The four-day working week is something that has been earmarked by organisations for several years. But now, numerous companies have taken the stride to adopt this new approach.

Earlier in 2022, tech giant Panasonic announced that they were looking to offer their employees an extra day off to relax. Despite Japan being a culture infamous for its steadfast devotion to work, the scales have begun to tip in favour of long weekends in one of the most career-focused countries in the world.

It’s not just corporations across the pond that have started to embrace shorter working weeks – European countries, such as Spain and Ireland, have already begun piloting similar schemes with great success. 

In the UK, dozens of companies, including several marketing agencies like Crystallised, FLOCC and Punch Creative, have taken the leap as part of the 4 Day Week Campaign, reaping the benefits that this model of work brings.

But, how did we get here? The world of work has been changing with the evolution of technology for some time. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it allowed employees and employers time to reflect on the future of work and their approach to it. Since then, the calls for the 4-day working week have only grown louder.

The benefits of a shorter working week

At first glance, it may seem counterproductive to condense our busy work schedules down to 4 days. However, adopting this new working model has several very real advantages for businesses and the marketing teams within.

Enhanced productivity

Although you may think that having less time to do the same amount of work would cause deadlines to pile up, in many cases, working fewer hours actually has the opposite effect. When time is at a premium, staff are more aware of how they spend their hours, often resulting in them working much more efficiently. 

While 4-day weeks mean reducing you and your team’s hours by 20%, embracing this new model of work has been seen to boost productivity by up to 40% – typically outweighing the time lost. 

The end result? Your marketing department can increase its output in a shorter space of time. This could mean campaign assets are completed quicker, leaving you or your team more time to plan ahead.

Improved employee engagement

Giving your staff more time away from work by condensing the week can serve to improve staff happiness and engagement, in turn reducing employee absenteeism by up to 41%.

Enhancing engagement also has a notable impact on how invested your marketeers are in the company. Simply put, if people are engaged, they are more likely to go above and beyond for the business.  

By limiting the number of working hours within your organisation, you not only help bolster staff attendance – the people working at your company are going to be more invested in the business and more willing to help your brand go further. 

Higher staff retention

Over time, it’s natural for employees to eventually move on to pastures new. However, to keep your top talent for as long as possible you ideally want to increase staff retention as much as you can.

By embracing a 3-day weekend throughout your organisation, you work to keep existing workers happy and satisfied, reducing the likelihood that people consider leaving.

As the time and costs associated with recruitment are considerable, keeping talent inside your offices means you can spend more time and money delivering outstanding content, and less on finding and training new recruits. 

Challenges of a 4-day working week

While preliminary trials suggest that a shorter working week does indeed have some very real benefits to businesses and their subsequent marketing departments, this new model isn’t without its challenges.

To combat these potential obstacles, tools such as BAM by Papirfly™ can help organisations overcome the challenges ahead, allowing them to leverage the benefits of this new way of working. With this all-in-one software, 4-day weeks can become a reality for your organisation.

Fewer hours to deliver

The most notable challenge enterprises face when switching to a shorter week is the fact that there are fewer hours for employees to carry out their workload. Without the right tools in place, you risk diminishing the volume of content your marketing team produces. 

If you’re unable to deliver at the pace your audience expects, leads could go cold and customer engagement may dip.
How BAM overcomes this challenge

To help you upscale your content production, even during smaller 4-day working weeks, BAM allows your department to:

• Create bespoke assets that embrace your brand’s guidelines quickly and easily using smart templates – no design experience is needed
• Approve individual elements of your campaign faster to deliver a greater volume of accurate content
• Reduce the time spent looking for crucial files by filtering through existing assets in our robust digital asset manager
• Simplify your webpage management, and easily publish or update content online using an integrated CMS

Maintaining consistency

Another challenge that workers will face when moving to a shorter working week is maintaining the same level of consistency across their output. Often, when there is less time to complete tasks, it can be easy for errors and inconsistencies to creep in. 

In such a highly competitive marketing environment, a brand without a clear message, tone or look may risk muddying its brand and alienating its existing customer base.

How BAM overcomes this challenege

To ensure your brand is fronting a strong image, BAM’s intelligent creative templates allow the streamlined creation of on-style visuals. 

Covering everything from social media assets and email templates to posters, brochures and billboards, ensures that brand identities are locked down across all assets. Even those with no prior design experience can utilise these templates to craft perfectly branded content.

