At Lifescan, a medical device company, I worked with the global brand communications team to empower key company stakeholders with presentation tools that improved brand consistency and resulted in significant company savings.

A well-designed brand deck has several superpowers including:

• Providing an easy entry point for democratizing design tools within large enterprise organizations.
• Empowering content leaders across many company business teams to properly utilize brand assets and tools.
• Giving brand ambassadors the right tools to promote the company and confidently sell products, services, and ideas, all while maintaining brand consistency.
• Saving team hours by significantly reducing the time it takes to create successful presentations and preventing unnecessary cognitive load for brand/design tasks.

Many companies struggle with brand and content consistency and there are several easy, low-budget methods I’ve used to help teams overcome some of the most common organizational brand challenges:

• Design easy-to-use, robust, brand presentation templates that empower key content creators across an organization to support brand consistency among internal and external stakeholders.
• Build abbreviated and useful brand guides into company slide templates. These should include Logos, fonts, colors (w/ hex values), iconography, and imagery (Ideally image libraries will take customer diversity into consideration and avoid stock-looking photos).
• Make sure slides are fully editable. That way, teams don’t have to submit design requests for simple copy changes or image swaps.
• Recruit brand ambassadors by demoing presentation resources to key company leaders to promote the preferred tools throughout the organization.
• If your organization has an intranet or shared drive, use it to publish a single source of truth for all brand slide templates and guides.
• If accessible, work with the company’s IT department to implement an organization-level asset library that lives in your company’s preferred workspace (Microsoft 365 or Google Suite) so that all users across your company have access to the correct brand templates.

Lifescan Case Study

Challenge
At Lifescan, a medical device company, the global brand communications team was struggling with brand consistency across all teams within the organization. Important external presentations were missing key elements that made the brand recognized as a trustworthy partner.

Strategy
I worked with their global brand communications team to develop a template that would meet all of their content needs and serve as a single source of truth for important company brand assets.

Solution
The final products served as a tool to save the team countless hours of work controlling brand quality and creating new presentations without adequate guidance.