Your corporate communications team plays a critical role in shaping how the world sees your brand – yet their contributions are often misunderstood or undervalued.

In the last couple of decades, we’ve seen an explosion of choice in available marketing channels. Combine that with increasing competition and rising pressure to maintain strong, consistent brand equity across customers, employees and the general public, and the role of communicators has never been more important.

Think about the breadth of what your corporate communications function covers:

• Maintaining and translating your brand across all audiences
• Managing media relations – from press releases to interviews
• Monitoring mentions across platforms and responding to misinformation
• Promoting your corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts
• Shaping your online brand image across web and social
• Managing crisis communications if serious issues emerge
• Connecting internal teams to your brand and each other

That is a lot of responsibility placed on one department. It is no surprise the industry is valued in the billions – and that teams are growing to keep pace. But without clear, focused objectives, even the best communicators can lose focus or direction.

That’s why setting tangible, business-aligned goals is vital to helping your communications team drive brand equity. Below, we explore five core goals to guide their strategy, along with practical metrics to track progress and performance.

What does a corporate communications team do?

Your communications team defines how your brand is seen – both internally and externally. It’s about more than delivering updates or managing media. It’s about creating clarity, building customer loyalty and trust, and protecting reputation in a fast-changing world.

This function typically splits into two core responsibilities:

• External communication focuses on messaging for customers, media, and the wider public. It’s the foundation of your brand reputation on local, national and global stages.

• Internal communication centers on what’s shared inside your company. It’s about aligning leadership, employees and stakeholders through consistent updates and a unified brand experience.

It’s a high-stakes balancing act. As channels multiply and expectations rise, the ability to shape culture, reinforce values, and respond in real time has never been more important – or more challenging.

Yet Gartner reports that only 9% of today’s communication leaders believe they can shape company culture effectively. That’s a critical gap, especially in globally distributed teams.

Setting the right objectives is essential. It’s also critical to align them with business strategy and give your Director of Communications a seat at the executive table to ensure every message reflects your brand identity, vision, and long-term goals.

Here are some clear communication goals and metrics to help your team stay focused, impactful and aligned.

5 brand communication goals for corporate comms teams

1. Strengthen your brand equity

Your communications strategy should always have brand reputation at its core. Ensuring this goal is front and center helps embed it into every message and channel your team manages.

Metrics to track

• Brand mentions on social media
• Google Trends data linked to your brand
• Number of press releases being picked up by external websites
• Online reviews and public sentiment

2. Deepen employee engagement

Increasing employee engagement should be one of the key objectives of your internal communications team. Employees perform better when they feel a strong emotional connection to your organization and brand.

Metrics to track

• Employee retention rates
• Open and click-through rates on internal emails
• Responses on employee surveys and feedback forms
• Participation in training, company events, and team activities and after-work social activities

3. Encourage employee advocacy

Your people are your most powerful storytellers. A key goal for your corporate communications team should be to inspire employees to share company news, successes, and more. It’s one of the most effective ways to get people outside your organization to listen and respond.

Metrics to track

• Brand mentions on social media
• Posts featuring employees and company activities
• Likes and shares on employee-led content

4. Increase traffic and leads for your company

Corporate communications should contribute to overall brand marketing performance. By aligning messages with strategic campaigns, your team can help attract the right attention and drive action.

Metrics to track

• Website traffic numbers
• Marketing- or sales-qualified leads generated
• Growth of email database
• Website analytics goals attributed to the corporate communications team

5. Accelerate crisis communication response

In a digital world, issues spread fast. Having a goal focused on improving the speed and clarity of crisis responses ensures your team can protect your brand image when it matters most.

Metrics to track

• Time taken from incident to initial response
• Public and media reaction to statements or press releases

How DAM software helps produce more consistent brand communications

These five goals offer a practical framework to help your corporate communications team focus their efforts and measure their impact. With a fast-evolving media landscape and growing global footprints, their role is only set to become more central to business success.