This means consistency is effortlessly maintained across your output, relieving your team of pressure when producing assets at pace.

Overseeing all elements 

For managers who oversee the delivery of marketing campaigns, a shorter working week can seem a daunting prospect. 

Not only will you have less time to fit in your weekly duties – as a manager people rely on your input all of the time. If you can’t cast your eyes over everything you need to, it’s likely to cause delays in the pipeline, hampering efficiency.

How BAM overcomes this challenge

BAM’s powerful campaign planner gives you a bird’s-eye view of your campaigns across brand divisions, letting you create briefs, assign marketing materials and outline timeframes from one single place. 

This doesn’t just save you and your fellow marketing managers valuable time – the robust campaign planner aims to give you the information you need to make informed decisions that benefit your brand.  

Leverage the benefits of the 4-day working week with BAM

With the likes of Panasonic and Canon recently taking the leap to a 4-day working week, this new approach is here to stay. And rightly so – trials indicate that there are very real benefits to this new working model.  

Despite there being a number of challenges associated with adopting shorter weeks – BAM our revolutionary all-in-one solution – is perfectly positioned to help your organisation adopt this new model of working, overcoming challenges and harnessing the unmissable advantages. 

Over 500,000 users in some of the world’s most well-known organisations – such as Coca Cola and HSBC – recognise BAM as the future of marketing. This is because our all-in-one platform doesn’t just deliver quality, on-brand content at speed – our cutting-edge software can also:

• Edit and brand videos for websites, social media channels and digital campaigns
• Simplify the process of localising and adapting content to new regions
• Centralise assets and important documents into an accessible online folder structure
• Allow content to be updated and published across sites using one central CMS
• Integrate seamlessly with existing PIM and ERP systems

If you want to learn more about BAM, and the ways in which it can help you ramp up content production in a condensed timeframe, get in touch today, or book your demo online.

Keeping on top of marketing campaign assets can be a mighty task at the best of times, but managing them across global teams is an even greater challenge. As the capacity for organisations to reach consumers across the globe expands ever further, and the number of channels available to engage them continues to grow, the problem of effectively managing digital assets has become more prevalent than ever before.

Consider the following statistics:

• It is believed around 90% of companies meet bottlenecks when handling digital content
• 41% of companies have over 1,000 folders of sensitive assets accessible to anyone
• Up to 19% of an employee’s time is spent searching for files
• 15% of companies’ documents are misplaced, while a further 7.5% are kept despite being obsolete

These figures and more illustrate the overriding issues that many companies are having when trying to stay in control of their assets.

From the effort wasted on reproducing or duplicating content due to misplaced or lost files, to the time it takes to produce and supply tailored assets for specific markets, the inability to track and manage assets can be a significant drain on any organisation’s resources.

A DAM system can go a long way in helping organisations avoid and overcome these issues and become far more efficient and effective at managing their ever-growing collection of digital assets. Moreover, a DAM that’s integrated into a BAM portal becomes an even more powerful tool.

What is DAM?

DAM (Digital Asset Management) is software designed to centralise all of an organisation’s digital assets into one straightforward, spacious location. Be it documents, images, videos, photos, audio or any other digital medium, these assets are held in one place to remove the risks of content going missing or being unnecessarily duplicated.

Fundamentally, implementing a DAM solution is done with the goal of optimising the production, management and mobility of a company’s digital assets. Using one should help employees locate the media they need for upcoming campaigns without any hassle, eliminate doubts about lost content and preserve brand consistency across all locations.

In fact, it is estimated that the average DAM system can save a company over £150,000 in as little as five years, while well-managed, consistent brands are worth up to 20 times as much as those that do not invest in controlling their digital library.

This is why DAM makes up a key component of our BAM by Papirfly™. In order to help our clients harness the full potential of their brand, it is critical that they can maintain, access and share their assets in one place, ensuring there is little-to-no room for inconsistencies to creep in or wasted resources spent on unnecessary content.

Nevertheless, while a DAM solution is ideal in principle, it is vital that you select one that meets your specific needs. While these will vary from company to company, below we’ve identified three critical considerations that you should keep in mind when looking to introduce this powerful software into your organisation.

3 important considerations for your DAM solution

1. Make navigation and user experience a priority

First, it is vital that your DAM solution presents an excellent user experience for your employees and any other users. Because, as we’ve identified earlier, the primary goal of any DAM is to make it easier for your team to find and use the resources they need to support the creation of marketing collateral. If the UX makes this challenging, the DAM is not working as it should.

