Brand-led learning - Training Industry brand experience adds value to a product or service (which in the case of brands like Apple or Google is about simplicity, ease of use and continuous

Brand-led learning

Brand-led learning

Introduction

Is Brand-led learning important?

What are the challenges of applying a brand-led approach?

Brand-led learning:real examples

Brand-led LMS and platforms

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Brand-led learning

Brand-led learning Learning in corporate organizations is far more than just acquiring a set of skills or specific knowledge, it is also about consolidating the attitude and behaviours that fit with the organization’s brand values.

Organizations each have their own culture, style and approach in the way they do things. This is not just about how an organization might deal with a customer but the whole style and approach in how staff work with each other internally (from recruitment to working with partners and contractors).

In essence a brand is about the personality of the organization and its products or services. This personality creates thoughts, feelings, perceptions, images, experiences, beliefs, and attitudes. The sum of all the points of contact with the brand is generally known as the brand experience.

This brand experience adds value to a product or service (which in the case of brands like Apple or Google is about simplicity, ease of use and continuous innovation). Often the brand is an extension of an individual, like Steve Jobs at Apple or Richard Branson of Virgin – people who have forged their personality so strongly onto the brand that it’s hard to tell them apart. Brand geniuses like them and others have the power to create desire – often desire for something you didn’t know you wanted. So far, so Mad Men. What’s this got to do with Learning? Dear learning designer, you’re not as far from Madison Avenue as you might think. You’re trying to bring about a change. That means you are in the persuasion business. Your stock in trade may happen to be learning experiences rather than marketing ones, but you’re trying to connect to the same mental circuitry through different channels.

How effective that experience will be depends a lot on the personality your learning design conveys. Do people look to connect with your e-learning? Do they form thoughts, feelings and perceptions about it? You bet they do. And if you think it may be not in a good way, then you might want to start thinking about brand-led learning experiences.

In the same way brands add value to a product or service, so brand-led learning can add an extra level of value to the overall learning experience. This is in no way to reduce the impact of good instructional design or cognitive engagement through screen-based interactions. Of course all of the hard work and science that goes into learning design still counts. But a learning design that’s cognitively sound and yet lacks personality is not going to fare very well at the party. There are too many other messages fighting for your learners’ attention. If learning is the only one that doesn’t pack a brand punch, well you may as well not show up to the contest.

A brand-led approach complements solid instructional design. It shows how best practice is always in synch with the core values of the organization and the way the learners are being asked to learn is equally in synch with that brand and set of values.

Put simply: you need to be as on brand with your learning as the marketing team is on brand with their message – because you’re both trying to do the same thing.

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Brand-led learning

Is Brand-led learning important? The value of brands to businesses has been recognised for some time.

“If this business were split up, I would give you the land and bricks and mortar, and I would take the brands and trademarks and I would fare better than you.” John Stewart (Former CEO of Quaker)

Back in the 1990s research demonstrated that brand and brand values were not important just in terms of marketing and external positioning, it also showed that companies with consistent, distinctive and deeply held brand values tended to outperform those companies with a less clear and articulated ethos. (Collins, J and Porras, J, (1995), Built to Last, Random House, UK.)

Achieving an internal culture which is consistent with brand values is critical. Getting it right is fundamental. As Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, says “One of things you find in companies is that once a culture is formed it takes nuclear weaponry to change it”. To reinforce the brand requires consistent and continuous shaping and management which includes all communication and learning.

What does this mean for learning?

Learning is one of the key activities where employees reflect and commit to changing their behaviour as part of the learning process. It is therefore an ideal opportunity to reinforce brand values through the learning from elements such as visual design to tone of voice and behaviour examples in case studies and scenarios. So, learning has to work both ways: reflect the brand, but also to help people understand the brand. No pressure then.

In practice: Start at the beginning

Want to check if you’re living up to the brand experience through your learning? Start at the beginning – what’s your onboarding or induction learning like? You may mention the brand values in there, but does the learning experience embody them?

At this first moment, learners are most vulnerable. They’re looking to you to help them understand what the brand really is – from the inside. And they’re expecting an experience that lives up to the brand. That may mean light, snappy, informal – or it may be the opposite depending on the organization.

Whatever the organization’s brand values and identity is, it must be baked right the way through the onboarding process. It’s your last chance to make a first brand-led learning impression.

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Brand-led learning

What are the challenges of applying a brand-led approach to learning (and particularly e-learning)?

So you want to make sure your learning experiences embody the brand. What do you do? The easy bits, what the organization communicates to customers, are usually written down clearly. You’d have to go a long way to find an organization that doesn’t have set of values, a brand promise, a ‘who we are’ website section. Most will even help you out with a style guide and a tone of voice guide. These are your starting points – but they’re rarely the whole story.

