Keeping it Clean

I’ve been in the signage, display and the general image
enhancement industry for well over 20 years now. In more recent times I’ve been
advising customers on the importance of visual brand maintenance as an integral
part of the overall brand management ethos – not much point in all that effort
planning, designing and rolling out a signage or point of sale campaign if you
then don’t make sure it does its job effectively throughout the whole of its
life.
And yet, wherever you look, there are companies and local
authorities risking how their customers and general public perceive them by
failing to do one simple thing - keep their signage clean!
Premium brand companies should pay particular attention to
every aspect of their image perception. If they start to look tatty and grubby
then their brand perception will soon be the same.
Even in the leafy suburbs of my local Berkshire market town,
a nearby prestigious racecourse has years of mildew and dirt on some of its car
park signage. A large American food chain looks like it’s never cleaned its
fascia sign in the 3+ years it’s been open on a busy main road and some local
independent boutiques look like the owners have never stepped out the front
door.
Councils (especially the ones near me) seem to be the worse
culprits of this. They spend a fortune on installing high visibility Class 1
reflective road signs, but then let mildew grow all over them. How reflective
is a dirty green stained sign when it’s dark? And what sort of community pride
image does it give to that area?
Signage maintenance should be one of the more straight
forward and easier of tasks to control, but always seems to be one of those
jobs that falls in between the cracks in departments (and budgets), depending
on the industry you are in. If you’re in retail, does it fall to the
merchandising teams, facilities or marketing teams to deal with it? For road
signs, does it fall to the highways agency, parish council, borough council, or
county council? And once you’ve established which council, then which
department? Highways? Maintenance? Facilities?
Each companies brand police should be ensuring that every
aspect of their image perception is managed and maintained on a regular,
ongoing basis. But it would seem that the modern trend of efficiencies and
streamlining are leaving gaps in the processes that threaten to jeopardise and
sabotage the very thing it tries to protect.
So the next time you are out and about – have a look around
the various signage and POS fittings and see if they are as clean and
presentable as they should be and whether they are actually enhancing the
brands image or not.