Brands are curious things. They can be hard to define, but they are critical to a company's success. It takes years to build, develop and nurture a good brand, but unless your brand is robust, all that good work can be undone much more quickly, and nowhere are brands more commonly abused and misrepresented than on the web.

In the last few years 'the brand' has become one of the most talked about and powerful aspects of corporate marketing. Large companies spend tens of thousands of pounds on making even tiny tweaks and readjustments to their brand identity.

But although throwing money at your brand may result in a flash new logo, if it's not pervasive throughout your company you may as well burn the cash. There are cheaper, cleverer ways of getting it right.

1) Do you have brand strategy?
Brands don't happen by accident. The best brands are born of a well-developed strategy that runs through everything a company does. So how deep does your brand strategy run? Ask yourself the following questions.

A) How important is the concept of 'brand' to your organisation? Think about how often the subject of branding comes up at internal meetings
B) What do you do to communicate brand values internally and externally?
C) How much of your marketing budget is spent on promoting and developing your brand(s)?
D) What processes and systems are in place to ensure that marketing communications are 'on-brand'?

If you can satisfy yourself that you have a cohesive and detailed, documented brand strategy that everyone in the company is aware of, and that it is being accurately reflected in what you do online, give yourself a pat on the back. If not, it's time to do something about it.

Strategy is one of those words that is abused, overused and misunderstood. If you think of it as a journey, before you get to the strategy, which tells you how to get to where you want to be, you have to ask yourself where you want to get to, and before that, why you want to get there. Only then can you use strategy as a roadmap to reach your destination.

First up, you need to know what your brand(s) and your company stand for, and the values they embody. What do your customers and your staff think of your brand? Do they have any emotional attachment to it? There's only one way to find out: ask them. If you find that customers and staff have less appreciation of what your brand stands for than you might have hoped, you need to start getting the branding message out. Use internal communications to get your staff 'living the brand' and external communications to begin educating your customers and potential customers about what your brand stands for.

To ensure that your brand strategy is carried through all kinds of communication with your customers, prospects and staff, formalise your strategy into a brand bible so that everyone in the company understands how the brand should be represented in each medium and new people who join the company have a set of brand guidelines to work from.

Once your brand strategy is in place, revisit it constantly to check that it remains relevant in the light of changing market conditions and customer needs.

2) Is your branding consistent on and offline?
Over the years, it has become good practice to ensure that brand identity and messages are consistent through point of sale, point of purchase, above-the-line and below-the-line. And yet for some reason, when they take a brand online, why do so many throw the rulebook out of the window?

Many companies and brands seem to develop different designs, looks, and brand guidelines for digital or online representations. In fact, it should be irrelevant which medium the consumer is using to interact with the brand. The look and messages must be consistent. Brand rules should be applied across all media, without exception.

It's not difficult to check whether your brand is being accurately represented online. Take a good look at your website and at how your brand appears there. Look at colours, fonts, imagery? Not just the logo itself, where applicable, but the overall look and feel of the website. Whatever values your brand embodies, whether it's comfort and security, or rebellion and risk-taking, ask yourself if these are the values you would take from your website.

Does your online presence accurately reflect what happens in other media and channels? If there's no commonality of branding to benchmark against, you should review how consistently your brand is portrayed across all media.

If your online branding is out of step with everything else, look at how to bring it into line. Often, the cause of the problem lies in web designers working in isolation, so one obvious solution is to involve your other agencies in the remedial work. Agencies of different disciplines are famed for their dislike of working together, as a client however you need to get them round the table.

3) How effective is your brand bible?
And if your answer to this is "what brand bible?" take three steps backwards. Businesses can last a hundred years, but staff come and go. Agencies and suppliers come and go. What chance do you have of maintaining any sort of consistency of branding, image or tone of voice if no-one has ever committed your brand values to paper?

Even if you have a brand bible, you should take a close look at what it contains. Simply recording your brand values is not enough. A good brand bible demands interpretation of those values to give guidance to the people who use.

Brand bibles began life as corporate identity manuals, and then evolved into more strategic documents that talked about brand values and gave people words and phrases to learn. But it's not enough. Take the concept of simplicity as a brand value. You can't own the word 'simplicity' but you can own your own interpretation of it and how that impacts on your brand. The mindset needs to move beyond communication of what the brand is all about to an interpretation of it in practice.

