Master Brand Asset Management: Your Guide to Effective Branding

Your brand may be your company’s most valuable asset. While your company’s name is certainly important, its face is what most remember it by. A brand is just that; it dictates everything from your company’s appearance to its personality and more. In fact, the common marketing principle, the “rule of seven,” shows that customers need to see your brand at least seven times before they purchase—and each of those times, your appearance needs to stay the same.1

So, how do you develop a consistent brand? By creating an internal resource known as brand guidelines. Brand guidelines, sometimes known as a style guide, are a set of rules that dictate the way your brand looks and sounds. Brand guidelines typically include the files and information that your team members need to ensure a consistent look everywhere you appear: on your website, social media, sales assets, packaging, and any other channel.

Creating a consistent brand is one thing, but implementing that branding is another. It’s not enough for your brand guidelines to exist; they need to be easily available for team members to use, too. Unfortunately, statistics show that brand guidelines are regularly overlooked. According to a survey, only 30% of brands use their brand guidelines regularly, while 15% have no brand guidelines at all.1

To give your team easy access to your brand guidelines, it may be time to implement a brand asset management tool. Read on to learn all about brand asset management, why it’s so important, and how to implement it.

What is brand asset management?

Brand asset management (BAM) is a system through which a company stores all of its brand assets to make it easy to find and share assets, manage storage space, and control access. Common brand assets involved in brand asset management include:

Color palette: Hex codes, RGB codes, and information on how color palettes can be used
Typography: Both the name of their font and the formats that are allowed (italic, bold, semi-bold, etc.)
Logo: A range of file formats for different usages, like PNGs and JPEGs, as well as any color variations
Creative: Brand images and videos and their approved usage
Brand documentation: Information on brand voice, tone, values, and mission statement

Through brand asset management, businesses can develop a single, centralized location for these vital assets. There, they can store, organize, and manage these assets so that team members can easily access them.

Why brand asset management matters

In today’s increasingly digital age, brand asset management is vital. By developing a brand asset management system, companies reap significant benefits, including:

Ensures consistency across platforms

Consistent branding should be a simple way to boost your business, but in practice, many companies find this not to be the case. With geographically and departmentally siloed team members, it can be hard to keep everyone on the same page—especially as your business grows. Without straightforward brand asset management, team members may unknowingly use an outdated version of a logo or may have too much difficulty locating documentation on brand messaging and simply try to recreate it from memory. With each small mistake, your brand becomes more and more disjointed—and your revenue can take a hit.

Thanks to brand asset management, consistent branding is easy. Brand asset management provides a single system of record for all branding. Whenever your team members need brand elements, assets, or information, they know to go straight to your brand asset management system and can trust the information there.

Facilitates efficient team collaboration

Brand asset management also allows your team members to collaborate easily, no matter where they are located. A strong BAM strategy keeps marketing, communications, and design teams on the same page and allows them to work together efficiently on projects that drive revenue.

For even easier collaboration, look for a brand asset management tool that offers workflow tools, too. With solutions like Content Workflow and Asset Workflow, Bynder offers content collaboration and creative asset collaboration solutions that enable your team to create, edit, and finalize brand assets without ever needing to leave your brand asset management system. Plus, get access to automations that make creative product management a cinch.

Not only does brand asset management help keep internal teams on the same page, but it also helps to align your business with external partners, too. Instantly provide partners with the assets they need and empower them with the knowledge they need to use them, thanks to centralized brand information. Plus, thanks to brand asset management platforms like Bynder, you’ll have access to permissions-based security to give your external partners secure access to everything they need—and nothing they don’t.

Fosters brand scalability and growth

With better brand asset management, you may find that your growth becomes more rapid. Your sales team may close bigger sales, and your product launches may be grander. That’s why it’s crucial that your team has access to the information they need at the moment they need it.

Furthermore, as your business grows, matters pertaining to brand assets can become more complex. For instance, you may develop sub-brands, each with its own unique branding needs. Additionally, more players in the game simply means more opportunities for basic human error—and we know that consistency means everything. Brand asset management can make it easy for your brand teams to update and manage brand assets as your brand grows.

Protects brand assets

A strong brand asset management system explains not only what to do but also what not to do. With a BAM solution in place, team members can access the most up-to-date assets while ensuring they use them correctly. Distorting your logo, pairing colors incorrectly, or manipulating a video asset in a disallowed way are all forms of asset misuse, and doing so can be devastating to your brand.

A strong brand asset management tool shows several options for approved and unapproved use of different brand assets to provide clarity and reduce the risk of preventable errors. If you identify a common branding mistake, include it in your brand asset management system to discourage its use.

What should you look for in brand management software?

To find an effective brand asset management solution, look for the following elements:

Digital access: Gone are the days of using a central server to store your company’s data. Instead, look for an asset management platform that stores your data in the cloud. Not only will this offer you the ability to scale storage as needed, but it also offers a backup of your most important brand assets in case of hard drive failure.
Centralized storage: No one person should own your brand assets. Instead, create a centralized storage system that allows access to all verified users wherever and whenever needed, whether in the office, at home, or on the go.

Ability to add authorized users: As your team expands and partners with external brands, you’ll need a way to add more people to your brand asset management software, ideally with precise permissions. BAM solutions enable organizations to set precise user permissions to enhance accessibility while maintaining security.

Best practices for using a brand asset management system

Ready to begin building your brand asset management system? Follow these best practices:

Create a central, accessible repository: All brand assets should live in one single, clearly defined place.
Set clear usage guidelines: Ensure your brand guidelines are detailed and organized to make it easy for users to find the information they need on asset usage. Additionally, show not only how assets should be used but also how they should not be used by including common brand asset mistakes.
Regularly update brand assets: Keep the latest versions of brand assets in your brand asset management system. If your system doesn’t allow versioning, be sure to delete any outdated versions to minimize confusion.
Train your team: Show everyone exactly how to access your brand assets and how to navigate your BAM for optimal efficiency and collaboration.

Unlock your brand’s highest potential with Bynder

A brand asset management system may be just what your team needs to build your brand. It can minimize confusion and mistakes, improve brand recognition, facilitate easier collaboration, protect your brand assets, and allow your team to scale beyond expectations.

If you’re seeking a new brand asset management system, look no further than Bynder. Bynder is a leading AI-powered digital asset management solution that offers advanced brand asset management capabilities with advanced security features, asset and content workflow solutions, custom taxonomy, and other essential functions to make managing your brand easier than ever.