Corporate PowerPoint templates and branding issues
A keep perspective into the corporate PowerPoint ‘user manual’ and its branding implications.
A point Cliff Atkinson brings up is with the IBM master slide with specific instructions: “IBM logo must not be moved, added to, or altered in any way.” Because this corporate logo is on every PowerPoint slide, it has not accomplished ‘branding’ the presentation. The logo creates a graphical and navigational obstacle in getting the presentation’s message out there.
It turns out that much of our collective thinking about PowerPoint is based on a branding misunderstanding, a lack of awareness of the research
related to multimedia presentations, and a general idea that our work
in corporate communications is done when we’ve designed a template and
have thrown it over the fence for people to use.
This line of thinking guarantees that everyone in that organization
will be put into a literal box and constrained from doing things that
help them get their job done. As much as people might blame Microsoft
for enforcing a bullet-point culture, it is really organizations that
enforce it through their templates and lack of an organizational
strategy for their PowerPoint-based communications. The solution here
is to throw out the template approach altogether an
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