Brand values are often very subtle and revolve around a set of beliefs and behaviours. They may incorporate a tone of voice, a style or way of doing things. Some organizations value collaboration over more directive leadership. Others value staff flexibility and quick adaptation, whereas others may seek to restrict flexibility to ensure consistency, possibly to ensure safety or compliance with regulations. To find this out, you need to become more immersed in the organization and take your cue from how people behave. Some form of questioning to try and build up a personality profile of the organization can help here.

And of course, ask the Marketing department. Too often in e-learning projects, the connection with the marketing team to the e-learning project is to be asked to provide style guides and image libraries. Useful, but to say thanks and leave it there would be to completely undervalue your potentially most effective collaborator after your Subject Matter Expert. Marketing (let’s let that capital M stand by extension for PR, communications, in-house Advertising and outsourced agencies) will bleed the brand if you cut them. So use this. They spend their lives creating branded experiences to sell ideas. They know what will work to convey the message, and will cut through anything that doesn’t add to the brand experience for the learner. And when your client is the marketing department? Buckle up - you know you’re going to get put through your design paces (we speak from experience). But you also know that what comes out the far side is going to be some of your most impactful work. Because they know how to create brand experiences that work. And because e-learning should look more like advertising and less like textbooks with next buttons. There, we said it. Again.

In practice: Would your e-learning pass the Pepsi Challenge?

Give your e-learning the Pepsi Challenge – if you hid the logo and did a find and replace of organization name for ‘company x’, does this course feel like it could be for any organization? If so, then it’s not brand-led. It has no personality, and that’s not going to get anyone excited.

If you’re finding that, then go back and bring in more of what makes that organization different. You know when you’re watching an Apple ad that it’s theirs, long before you see the logo – shouldn’t e-learning have the same feeling?

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Brand-led learning

In practice: 5 places to find out about the brand values

A core task for any learning designer at the start of a project is to immerse themselves in the brand values and to consider how these can be incorporated into the learning.

1. Website, in particular CEO commentary, vision and values sections, annual report

2. Advertising / any other promotional material

3. Talking to the marketing department – what sits behind the site and the ads?

4. Observing how people behave internally – what behaviour is valued and rewarded?

5. Employee surveys – how is the brand perceived internally? Does the employer have

the same internal and external brand perception?

Get beyond the visuals: Brand-led learning goes all the way through To design a branded learning experience, you need to go way beyond compliance with the visual identity guidelines. While obviously important, that’s really the weakest form of branding the learning experience. You need to let the brand influence every aspect of the design, including:

Learning model and execution Art direction How you will emotionally engage the learner Interface design Use of images, audio and video Tone of voice The tactile screen experience Messaging style Questioning style If/how you support and call for action If/how you assess

We would argue that a designer that isn’t immersed in the brand is not able to add value to the learning by reinforcing the brand throughout the design of the e-learning.

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Brand-led learning

In practice: Create brand values for your e-learning

You’re going to need to turn the brand values into something that you can tangibly use in the design, to guide your choices. So you’d do well to write them down. They can become a brand promise for the learning experiences that you plan to use.

When the Ministry of Justice designed the Justice Academy as a portal for all leadership learning, we spent a lot of time together discussing and defining the brand experience we wanted learners to have. This was more important design work than what the screen will look like, or where the logo will sit. We developed it into a one-pager ‘service commitment’ which was the brand promise to the MoJ customers – the learners. It acts as a stress test for any piece of learning (e-learning or otherwise) – is it straight talking, adult-to-adult, focused and concise, challenging to the status quo? If not, how can we make it more like these things?

Define the brand values for your organization for learning, or the organizations you work with. Nail them to the wall. If people don’t design in line with them, get some more nails.

Does it make a difference? Let’s have a look at some brand-led approaches and make your own judgement.

Visual design with Nikon and McDonald’s We are privileged to work with some the world’s leading brands and are particularly proud of our association with Nikon. Nikon’s brand promise is based on being “at the heart of the image.” This is an expression of the essential value and promise of the Nikon brand. Thus throughout the learning we deploy high quality images, and create e-learning which is beautiful to use. The art direction of the e-learning creates an immediate impact and in the case of our product knowledge modules for Nikon, the visual feel matches that of the product concerned.

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Brand-led learning

Below are example screens from the COOLPIX and the D7000 product knowledge modules. You can instantly see how the visual design for the professional grade digital single-lens reflex D7000 camera varies from that for the compact COOLPIX series.

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Brand-led learning

Interface design Brand-led learning is much more than static imagery.