In addition, a poor user experience will make it more likely that your employees avoid using the DAM, instead relying on less effective but user-friendly means of storing assets, such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

A good user experience will start with how people navigate the system:

• How intuitive is the structure, hierarchy and navigation of the software?
• Does the system allow you to tag and categorise assets using terminology you and your team are familiar with?
• Can you quickly filter resources by a particular tag or category to help you find the asset you’re looking for faster?
• Is the display and user interface straightforward and intuitive to users?
• Is it easy to share assets with your teams in a variety of locations?
• Can the system be translated into multiple languages to support its use by your teams across the globe?
• Does it offer any indication if an asset has already been uploaded to the system to remove the risk of duplication?
• Is it easy to operate across multiple devices, including mobile and tablets?
• Can you export digital assets into a variety of file formats?

These are just some of the questions you should ask about any prospective DAM solution to ensure it provides you and your team with an effective user experience. Without this, it will inevitably be ignored and underutilised, meaning you miss out on the ROI that other organisations gain from this kind of software.

Think of it as a library – if its filing system is too complicated or difficult to digest, it’s unlikely you’re going to visit it again.

However, the user experience also depends a great deal on how you as an organisation manage your assets when the system you’ve selected is implemented. While it can do a lot, it requires those responsible for the solution to manage it professionally and prudently. 

This includes ensuring that all labelling is applied consistently and in terminology that your global teams can recognise, that any resources specific to a particular location or outlet are clearly marked, and that assets that are grouped together are done so for a specific reason.

When the user interface offered by a high-quality DAM aligns with the effective organisation of the team operating it, then the management of your digital assets can reach a whole new level.

2. Work on a global and local level

Secondly, there is a need to differentiate between digital assets that are globally available, and resources that specifically cater to a particular market or location. A problem that our clients identify before working with Papirfly is that the time and resources required to produce dedicated campaigns for a particular location mean these often aren’t worthwhile.

Yet, as we’ve explored in other articles, localised marketing is essential to effectively engage your audience at a deeper, personalised level. Giving this attention can help you build stronger bonds with the various communities your brand interacts with and foster customer loyalty. Remember: 71% of consumers prefer advertising tailored to their situation.

How can a DAM solution help you achieve this? By establishing a central hub for all on-brand digital assets and making this accessible via the cloud to employees based around the world, you can provide them with the resources they need to create and share assets for localised campaigns, rather than conserving time and resources by sticking to a global, universal focus.

Through your DAM system, employees should be in a position to access content that is translatable to the required language and contains imagery that is culturally appropriate, which means you can create hyper-targeted local campaigns quickly to work alongside your global branding – all while ensuring your overarching brand messaging is never compromised.

Of course, BAM by Papirfly™ takes this a step further in providing teams, regardless of their design experience or expertise, with an intuitive creation suite and intelligent templates. This means that, once they have access to the assets available on the DAM, they can then immediately use these to edit or create new, tailored assets for an upcoming campaign, without the financial or time burden of bringing in a specialist.

3. Don’t give everyone access to everything

Thirdly, let’s discuss accessibility. While one of the key benefits that a DAM solution offers is sharing assets to employees worldwide, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll want every asset to be available to every person at all times.

This can lead to human error and inconsistencies creeping into your process. For instance, say someone mistakenly selects an asset designated for the incorrect country or campaign for a separate project; this would at a minimum be time wasted on developing an unusable asset, or at worst be shared to your audience and potentially hurting your brand’s reputation.

To prevent this from happening, it’s vital that any DAM software you implement has measures in place to assign administrators and lockdown certain assets for particular employees or locations. By adding this extra level of security, it gives you greater assurance that your assets are governed and nothing off-brand will be broadcast across any of your platforms.

In addition, setting these administration levels will make it possible that not everyone can upload or delete files, or can only do so when permission is granted. This helps add another layer of protection from duplicated or low-quality content reaching being stored within the library, which again goes further to protect your brand’s reputation.

Our BAM portal expands on this with an “add to basket” feature. This allows the user to select multiple files from different sources within the DAM and download these at one time, speeding up the process for people to access the resources they need.

Finally, check with your DAM provider if the system offers a way to monitor who is adding, sharing and editing assets. This ensures you have a record of any changes that have been made to your library of assets at any given time, so nothing ever has to slip under the radar. Plus, if it carries stats about how often particular assets are used, this can help marketing teams determine the ROI of these materials.

