and fix it. And this leads to point three, which is all about finding the balance between consistency and rigidity in brand application. Now, I'm sure you've all seen examples when a change project or a HR initiative has decided to go and create their own brand for their program, and they've gone and developed their own logo or tagline and project name, et cetera, et cetera, and they think it's really cool.

A few problems with that. A, it's usually not really cool. It's often [00:07:00] a bit cringe, looks a bit amateurish. B, it's a waste of time. Focus on developing that valuable project or initiative rather than a project brand. And C, this stuff erodes or waters down, dilutes, whatever you wanna call it, the master brand, and it sets a precedent for all future projects and initiatives that they can just go and do whatever they want.

And forever, you'll be chasing down people who have gone rogue with pretty colours. That said, when it is a big transformational change, you might want to help it stand out a bit from the run-of-the-mill change projects, and this is where you might want to develop a little bit of a freedom within a framework, so to speak.

So that framework, it could have some secondary colours that people can use when they are working on projects, or you might have a naming convention they can use. So rather than using words like best change project ever, every project needs to use a convention like the word project followed by one word related to your brand pillars.[00:08:00]

It's giving people enough creative license without watching it all go nuts. I would strongly recommend you do not let people create their own logos. That is fraught with all sorts of issues, and apart from diluting the master brand, there may also be some copyright and other issues that people just aren't aware of.

So that's the three points about the importance of brand consistency internally. So now what? Well, here's some things you can do to help make that happen. And number one is educate. Make sure, in particular, your team leaders and senior leaders understand your brand so they don't water it down, and they can role model really good behaviors.

This might be one-on-ones, it could be small group training, and then expand that out to the rest of your business. Make sure that you are offering some sort of education sessions in your brand, what it stands for, how to apply it consistently, all those things. And help them understand, like I said at the top of the episode, [00:09:00] that a brand is so much more than the shiny stuff they see.

Number two, have some tools available. So quick brand guidelines. I'm not talking about the huge brand guidelines you'd give to a graphic designer. That's usually not very useful for most people. Instead, some quick brand guidelines, the do's and don'ts of what to do with your brand. Here's your colour palette.

Here are the logos you're allowed to use. Here's the words that we use when we talk about our brands. And speaking of which, you should have writing style guidelines which talk about that language that you use, the tone that you apply. Uh, what things do you capitalise and not capitalise? All those sorts of things.

And of course, a suite of templates. So we're talking about things like not just letterhead and Word documents and PowerPoints, but poster templates. I mean, everybody loves a poster. So make sure you provide a few different templates that people can choose from. Uh, email banners, all those sorts of things.

You should have a whole suite of branded templates that people can take and [00:10:00] use, so they're not having to create their own and really stuff it up. And number three is factor brand into your induction processes. If brand, a brand education session is not part of your induction already, then get it in there.

And again, this is about helping people understand what your brand stands for, your brand values, how you expect people to show up in line with that brand, depe- doesn't matter who they're talking to. And then you can also talk about the shiny stuff and the brand guidelines and introduce them to those templates as well.

Okay, so let's do the episode recap. So today we talked about the importance of having a brand that is consistent internally as much as externally. And we talked about how reputation and brand is built from within, so that is why we have to make sure that whatever's happening externally is also happening internally.

And the three points I mentioned were that brand is more than logos and colours. So set people up to really understand what your brand stands for. [00:11:00] Number two is that inconsistency erodes trust and that consistency in brand can help build trust or at least maintain trust during change or crisis. So make sure there's a trust bank to pull from.

And number three was that you need to balance consistency with rigidity. Have a freedom within a framework. Provide some options for people to use the brand internally in ways that work for their projects and initiatives. And then I shared three things you can do to help build that brand consistency.

So number one was educate. Make sure your team leaders and senior leaders in particular are all across your brand, and then spread that out through the rest of the organisation. The second point was to have tools available, so quick brand guidelines, writing style li-- guidelines, and loads of templates.

And number three, factor brand into your induction processes. Now, if you need help with any of those things, just give us a buzz. This is something that I do quite a bit of brand work [00:12:00] internally, so happy to help where I can. But in the meantime, I hope you have an amazing rest of your week. Wherever you are in the world listening to this, I appreciate you stopping by, and as always, I would love you to leave a review or a rating.

It really helps me to understand whether or not this podcast remains valuable, especially as we are coming up to two hundred episodes soon. So I would really love that if you could do that for me. But in the meantime, keep doing amazing things and bye for now