But objectives alone aren’t enough. To realize these goals, teams need the right infrastructure – tools that support clarity, consistency and speed at scale.

It starts with a Digital Asset Management software. By centralizing brand guidelines and assets, and allowing users to access them through a global brand portal, you’ll make it easy for everyone to visualize, understand, and follow your corporate brand.

Next you need effective content creation tools. The only way to achieve all five goals above is if your teams are empowered to create studio-quality content – without ever straying off brand. This is exactly what Papirfly’s templated content creation solution is designed for, ensuring every corporate communications message is on-point and on-brand.

FAQs

In today’s connected world, more brands are stepping onto the global stage – but with international visibility comes greater complexity. That’s why maintaining brand consistency across platforms and markets isn’t just important – it’s essential.

The 2025 brand consistency numbers speak for themselves:

• Companies that maintain consistent branding across all channels see up to 23% revenue growth compared to those with inconsistent identities. [Source: Amra & Elma]
• About 33% of businesses report that consistent presentation of their brand has driven revenue increases of 20% or more. [Source: Shapo]
• Around 68% of organizations experience 10–20% revenue growth directly linked to prioritizing brand consistency efforts. [Source: Capital One Shopping Research]
• Brands that maintain long-term consistency achieve twice the profit gains of those with frequently changing messages. [Source: Funnel.io]
• A striking 90% of consumers expect a seamless and consistent brand experience across all marketing channels. [Source: We Are Tenet]

Global brand consistency directly influences how people perceive your business – externally and internally. It strengthens trust, builds brand awareness, and helps you stand out in increasingly competitive markets.

Why brand consistency counts – and what it delivers

Achieving a consistent brand identity does much more than help you look good. It:

• Signals professionalism and purpose
• Reinforces the authenticity of your vision and goals
• Clarifies what your company stands for and what you offer
• Builds brand equity and customer trust
• Gives your global teams a shared identity and direction to move toward
• Makes it easy for people to follow and interpret your brand

However, maintaining brand consistency is easier said than done. With so many employees sharing content across so many channels, inconsistencies can naturally creep in if you’re not careful or lack a clear brand strategy.

This can be problematic even for a small, domestically focused business. Expand to a global scale and the risk of inconsistency increases dramatically, especially when you factor in differences in culture and language.

You’ve likely seen some of these famous missteps:

• Braniff Airlines translating their “fly in leather” into the Spanish slang for “fly naked”
• KFC’s “finger-lickin’ good” slogan becoming “eat your fingers off” in China
• The Arabic translation turning “Jolly Green Giant” into “Intimidating Green Ogre”

And while these examples highlight how easy it is to get brand messaging wrong, they are also just the tip of the iceberg. So, with the stakes as high as they have ever been, how can companies maintain brand consistency on their global stage?

Your global brand consistency checklist

Here are five key steps to maintaining brand consistency worldwide:

1. Audit your existing brand materials

Start by assessing what’s already out there. Do your marketing materials reflect your true brand identity in terms of color, tone, imagery and brand messaging? Or are there inconsistencies?

This audit helps you pinpoint gaps and get a clear picture of where alignment is needed.

2. Develop brand guidelines

Clear, accessible brand guidelines are your brand’s north star. These should cover:

• Brand mission and values
• Logo usage
• Color palettes
• Brand messaging and tone of voice examples
• Iconography

Your brand guidelines will be vital in keeping your entire team on the same page – and helping to ensure you show up in a consistent way through all your content and in every market.

3. Make guidelines accessible to all

Having great brand guidelines is one thing. Making them easily accessible is another. From your marketing team to local employees to agency partners, everyone needs to be able to work from the same brand book – because if people can’t find or follow your rules, you can’t expect consistent results.

4. Align internal and external branding

Consistency starts from within. If employees aren’t aligned with your brand values, it’s difficult for them to deliver your message authentically to the outside world.

From onboarding and internal training to office signage and internal comms, reflect your brand identity inside as well as out.