Take control of your digital library

We hope this will help you in your efforts to properly manage the vast array of digital assets that any organisation needs to have to hand nowadays. With the potential for assets to be mislaid or misused a high as ever due to the assortment of channels that organisations need to have a presence on, having a DAM solution that meets these considerations in particular is more crucial than ever before.

With that in mind, our BAM solution is geared with a dedicated, intelligent DAM, making it easy for you to store and locate an unlimited number of assets, categorise these appropriately and present them in the right format and optimal resolution.

However, BAM is much more than digital asset management, empowering users to also:

• Create high-quality, on-brand assets through an intuitive, powerful creation suite
• Educate your employees worldwide on the values and guidelines behind your brand
• Manage campaigns with a birds-eye view of all materials used at a given time

If you’d like to know more about how you can activate your global brand, request a demo or speak to our team today.

In a short span of time, the Coronavirus crisis has completely altered the landscape for people, businesses and more the world over. Organisations, regardless of size, industry or legacy, are now being pushed to adapt to the circumstances to meet this unprecedented challenge, be it:

• Employees working from home where they typically wouldn’t
• Changing office layouts and policies to meet social distancing regulations
• Adjusting the channels and messages broadcast to internal and external audiences

We are entering uncharted waters, which has sadly already caused the fall for many businesses. But now, arguably more than ever before, is the time for brands to get creative and maximise the tools at their disposal to help steady the ship in these troubled times.

That is where BAM by Papirfly™ can lend a hand. Our existing clients will already be aware of the scope that our all-in-one brand activation software covers, helping them create an unlimited amount of assets, share these with their teams across the globe and maintain total brand consistency. 

But, as the world adjusts to life with COVID-19, we would like to offer some timely advice for how you can truly unlock the potential of the BAM Portal to meet the unique challenges that these circumstances have produced. We hope this helps you thrive during this difficult period.

Expand your educate section 

First, now is the time to make full use of the ‘educate’ function of your BAM Portal. In typical times, this would be the home for key documents such as brand guidelines, EVPs and company policies, ensuring that your teams worldwide have a single source of truth for everything affecting your brand and are keeping things aligned.

But these aren’t typical times. Now, your educate section can and should act as a powerful repository of information for employees and other stakeholders about your brand’s approach to managing crisis situations.

At a time where confusion and contradiction are rampant among workers over how the Coronavirus affects them and their livelihoods, using this element of BAM by Papirfly™ to house vital information about company policy will help provide the clarity that people are crying out for, and minimise disruption to your day-to-day processes.

Examples of what additional documents and assets you’d incorporate into your educate area could include:

• Governmental guidance related to COVID-19
• Guidelines and procedures for working from home
• Any updated company policies
• Important notifications for employees and BAM users

Uploading these to your portal, with specific permissions available to ensure employees in a particular location or department only have access to the information relevant to them, will provide a great deal of reassurance and keep everyone on the same page on your company’s position. Remember – we’re all in this together.

Create crucial assets

While some brands and organisations have reacted to the Coronavirus outbreak by shutting off their messaging completely, others we feel are rightly recognising that it is more important than ever for companies to be actively producing materials for employees, customers and other audiences.

This is when your BAM Portal’s capacity to create on-brand assets efficiently and cost-effectively will pay dividends like never before. Team members, regardless of design experience, will able to produce tailored campaigns and assets for the situation at hand, whether it’s leaflets to be shared internally or marketing emails for your customers. 

With new information and guidance coming to light practically every day, having this portal gives you the power to quickly react to the news, adjust assets accordingly and engage with your audience, letting them know you’re on top of the situation. And, with users able to access the portal from anywhere, this can be achieved easily by your team members working from home.

Plus, with only 8% of consumers stating that advertising should stop in these circumstances, there’s a clear indication that people will continue to look to their preferred brands for information, reassurance, or simply to try and inject some normality into this increasingly solemn landscape. BAM will help you continue to meet their expectations.

Centralise your materials

As well as creating an abundance of bespoke materials for this new environment, it’s critical that these can be housed in one centralised location. Right now, your portal’s dedicated DAM facility will be essential to getting the tailored COVID-19 materials and campaigns out to your teams across the globe, as this remains a worldwide crisis.