Tied up with the idea of the brand bible is that of the brand champion. Every company needs leadership and a good leader will live the brand and send the message out to staff to do the same.

So ask yourself, do you live your brand? Do you teach your staff about your brand values and encourage them to celebrate the brand? If not, it's time to start, because great brands begin at home.

4) Would customers be able to identify you without your logo?
You may think you have a strong brand image and that it's carried through everything you do. But if you really want to put it to the test, try looking at a piece of marketing literature without the logo in place. Is it still obvious which brand you're dealing with? Even if you can recognise your brand, can your staff? Your customers?

If the brand image is to survive without the logo, other elements must play their part too: typography, colour, and physical form - even mood. Look at a press or billboard ad for Mercedes, for example, and if you pay any attention at all to these things, you should recognise the brand from the typeface alone. And could anyone presented with the 'Marilyn Monroe' Coca-Cola bottle, minus its label, realistically mistake it for anything else?

Of course, few brands in life are as pervasive as Coca-Cola, but that doesn't mean you can't work towards the same ends. It comes down to consistency. If the brand (and logo) is always associated with text in a certain font, with a certain colour, perhaps a certain type of pack design and the rules are strictly adhered to by everyone who creates communications, then over time the logo will come to be recognised as part of a holistic strategy.

You have to wrap a distinctive set of communications around your logo, which are an accurate reflection of your business, to support it and give it context.

5) How future proof is your brand?
Brands need to move with the times, and take account of trends and long-term consumer behaviours. By the same token, a brand that reinvents itself too often will lose the respect and trust of its advocates.

There are some simple checks you can carry out to see how future proof your brand is. Ask people who don't know the brand, or anything about it, to tell you what they think it stands for, based on your logo and any strap lines that go with it. Does it look and feel like it belongs in the here and now? Look at your brand values. Do they belong in 2004? Or do they seem to have come from another age, when consumers had different needs, different priorities?

There's no shame in updating a brand. Look at the way BP successfully updated its brand in 2000 with the introduction of the 'Helios' sunburst logo and the 'Beyond Petroleum' positioning. You may not have BP's Ј100 million to spend on it, but you can apply the same thinking to an update of your own brand imagery. And chances are you don't have as many tankers and petrol stations to redress in any case.

If, after assessing your brand, you decide that it is in need of a makeover, don't abandon what you already have. Try to make the new brand an evolution from the old, rather than a complete departure. That way, you keep those who have been loyal to the old brand, loyal to the new.

Remember too, that in the modern era, your logo must work on a screen as well as on paper. Even if you don't, and never will, advertise on TV, you will have a website and your logo will be an important part of it. And if you decide your brand values are out of date and you want to come up with new ones, don't keep them to yourself. They need to be communicated both within and without the company.

6) Does your brand boost your ego or sell the benefits?
There's a great temptation when developing a brand to develop one that would appeal to the Chief Executive or the Marketing Director. After all, it's they who are likely to be responsible for formulating the brand strategy and deciding on the values and attributes that they want the brand to have.

That's OK, so long as the profile of the brand's target audience fits the profile of the members of the board. But no matter how young at heart he feels, the 55 year-old boss of a company is unlikely to be moved or motivated by the same things as a teenage girl, so if that's who the brand is targeting, it's her needs, motivations, and aspirations that need to be front of mind, not his. This is particularly important when designing the website, as for most brands, with the exception of retail brands; the website is the most visible part of the business for the majority of customers. But it's something many companies get wrong.

Many website owners create a site that they like, rather than a site their target audience would like. Decision-makers often fail to truly understand the tone of voice that their audience responds to, the technical limitations that they might well be governed by, and the appropriate content that they would respond to.

Take a good look at your brand and your site. Is it designed in your image, or that of your target audience? Do you even know who your target audience is? What motivates them? What sort of things do they like, and don't like?

Commission research to find out what visitors to your site like and don't like about your site and your brand. You can do this easily enough online, but don't expect visitors to give of their time freely. You must give them some kind of incentive, whether this is a prize draw, a discount off their next order, or a free download.

