No matter what you sell – whether it’s soft drinks, fashion, IT services or financial expertise – your brand is the most valuable thing your company owns. It connects your products with your identity and values in a way that consumers can instantly relate to and makes it possible for shoppers to find you in a crowded market. But it’s also the most intangible. Little wonder then, that brand management is often not only complicated and time-consuming but also such a high-stakes activity.
Anyone who has ever dealt with a complex global campaign knows the pain of sitting up until three in the morning, wading through scamps from your local agencies and wondering why Vietnam has done its own version of the logo, Poland has apparently redesigned the approved grid and Mexico is using its own font. Why, you wonder, are they all doing this to me?
But it’s not deliberate. Brand management is just incredibly complicated, involving as it does hundreds of elements in different variations, used by many different brand teams and agencies in sometimes hundreds of countries. To get the most value from your brand, while preserving the sanity of your team, and making the best use of their time, requires flawless brand management.
A new white paper, The Essential Guide to Brand Management, looks at how to make your brand management as effective, cost-efficient and user friendly as possible. The research looks at the aims, processes, roles and technologies required to make your brand management market leading.
Many brands, the paper explains, are using generic cloud storage to share their brand assets among different markets and stakeholders. But this undermines the work the companies have done in creating brand guidelines. It introduces ambiguity and confusion about which brand assets belong together and how designers should use those assets.
The alternative is to centralise assets on a platform designed to store and share them in a way that’s structured and accountable. By creating authorised, but flexible, workflows, you can guide users – such as agencies and local marketing teams – to pick assets that belong together and then use them in ways that meet brand guidelines.
Using the right technology and the right processes also allows you to build approval into your brand-management platform. When someone downloads assets from the share-site, the platform notifies the relevant approver.
This makes it easy for the brand team to retain oversight and to help other stakeholders meet the guidelines from the first version. Even on a small campaign, that means less stress, less re-working and less budget lost to amends that should never have been necessary in the first place. On a global campaign, it can massively reduce waste and have a huge impact on everyone’s efficiency and wellbeing.
Improved brand-asset management also helps brands and campaigns to scale. It allows best practice and new on-brand assets from the markets to be fed into a centralised system, so that the whole company learns from the best of what’s being done in the regions. And when it’s time to grow the campaign or expand to new markets, using a collaboration platform that incorporates your company’s approved guidelines into its workflows allows you to take on new partners and include new local offices, without losing control. And if some teams are new, and still a bit green, you can limit the editorial control you give them, and increase the level of supervision, making it impossible for them to go off-brand while they’re still learning the ropes.
To find out more about how consolidated brand management can help you cut costs, be more agile and improve brand outcomes, download the free white paper from digital asset management platform Canto.