Of course, different territories will have different government responses to Coronavirus and be impacted by it to varying degrees, so these assets will likely need to be adapted from your HQ in accordance with these as well as other cultural and language-based considerations.  

This would then be an opportunity to take advantage of the Store & Share’s ‘DAM’ ability to adjust who is able to access what materials. This will help ensure that there are no crossed wires between regions and that your team members only use on-brand content relevant to their location. With conflicting messages a central theme of this outbreak, staying consistent is paramount. 

Get ahead on campaign planning 

Finally, even if it’s hard to envisage right now, it’s crucial we don’t lose sight of the future. These current circumstances won’t last forever, and when everything is resolved, the brands that stand to benefit the most will be the ones ready to hit the ground running on the other side. 

So use BAM by Papirfly™ to get ahead on creative and strategic planning for campaigns, both now and following the present situation. With the ability to manage, plan and organise these across your international teams and assign newly created assets to these, you can put yourself in a position to immediately engage your audiences, be they customers, recruits or the wider public, when we return to some form of normality. 

In the meantime, this functionality could also potentially support a sustained social media or email marketing campaign geared around your brand’s perspective on COVID-19, ensuring you remain authentic to your values and characteristics.

Harness the power of BAM by Papirfly™

Has this has given you some food for thought over how BAM by Papirfly™ can play a key role in navigating these difficult circumstances? Whether you’re very familiar with our systems or don’t use them as much as you could, we hope that these suggestions can help your brand manage this challenge and come out the other side stronger than before.

If you’d like to discuss any of the suggestions we’ve put forward, contact your client success manager to explore these in more detail.

‘Humanising’ may sound like another buzzword, but it’s actually something that the world’s leading brands have been doing for decades. It’s a large part of what makes them so relatable to consumers across the globe. In this article, we emphasise the importance of humanising your brand to build stronger emotional connections with your audience.

What does humanising your brand mean?

In essence, it’s a way to shed the image of a soulless corporation and show the ‘human’ side of a business. It helps your customers put a face, or at least a personality, to the brand they are engaging with.

But, this is about more than projecting values and purpose. When you’re marketing to an audience who not only dislike most advertising, but will often go out of their way to avoid it, people aren’t just going to take your word for the great things your brand says about itself. What really matters is clear evidence of how your brand embodies the claims it makes in its marketing.

To humanise your brand you need to present it as an approachable entity with something relevant to offer.

Why do brands need to be human?

Nobody responds well to robotic advertising tactics. Yet so many brands come across in the same sales-heavy way. If they are able to become more human, brands can communicate with nuance, and provide a more authentic demonstration of value to develop stronger bonds with their audience.

Transparency and authenticity have become decisive purchasing factors for an increasing number of consumers. This makes it more important than ever to bestow your brand with the emotional intelligence to talk about any subject in a way that feels natural.

Humanising your brand allows you to produce content that uses emotional archetypes to tap into universal feelings that resonate with everyone. This means you can begin to create a personal relationship between brand and consumer and open doors to new ways to instill more trust in your brand.

Personalisation is an especially important consideration for digital marketing strategies — it’s an important way to gain trust, increase relevance and promote engagement. However, without the in-store experience offered by good sales agents, it’s all too easy to sound like a robot. It’s the simple things like a warm welcome, remembering a customer’s name and engaging in natural, unscripted conversation that make customers feel valued as individuals.

Humanising your brand is a way to win back these lost interactions. But to get it right, you need to go beyond faceless transactions and towards building a memorable relationship between brand and customer.

How to make your brand more human

As we mentioned before, your brand needs to sound human across every touchpoint. If you roll out a beautifully crafted email campaign that really connects with your audience, only to link them through to a sales-y, robotic-sounding landing page, the whole experience can be undone; the ‘human’ element disappears. With these steps, you can make sure that every aspect of your brand embodies the same personality traits and feels like a human:

#1 Tell your brand’s story

For your humanised brand to come through naturally, you need to tell stories, not just sell products. The stories you tell should make your audience see your business as a likeable, relatable person that represents your brand.

Telling stories is a fine art and there are endless ways to communicate them. You could weave them into your email loyalty campaigns, share them as articles on your blog or bring them to life through video. The important thing is that they all feel consistent and that they are told with authenticity.

A brand that got it right:

Airbnb does an excellent job of bringing the human element to their content by focussing on their hosts (the people that rent out their homes through the site) and the experiences of the travellers who have rented properties from them.

