The more unified a company is in their compliance to strict brand regulations, the stronger their brand is likely to be. However, with the growing need for companies to connect with audiences using more meaningful, personalized and social messages, the trend towards “Rogue Marketing” is becoming a greater challenge for corporate brand control.
Customization introduces risks—ranging from a prolonged approval process and lagging speed to market, to off-brand creative decisions based on outdated content. Time is always a factor. And the gap between the brand-standards focus of marketing departments and the audience-focused drive of sales can further complicate the results.
The answer is: Brand Control. Given that brand essentially lives in the gut feeling in your audience, the idea of “Brand Control” can be a challenging concept to grasp on a practical level. We’ve found that it is possible to control your brand within your company. If managed consistently with the right tools, companies can control every brand asset and how it is presented to audiences. Here are three major cornerstones of Brand Control:
Brand Asset Organization
Unregulated organization can lead to lost, out-of-date or damaged assets, and unwanted versioning. Centralizing brand assets is absolutely essential to controlling your brand.
This regulation can be provided with a data asset management system (DAM). In a system like Fision, this DAM lives online as an organized library—making marketing assets and company information instantly available to users anywhere in the world. This library stores, organizes, manages and releases brand assets according to business rules, brand standards, user-permissions and expiration dates—ensuring that only the most current assets are available, and users can only access those that are most up-to-date.
Pre-Approval Over Post-Customization Approval
With the kind of control a DAM provides, administrators—such as marketing directors, brand managers, CFOs and sales directors—have the power of pre-approval. Since every asset and asset permission is approved in advance, countless hours are saved in the approval process and customized one-to-one communications won’t have to be routed before sending them off.
Customizable Templates
A selection templates provide consistent blueprints for pre-approved assets. User simply choose the best pre-approved assets for their audience, populate the template fields and send their completed marketing or sales piece. Since the templates and assets are governed by usage rules, any available combination of assets will always be on-brand.