Lastly, when the results are in, act on them - and make sure it permeates your entire operation. In interactive media, the brand experience goes from its visual manifestation (i.e. the visual design), to the quality of the content (as if it's a publication - say editorial), to the quality of the interaction (usability - whether it helps in completing a task), to the fulfillment (how queries are dealt with, how products are delivered).

Fail in any of those, and no matter how good the others, the brand will fail.

7) Does your brand cross cultural and geographical divides?
The decision to go global is not one to be taken lightly. Sure, the web may have made it easier to show your wares to the world, but just because people in Iceland are interested in what you sell, it doesn't necessarily mean it would be sensible, or profitable, for you to use your site to target them.

You have to be realistic. Don't try to please everyone or invest too much in reaching the margins of people who might want to reach you - deciding who you don't target is as important as deciding who you do.

In reality, the vast majority of brands are not created for a global market, though when you reach the higher echelons of corporate enterprises, greater majorities are. Think of the way the Marathon bar became the meaningless 'Snickers', how Jif, which had spent years building up connotations of 'lemon freshness', became 'CIF'. The trend among large companies is towards names which mean nothing to anyone, so they can be built into global brands, and also stand a chance of being registered as a domain name.

Before going global, think about your motivations for doing so. Is it because, thanks to the web, you can? Or is it because its part of a coherent business strategy and the web just makes it a little easier, or at least more feasible, to execute?

It goes without saying that there are countless other issues, especially if you're aiming to sell via the website to consumers in other countries. What sort of infrastructure do you have in place for service orders, to handle returns, and indeed, publicise the brand in the first instance?

It's easy to get caught out when taking a brand beyond its traditional homeland. The tone of voice needs to match the demands of the local market. Greeting a returning visitor to your site with 'Hi Bob' may be fine in the States, but a user in Japan would expect something much more formal.

Colours and symbols have different connotations from one territory to the next. A thumbs-up symbol will be fine in most parts of the world, yet in Iran, it's a grave insult. In Hong Kong and China, the colour black is closely associated with death. In Arabic text is read from right to left, so an arrow pointing to the right signifies a move backwards, not forwards.

Before pushing your brand out into other territories, check with local experts whether anything is likely to cause offence, amusement or other problems, and if so, you'll have to balance the corrective work needed against the potential opportunity.

8) Have you protected your brand for Internet operations?
The first step is to give it some top-level protection in the form of a registered trademark. This can cost up to Ј1,000, maybe more if you want to register a name, logo and other items associated with your brand, but its money well spent. If you haven't registered a trademark for your brand and someone starts trading with the same name, the onus is on you to prove you have a successful business with a good reputation in that name. If you've registered a trademark, the onus is removed.

On the web the key requirement is to register a domain name for your brand before someone else does. Thankfully, now the web has grown up a little, there is less 'cyber squatting' than in the late 90s, when clued-up wide boys made a killing by registering the domain names of big corporations, then selling those names for a hefty profit to the companies concerned. If you suspect someone of cyber squatting your name, approach Verisign for .com or .net names and Nominet for .co.uk names.

Even if cyber squatters cause you no problems, domain name registration can remain an issue if your company has a common name and someone else has already registered the domain for it. The answer is not to give up, but to find a more descriptive version of your company name that you can register. So if your company is called Smiths and sells insurance, you won't be able to register Smiths.com, but you can register Smithsinsurancebrokers.com. Or at least you could at the time of writing.

To check if the domain name you want is available, just do a web search on 'domain name registration', then visit one of the sites that comes up and search for the name you want to register. The site will tell you which top level domains (.co.uk, .com etc) are available.
If you're doing business in several countries, you may want to register the domain for each country, with the relevant top level domain suffix. But you may have to draw the line somewhere, unless you have deep pockets, and a very good system for administering it all

It depends how unique and important your brand name is. If you think it may be attractive to someone else, it will prove cheaper to register another variation of the name than to bring a case against someone found using it.

Many websites like to link to other sites, offering visitors more detailed information on certain subjects. It's a common practice, but one that should be approached with caution. Web content is often protected by intellectual property rights. So if you're planning to link to another site, check its terms and conditions, and any copyright notices, and seek permission if required.

There's no need to register the copyright of your site as the look and feel, and the content of the site, are protected by UK copyright laws simply by being there. It is advisable, though, to include copyright notices explaining how the content of the site can and cannot be used.

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