Compliance and branding or brand compliance is the process of ensuring that your website’s brand elements strictly adhere to your brand guidelines. When used correctly, it ensures that your content, messaging, and look and feel do not deviate from your core brand identity. The brand is the image of the organization in the market and the industry.
Brand image is created over time and requires the implementation of different corporate strategies and plans to penetrate the market and provide better customer service. The management and the board account for various regulatory requirements to develop the corporate strategies and plans. The corporate strategy and plans may cause regulatory inspections and penalties without arranging compliance with the applicable regulations and standards.
Brand image may be lost due to non-compliance with some significant regulatory requirements. Breaches lead to an impact on the brand image and result in reputational losses.
The compliance function being the independent function and not involved in business line and operational activities, ensures that all the applicable regulatory requirements are considered by the management while developing the corporate strategy and plan. As such, a compliance function must ensure that it is not placed in a position where there are real or perceived conflicts of interest between the departments regarding the scope of work responsibilities, reporting lines, and remuneration.
The Compliance and Branding
The regulatory compliance status judges the organizations for the key and significant regulations, which usually relate to the environmental, health and safety, customer identification and verification, information security and data protection, etc. The status of compliance with these key regulations affects the organization’s brand image in front of the public and stakeholders. In case the organization has a good brand image from a business and compliance perspective. The stakeholders like vendors, banks, insurance companies, suppliers, etc., do business with these organizations, and people buy their products and services.
The compliance team shall have unrestricted access to the information and personnel necessary and clear line of authority to carry out compliance responsibilities. The organization must ensure that the performance appraisal of the compliance team is primarily based on the achievement of compliance-related roles and responsibilities.
The compliance function provides the advisory to the business and operations to ensure that the employees well understand the regulations. Compliance functions emphasize the requirements to incorporate the applicable regulatory requirements in the policies and procedures. Including regulatory requirements that may cause brand image losses in the policies and procedures increases the chances of employee compliance.
A constructive and cooperative working relationship between the compliance functions and business departments is implemented in the organization to facilitate the overall identification and management of compliance risk within and across different departments and functions. This collaboration helps all the departments to maintain brand image and comply with regulatory requirements.
The compliance function develops the appropriate procedures to maintain and protect the brand image and avoid reputational losses. It ensures proper communication to line managers, employees, and staff at all levels to guarantee that they are provided with all current and accurate regulatory information that is required to do the following:
- Maintain knowledge of applicable regulatory requirements;
- Assess the nature and magnitude of non-compliance;
- Identify areas where the risk of non-compliance exists;
- Communicate incidents of non-compliance to compliance; and
- Make effective plans to manage and mitigate compliance risk and protect the brand image.
Final Thoughts
Compliance works to protect the brand image of the organization. Different key regulatory requirements impact the organization’s brand image, and in case of non-compliance with those regulations, the organization faces reputational risks and losses. The compliance function aims to ensure that all significant and key regulatory requirements are identified, reviewed, understood, and disseminated to the relevant process owners for compliance purposes.