In the case of McDonald’s the brand delivers a value proposition with universal appeal among parents, kids, and teens alike: “Simple, Easy, Enjoyment.” In essence: “I’m lovin’ it”.This e-learning example below echoes these values through a simple, clean design with an enjoyable fun game style approach. The learner can scroll left and right through the restaurant taking on challenges and picking up stars. The language, tone and style are all designed to reinforce the brand values.

Nikon is well known for its innovation and we worked with the team to develop innovative, interactive approaches which enable the user to use real camera features. In the example below a learner can adjust the f-stop to sharpen the image. So here we reinforce the brand with a graphic that does the work.

These interface approaches reinforce the values of the company concerned.

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Brand-led learning

Perhaps nothing defines a brand more than the stories that a company tells. Stories and anecdotes form a key part of the internal and external brand values.

We’re strong advocates of the storytelling method in e-learning. Stories embed in the memory far better than presentation of information. Conveying the brand through anecdotes and stories works particularly well in induction and onboarding.

In our award-winning blended solution for BELL onboarding in the US, we included stories and examples from a wide range of advocates, to make it authentic. We used audio and video to tell these stories, which was a key part of building the learner’s brand relationship with BELL.

Language and tone with M&S Language and tone of voice play a critical part in any brand experience, and since most e-learning has a strong text element, that means making sure that the tone of voice you use is as on brand as any images associated with it.

We’ve been privileged to work for over five years with Marks & Spencer, one of the strongest retail brands in the UK. A strong branded experience is always at the heart of our collaborations. On our award-winning Café Service Heroes project, we knew from talking to our subject matter experts, and the team members in the cafés, that tone of voice was going to be key to the project’s success – robot-like e-learning speak wasn’t going to cut it for them. We worked with M&S to develop a style of communication and tone of voice for this module. We’d call it energetic, informal, and with a touch of urgency – but not afraid to have some fun on the way.

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Brand-led learning

Consistent visual theme An effective brand-led learning experience is thematically consistent. Staying with the M&S Café Service Heroes module, we developed a hero theme that was woven through the whole experience. It played to the goals of being warm, informal, aspirational and (where it needed to be) a little jokey. It tied the graphical and textual element with a consistent theme and brand to the learning.

Messaging Brand Values

Whether the theme is concern for the environment or customer care, you can take opportunities to reinforce the brand values and messaging. In the module below for HP we reinforce one of the key brand messages when it comes to customer experience – “we can help you do that”. The message throughout the module is that at HP it is everyone’s responsibility to deliver on the brand promise and ensure a consistent customer experience.

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Brand-led learning

Our induction modules for M&S address this theme head on, with real examples of the M&S values in action – including trust in the brand:

In practice – is your brand personality coming across?

As we’ve said, the brand is a personality. What gives personality to your e-learning? A lot of it is down to the quality of your writing. Again, define the style of writing that will deliver the brand experience in the strongest way. Is it a light, spirited tone, or a more formal, direct one? The marketing team can help you here again.

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Brand-Led LMS and Platforms

Brand-led learning doesn’t just apply to the e-learning but also to the delivery platform or learning management system – it’s the front door, so it had better be on brand. The same brand values-led approach applies equally importantly to the platform. Here are some examples.

Brand-led learning

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There’s a real opportunity with the LMS to make sure that it’s on brand – again visuals count here, but it’s also about conveying personality through different tools such as:

• Blogs to add further personality • Useofsurveystoseekfeedbackontheexperience• Adbannerstopromotenewlearningopportunities and features

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5 steps for great brand-led learning:

Strong brands give us a great opportunity to create strongly branded e-learning. 5 ways to make sure that you’re working the brand at its best into your e-learning:

Immerse yourself in the brand – look, listen, talk to people – especially the marketing department. Remember the internal brand perception might be different from the external.

Create a set of brand values for learning – use it as a guide for critiquing what you have now and setting standards for what you’ll do in the future.

Don’t stop at visual identity – bad courses with nice logos are not brand-led learning. Your whole design approach from overall model through to tone of voice needs to reflect the brand.

Stay the course - don’t let HR, compliance, or anyone else ruin the brand experience – be strong and get the marketing people to back you up. You wouldn’t let a TV ad overrun by 50% and have 30 messages, or you’d lose your customers. Treat your learners with the same respect.

Test market – learn from the ad agencies. Try a branded piece with a pilot group. Ask them questions related to the brand experience. Take their feedback seriously and adjust until it’s right.

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Talk to us... Looking to bring more brand into your e-learning? Lucky us, we get to with some of the world’s leading brands, including Coca-Cola, Nike, McDonald’s, Google, British Airways, M&S, Tesco, Nikon and HP. They’ve entrusted us to create learning experiences that live up to their brand.

Works for them – how about you?

Get in touch, we’d love to help.

[email protected] We have offices in the UK, US, China, New Zealand, Sweden and Israel.