I’m amassing a relatively short list of B2B marketing banana skins to avoid, based largely on my history of occasionally planting my heel on the floor with gay abandon, hitting the yellow stuff and ending up chest skywards. Hopefully you don’t do the same, or at least less often.

B2B marketing banana skin no 7 to skip round is this: thinking you can police your brand. You can’t; it’s not possible.

OK, so you can to a degree in the B2B world, and you should certainly put guidelines in place and make it as easy as possible for your stakeholders to toe the line and not dilute your asset.

However, all the new, good, short domain names have been gone for 15 years, so there is the distinct probability that customers will mis-pronounce your name – company or products – mis-spell your name, or mis-use your name, that’s if they don’t forget it.

Thanks to the wonders of office productivity tools, your staff and partners will adapt your brand identity for documents, signage, collateral, interfaces and so on. They’ll use the wrong colours, the wrong typeface, the wrong pointsize, the wrong spacing, and generally place it in a bunch of contexts for which it wasn’t designed or intended. They’ll not know the messaging, or adapt it to their own purposes, or not use it properly.

What can you do about this? What you’re already probably doing, which is to issue guidelines, reminders and encouragement to protect the company’s investment since consistency, culture and value is what it’s all about.

Do your best to police your brand, but don’t be a fascist about it and don’t let it disrupt your sleep. There are other, bigger fish to fry (unless you’re vegetarian).