The Three C’s of Brand Consistency

You can sell the highest quality products, have the most creative talent on your team, and benefit from multiple sales channels and social profiles at your fingertips – but you won’t get very far if you don’t have a strong, consistent brand identity.

Think of a retail brand like BooHoo, which is going strong despite emerging consumer backlash against fast fashion. How? Through its clever use of student ambassadors, strong social media presence (including an integrated “Instashop” on its website), dedicated apps, partnerships with influencers, targeted, curated collections, and seemingly endless sales. This strategy has enabled it to grow from a Manchester market stall to a leading name in the retail world, worth over £2 billion.

At the other end of the scale, Louis Vuitton was among several luxury names to climb BrandZ’s 2019 ranking of the most valuable global brands – and now tops the list in the luxe category. It may be over 160 years old, but Louis Vuitton has maintained brand consistency (based around travel as well as that instantly-recognisable print), while at the same time undergoing a successful digital transformation.

An early adoptor of SEO and omnichannel capabilities, Louis Vuitton is followed by over seven million fans on Twitter, 21 million on Instagram, and is the second most influential fashion brand on social media.

These are just two examples of how brand assets have been used to create a consistent (and highly lucrative) brand image.

But what about your brand assets and your brand image? We can’t all be the BooHoos or the Louis Vuittons of whichever sector we’re operating in, but we can all adopt tools and techniques to effectively manage digital assets, create richer customer experiences, and protect – and monetise! – our brand.

What’s the secret? An advanced digital asset management (DAM) solution that enhances the skills, creativity, and talent of your marketing and brand management teams.

What should you look for in a DAM solution? DAM good question. Here are the top features (the Three C’s) to look out for, and the benefits they can bring to your brand:

Centralising assets

Photos, videos, product descriptions, social media copy, blogs, reviews, logos, sales presentations: the sheer volume of assets a brand must manage can be overwhelming. Even more so when these assets are sitting on separate systems, and cloud platforms.

Look for a DAM solution which stores all of this digital content on a single, integrated platform. A central repository will allow your team to create a single source of truth, and use it to maintain a consistent brand identity across all channels. A single hub can also be used to stash design templates and content layouts, which can be accessed by team members on the fly, ensuring your brand remains consistent, no matter who is using the assets nor what office, or remote location, they’re accessing them from.

Collaboration

Delivering an experience with brand consistency for consumers can be a challenge when your team is not located in one place. However, if your brand assets are located in one place — which can be accessed simultaneously and supports collaborative working practices – this suddenly becomes a whole lot easier.

Scaling and launching marketing campaigns in new territories involves complex content workflows and micromanagement of your assets. This will ensure your brand is consistent no matter where in the world shoppers are based. A good DAM solution should enable marketers, salespeople, partners, and freelancers to find, convert, and deploy content with ease, as well as collaborate on projects in real time.

Control and reputation management

Not everyone needs access to all of your brand’s valuable assets all of the time. And not everyone needs to be able to edit, use, or approve all of these either. A DAM solution with advanced rights management tools allows you to assign and tightly control roles and permissions, as well as version control and auditing.

Further, a brand portal within a DAM solution can help ensure consistency across brand touchpoints, by sharing brand guidelines alongside content.

So: remember the Three C’s of brand consistency. The result? Your team can work together easily, access assets quickly, and control their use securely. Finally (and all-importantly), you can guarantee that the right content reaches the right consumers at the right time.

Credit: Jake Athey, Marketing & Customer Experience, VP, Widen