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he next time you work on an intranet project, whether for private- or public-sector organizations, ask your client or manager about branding. Usually, the answer will be another question, “Why do we need to worry about branding?” After all, this is an internal site, for employees only, or—in the case of extranets—for contractors and partners, as well. If users are on the intranet, why do they need to be reminded about which organization owns it?

Intranet branding efforts, of course, can range from an executive-level brainstorming session to hiring a high-powered branding firm to research the company and come back with a series of proposals.

First, let’s distinguish between brand and brand expression.

Many people assume that the brand is what you see in the design concept for a company or product—the colors, the logo, the slogan. The brand itself, however, is actually a broad concept that encompasses everything about the corporate image (brand perception), collective values, and the experience people have when dealing with this organization (brand attributes). It could be conceptualized as one brand, or as a mother brand with several offspring daughter brands that align with the corporate goals of the mother brand, but also have their own distinguishing characteristics.

Brand expression, on the other hand, is how a brand is given shape and voice (sometimes effectively, and sometimes not), whether on products, in advertisements, in signage, or on websites. It’s often associated with design elements—look and feel—but it’s also about the language used to express the brand personality, qualities, and values.

First branding issue: Who cares about the brand?

Two brand issues arise for many intranets. First, in most organizations, intranets lack a formal governance strategy to help them achieve a balance between what the organization wants to gain from its investment in an internal site, and what employees want to have on the site to make their daily tasks easier and, well, make the workplace a little more fun. Furthermore, intranets often have many departmental stakeholders, each with advocates at the executive level, who want to make the intranet into a tool that will suit their needs. While all of their objectives may be legitimate, they’ll naturally be competing for space and attention on the intranet.

Most employees don’t care if the corporate brand expression appears consistently throughout their intranet. Department heads may actually prefer it didn’t, because they would rather build a brand identity for their own department. Only a few lonely souls at the top of the foodchain seem to want the intranet to reflect the corporate brand so that employees are reminded they are working for a single organization instead of a loosely knit group of principalities.

Second branding issue: The intranet sub-brand.

Should the intranet have its own identity, a kind of sub-brand to the mother brand? Isn’t the notion of defining an intranet sub-brand or “Intrabrand” just another bit of fluff that can be resolved once the detailed design is developed?

The first branding issue, the high-level corporate one, is best answered by the company’s own business strategy. How pervasive does it want its internal brand expression to be—either to reinforce corporate values, oneness, and community, or simply for overall corporate consistency within the site, which is also an important factor in usability ?

It’s easy to use marketing research to discover the importance of the company’s brand to clients and the general public, but how do you determine its value for internal users? The simple answer is that there is value in having some visual and textual reminders of the organization’s mother brand on its intranet site, but, strategically, it may be more important to develop a strong, visible, and consistent sub-brand for the intranet, especially if it is being redesigned. That sub-brand is not just a matter of a simple wordmark, such as giving the intranet its own name, but a complete identity that also aligns with corporate business goals and reflects the community of employees it serves.