5. Empower your people to create, with control

Your people are closest to their local audiences. Giving them the tools to create high-quality assets is a powerful step on the way to building brand equity – as long as you can ensure everyone stays consistently on-brand.

This is exactly what our templated content creation tools make possible. Teams are given templates with key brand elements locked in, empowering them to produce localized content with confidence and consistency.

How DAM software helps maintain brand consistency

At Papirfly, we know maintaining brand consistency globally is a complex task. That’s why we’re committed to giving organizations the power to showcase, manage, create and share digital brand assets – across every market and every team.With Digital Asset Management and templated content creation at your fingertips, you can equip global teams to act locally without ever going off-brand. And that really matters – because when your brand speaks with one voice, people listen.

FAQs

Today more than ever before, it is difficult to underestimate the value of customer brand equity. It is what separates a generic local soft drink in your supermarket to Coca-Cola and Pepsi. It’s the value that a brand adds to comparable products.

Customer brand equity (also referred to as Customer-Based Brand Equity, or CBBE) relates to how your customers’ attitudes towards your brand influence the success of your business overall. If customers recognize, understand and connect with your brand, performance goes up (provided experiences are positive).

It appears a straightforward concept to understand, but building customer-based brand equity isn’t anywhere near as clear-cut. It takes a lot of effort and nurturing your audience, but the rewards for getting it right can make a big difference to your business prospects.

Plus, measuring CBBE can offer valuable insights into your company’s performance and play a key role in guiding your marketing strategy.

Here, we dive deeper into customer brand equity and why it’s so valuable for companies to strive towards. This includes a breakdown of Keller’s brand equity model, and techniques you can apply to enhance your brand equity moving forward.

What is customer brand equity?

As noted earlier, customer brand equity represents how much the success of your brand is directly related to the attitudes of your customers towards it.

It’s no shock that loyal customers play a vital role in the success of any brand or organization – without them, it would be impossible for these to get anywhere. But their influence extends far beyond simply how much they’re buying into your products or services – it is as much about how they perceive your brand.

If customers have a positive association with your brand and use it regularly over your competitors, this will naturally have a positive effect on your business. Conversely, an overall negative perception of your brand – or if you remain unknown and not even on customers’ radar, this will have the opposite effect.

Today, people can publicly review and critique a brand’s quality of products and service within seconds. Paying attention to the strength of your customer brand equity is as crucial as ever.

In essence, customer brand equity plays a vital role in depicting brand loyalty towards your business. As acquiring a new customer is 5 times as expensive as maintaining an existing one, having a strong CBBE is likely to benefit your bottom line.

Plus, having loyal customers that understand and resonate with your brand will help generate new leads more naturally. Brand-loyal consumers are more likely to act as advocates for your services to loved ones and friends – especially valuable considering 90% of consumers claim a word-of-mouth recommendation is a leading influence on their purchase decisions.

This makes the value of your customer-based brand equity essential to the strength of your company as a whole. If this is managed well and harnessed effectively, you can make a big impression on how successful your business is operating.

Equally, an understanding of your customer brand equity can provide insight if your brand is not connecting with consumers in the way you anticipated. Identifying this can encourage a change in strategy or approaches that develop a stronger, more positive association between your target audience and your brand, leading to repeat business and loyal advocates.

Brand equity vs customer equity

Brand equity illustrates the worth of the brand, i.e. the value added to a product by branding it. Customer equity relates to lifetime values that are important to consumers.

Both are linked by a strong focus on customer loyalty, and the value of having a dedicated customer base in determining the overall worth of a brand. But, what makes customer brand equity a key focus is its direct connection to the financial impact customers have on an organisation as a whole.

Therefore, building customer-based brand equity achieves the critical aims of raising the value of your brand, while also giving insight into what your customers want and expect from your company.