It’s a great example of how to make your audiences feel like an integral part of your brand by celebrating the ways in which they use a product or service.

#2 Celebrate your staff

Employee advocacy gives people a unique insight into what your business is really like on the inside. The ‘human nature’ of a brand inherently spreads from company culture — ultimately, it’s your employees that make your brand what it is.

Giving staff a platform to create and share their own content adds an extra layer of trust and authenticity to your brand. To give this some context, 76% of individuals surveyed in a recent study said that they’re more likely to trust content shared by “normal” people than by brands.

A brand that got it right: 

Starbucks created social media accounts for all of their employees, who they refer to as ‘partners’. This not only gives their employees a sense of belonging and responsibility, but also a dedicated platform to share the things they love about their day-to-day. 

Starbucks has also made their comprehensive social media guidelines available to all partners so that it’s easy for them to post relevant, engaging content while maintaining consistency with the brand.

#3 Empathise with your audience

Get to know who your audience really are. Find out what they care about, understand their pain points and find ways for your brand to become the solution.

Just like any positive human relationship, empathy needs to start with a two-way conversation. Don’t be afraid of customer feedback, even if it’s negative — every interaction with your audience will help you learn more about them and build (or re-build) their trust.

A brand that got it right: 

Elon Musk’s public-facing approach to entrepreneurship has made him synonymous with his brand. So any negative feedback from Tesla customers is negative feedback towards him personally. When Tesla driver, Paul Franks, Tweeted about making an improvement to his car, Elon Musk replied within 30 minutes promising to solve it in the next software update.

Being able to put an instantly recognisable face to your brand is a failsafe way to humanise any company. But what makes this example so impressive, is translating this quality into open communication between founder and customer — making them feel listened to, even if it’s just via a tweet.

#4 Educate, don’t sell 

For your marketing to feel human, it needs to show that your brand understands what your audience wants and needs.

Instead of pushing features, talk about solutions. Tell your audience what it is about your product or service that will make their lives better and how.

A brand that got it right: 

Amazon-owned shoe retailer, Zappos, knows that their audience has come to expect a simple returns process and fast, low-cost shipping when shopping online. Their advertising not only acknowledges this, but suggests that it’s every customer’s ‘right’ to have them.

It’s a genius way for Zappos to talk about their renowned customer-friendly policies while making their audience feel front-and-centre of their messaging.

#5 It’s not just what you say, but how you say it

Tone of voice is one of the first giveaways of your brand’s personality. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t just mean being quirky. There is a balance between conversational and professional, but using overly formal language or filling your copy with jargon doesn’t impress anyone — normally it just leaves them bored and confused. Anyone who’s a real expert in a subject can distil concepts and information, and present them in a way that everyone can understand.

Setting clear tone of voice guidelines is vital for achieving this balance and making sure that your brand sounds like one entity across any touchpoint. For more on this, be sure to read, Why tone of voice and language are critical to a consistent brand.

A brand that got it right: 

Throughout their fierce rivalry with McDonald’s, Burger King has become known for their quick, light-hearted sense of humour, never missing an opportunity to poke fun at the competition. However, the true test of any tone of voice is its ability to flip (pun intended) when it needs to, without losing a long-established brand personality.

When COVID-19 hit the hospitality sector especially hard during lockdown, Burger King found a way to use their witty writing style to create heartfelt solidarity with their rivals at a time when every restaurant chain was feeling the effects of the pandemic.

#6 Practice what you preach

Today’s consumer can spot a disingenuous marketing tactic a mile off. To an extent, this has probably always been the case, but the difference now is that audiences have social media platforms to call brands out for saying they’re one thing and acting like another.

Jumping on band-wagons or trying to capitalise on important causes is never a good look. The best way to avoid these marketing faux-pas is to humanise your brand from the inside out. Take your brand personality from what your business values and the way it already behaves.

A brand that got it right:

Patagonia is a brand that is synonymous with their commitment to sustainability and the environment, and has been since day one. Their values have become something that countless brands try to replicate but which very few are able to back up when pushed.

Even now that they have become renowned as being one of the most ethical brands out there, Patagonia still makes sure that they embody every claim they make about their products. Whether that’s pioneering the use of organic cotton in the early 90s, or recently announcing that corporate logos will no longer be added to its clothing in a bid to reduce landfill.