The Keller Brand Equity Model

The standout CBBE model was developed by Kevin Lane Keller, a Professor of Marketing, in his 1993 book Strategic Brand Management. Through this model, Keller looked to illustrate the journey of customers’ relationships with brands – from recognition at the bottom, through to resonating with the brand at the peak.

As depicted in the above image, Keller identifies 6 components that contribute to customer brand equity, and thus how customers think and feel about a brand overall:

• Salience
• Performance
• Imagery
• Judgements
• Feelings
• Resonance

Here, we’ll cover these in greater detail and the role each plays in creating customer loyalty towards a brand.

Who are you?

At the foundation of the brand equity pyramid is salience, which represents how aware people are to the existence of your brand in general. This is the essential first step in building customer brand equity – if people don’t know about your brand, it will be hard for them to form an opinion about it one way or the other. This section carries the weight of the rest of the pyramid.

Of course, this stage is about more than ensuring people have some recognition of your brand; it must be the right recognition. At this first instance, it’s important you give people a clear, consistent and accurate depiction of your brand’s identity, as without this they will have little chance of progressing further up the pyramid.

To make the biggest positive impact on your customer brand equity at this level, you should conduct thorough research to get a clear understanding of your target audience, and what they are looking for out of a company that provides your products or services. How do they decide between your brand and another competitor?

Once you have established this, it is important that your awareness efforts:

• Hone in on the pain points/interests that matter to them
• Are placed on a platform that they interact with often
• Are consistent across all channels you choose to market o

What does brand salience mean for your marketing team?

The people inside your organization must live the brand first, in order to help your audience recognize, trust and remember it. A brand portal becomes essential, acting as a single source of truth.

A well-structured showcasing of your brand identity includes ready-made campaign assets, tone of voice guidelines, or any content creation templates they can use. Everyone can visualize and represent the brand – employee, partner or stakeholder – with 100% brand consistency from day one.

What are you?

The second level of Keller’s CBBE model is divided into two segments – performance and imagery. Performance covers the actual features and capabilities of your products/services. This encapsulates:

• Functionality
• Reliability
• Style/Design
• Price
• Durability
• Customer Service
• Customer Satisfaction

Consequently, if your product delivers on the promises highlighted in your brand awareness campaigns, then it should lead to positive experiences which, in turn, drive customers further up the brand equity pyramid. If it doesn’t deliver on their expectations, then you risk them falling away altogether.

This is why authenticity is more than just a buzzword when it comes to customer-based brand equity – it is central to encouraging loyalty and establishing long-term relationships.

Alongside performance is imagery, which is more about how your brand meets your customers’ social and psychological needs. Think of your brand as if it were a human – what would they be like? Is it strong and tough? Is it sensible and sophisticated? Is it quirky and exciting?

Brand imagery is what people think when they see your brand. It is about how happy they would be to be seen associated with your products as a result of its reputation.

How effective this proves for you will come from initially discussing your brand values and which you consider relate to the interests of your customers. How important is the environment for them? Do they care about their local community? Finding the answers to these and other questions will help you project an image customers can get on board with.

How can your marketing team show customers your brand meaning and brand features?

Ensuring every visual, message and asset reflects who you are as a brand – consistently and without compromise – requires fast and reliable access to the right materials, tailored to their roles and regions.

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is key to making this possible. It centralizes all approved assets in one place, making it easy to locate, share, and use brand materials that align with your identity and values. When your DAM reflects your brand’s meaning with structure and clarity, your teams are empowered to deliver content that will resonate with audiences and is the starting point to evoking an emotional response.

What about you?

The third strand of the customer-based brand equity pyramid is also split in two, covering both judgement and feelings. These both relate to what people feel towards your brand, and the impact this has either positively or negatively.

First, judgement is about the opinions that people form about your brand. This could be good, like if someone considers your products reliable or handy. Or it could be detrimental, as in somebody judging them to be cheap or ineffective. And while you might disagree with their assessment, they still carry a great deal of weight.

Typically, the judgement of a brand breaks down into four segments:

• Quality – the brand’s actual/perceived quality
• Credibility – the brand’s reputation
• Consideration – the brand’s relevancy
• Superiority – the brand’s status against competitors

Plus, someone doesn’t have to even experience your brand first-hand to be affected by judgements – they can form an opinion simply through word-of-mouth.

To combat the potential problems of negative judgements, it’s essential your company is responsive to any complaints or issues that customers may have. Having access to software that can quickly turn around relevant marketing materials is extremely helpful in these circumstances.

Also, if these persist, it gives you just cause to reassess your brand and if it is delivering as it should be.

The other half of this equation is feelings, which unsurprisingly covers how people feel about your brand. According to Keller’s brand equity model, there are 6 positive brand feelings that companies should be aspiring to:

• Warmth
• Fun
• Excitement
• Security
• Social approval
• Self-respect

While your brand might not appeal to all the emotions listed here, it should focus on at least one and make sure customers feel that when they interact with or consider your brand.

Associating your brand with positive feelings and judgements is crucial for building customer-based brand equity – it grows trust and helps form a strong, lasting relationship between your company and your customers.

Remember – eliminating negative feelings and judgements is a tall ask once they’ve planted roots, so trying to instil positivity from the outset is very beneficial.

How can marketing teams quickly respond to affect how your brand is perceived?

Perception can shift in moments. Reacting to a crisis, capitalizing on a trend or addressing customer sentiment – the ability to act fast is non-negotiable.

When perception is shaped by how fast and authentically you show up, having the tools to act with clarity and control gives your brand a critical edge, such as flexible design templates. You need your frontline teams to create marketing content that can be localized, while fully on-brand in look and feel, with your brand’s tone and values in tact – reinforcing credibility and trust in real time.

What about you and me?

Finally, we reach the ‘Holy Grail’ of customer brand equity – resonance. This is the stage where customers are more than just aware of your brand and buying what you’re selling – they are advocates for your brand. These are the customers who go out on your behalf to introduce others to your company.

It is unquestionably the most difficult level to reach, but it comes with the greatest benefits. In Keller’s model, he breaks resonance down into 4 categories:

• Behavioural loyalty – how habitually a customer buys from your brand
• Attitudinal attachment – the love and connection people feel towards your brand
• Sense of community – the bond that customers feel towards others who use your brand
• Active engagement – how engaged people are with your brand even when not purchasing from it (e.g. social media follows, marketing events, online chats, etc.)

Achieving resonance with customers is a tall order, but there are numerous incentives that you might want to consider to encourage lifetime loyalty with your audience:

• Exclusive offers for customers who have signed up for emails
• Loyalty cards
• Points-based rewards
• Free/limited-time experiences
• Shareholder potential
• Community forums
• Charitable donations/events

These are just some suggestions of what you can do to achieve this rarefied level of relationship with your customers. As highlighted, it doesn’t take many people to reach the summit of the customer brand equity model to make a significant difference to the strength of your brand and your business as a whole.

Measuring, managing and perfecting customer brand equity

Now you have a deeper understanding of what customer-based brand equity is and what Keller’s model represents, you can start to consider techniques and approaches to track this information and help move people onto the pyramid and up the tiers over time.

Conducting regular research into the changing trends and feelings of your audience, as well as distributing feedback surveys, can help you determine whether your brand is leaving a positive impression on your audiences. Alongside this, when measuring customer brand equity, you should turn attention to your:

• Financial metrics
• Brand ‘buzz’ metrics
• Consumer metrics

These will give you a clearer sense of how your brand is perceived, and the impact this is having on your business prospects. By keeping tabs on these insights and focusing on the four tiers of Keller’s brand equity model, you can make a significant uptick in customer loyalty and subsequently expand your company’s bottom line.

Beyond that, it is simply a case of delivering branded materials frequently, authentically and consistently. Each of these characteristics is crucial for enhancing your customer brand equity over time, so finding ways to make this seamless and straightforward for your company should be a top priority for your marketing teams.