#7 Challenging perceptions

The best way to win over negative feedback is to own it. By trying to ignore an issue raised by a disgruntled few or sweep bad press under the carpet you will only add fuel to the fire.
Instead of shying away from confrontation, show the human side of your brand by opening up an honest, transparent, two-way conversation. When you talk about both the negatives and the positives with your audience, your brand shows that it has nothing to hide.

A brand that got it right:

When misleading information on Reddit and Twitter began to cause confusion around their payment service, Swedish FinTech company, Klarna, found a creative way to ‘set the record straight’.

Working with contemporary artist Ignasi Monreal, they commissioned mythical-inspired artwork based on the top myths being spread about the company. They also created the Mythbuster Challenge as part of the campaign which incentivised users to discover the truth about Klarna for the chance to win prizes.

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Bring out your brand’s human side with BAM by Papirfly™

It takes time to give any business an honest, believable personality, and a lot of work and dedication to maintain it. With BAM by Papirfly™, you can create consistent marketing assets and implement failsafe processes to humanise your brand. Here’s how:

Make your brand guidelines impossible to ignore

• BAM gives you one place to store and share relevant assets, documentation and guidelines. It means you can easily educate your teams to produce content that’s firmly attached to your brand purpose

Create consistent on-brand assets

• To keep your brand looking, feeling and sounding like its true self, consistency is key. BAM allows you to set predefined templates that give teams the freedom to be creative, without veering off-brand.

Empower your staff

• With BAM’s easy-to-use creation suite, your teams will have everything they need to create studio-quality assets with no outside help needed. Working within set parameters, they can tell your brand’s story through digital, print, social media and video.

Stay on top of your marketing output

• Through BAM’s innovative portal, you can have a clear overview of your campaigns and control who has access to prevent any misuse of materials.

Want to learn more about capturing your audience’s imagination with BAM? The best place to start is with a live demo of all of its innovative features. You can book yours here.

Content is the fuel that powers the entire marketing engine. It is how organisations of all shapes and sizes engage, communicate and connect with their audiences worldwide. It builds brand awareness and spreads your messages to the masses.

Videos. Social media. Blog posts. Emails. Brochures. Posters. Web banners. The forms of content modern marketers can harness are broader than ever before, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t think content is king.

With an ever-growing number of mediums and platforms for content, the possibilities for marketers are infinite. Budgets, however, are not. Content production often takes a sizeable slice of any marketing team’s annual budget – leaving little room for other activities. And, despite the amount that is already spent, there is always more that can be done…

The importance and necessity of content cannot be overstated, but more than likely it poses a significant strain on your budget. We want to iterate some points about why content is crucial, the pain points it presents towards your budget, and how you can streamline production to maximise your budget’s true potential.

6 reasons why content production is crucial

To cover every benefit that content marketing offers to an organisation would take an article all by itself (and then some!). But, here are some of the top-line reasons why it is critical for marketers in the current landscape.

1. Lead generation

A brand’s content is a powerful technique for reaching out to prospective customers, helping them engage them with articles, videos, imagery and more in the build towards an eventual sale.

2. Brand awareness

Content across all platforms can project a brand’s values, identity, offering and more, consistently raising its awareness across a global audience.

3. Digital presence

In an increasingly competitive field for customers’ attention, content helps establish a strong digital footprint, increasing the possibilities of online consumers finding a brand’s website and platforms.

4. Customer demand

Modern consumers crave content on a daily basis, especially online. Content allows you to respond with the information your target audience wants, ensuring they associate you with the knowledge they gather.

5. Strengthens relationships

It takes time to build customer loyalty. The more you can supply people with useful, valuable content, the more likely that this will bolster their affinity with your brand.

6. Builds authority

In addition, the more value people gain from the content you supply, the more they will associate you as an authority in your market, enhancing your overall reputation.

Why is content production so expensive?

So, now it can be left in no doubt how crucial content is for today’s brands, this brings us to the crux of this article – the cost of content production. Of course, this will vary depending on an organisation’s size and reach, but it typically takes up a substantial chunk of their overall marketing budget.

There are many factors that contribute to this significant expense:

• The ever-increasing content avenues for marketers to tackle – social media, video, emails, print, etc.
• The need to meet growing audience expectations, both internal and external
• The evolution of new techniques and platforms with which to present content
• The challenges recruiting talented designers, copywriters, editors and others at the forefront of content production
• The importance of optimising content for various mediums, especially mobile
• The need to translate and adapt content for audiences around the world

While there is no hard-and-fast rule for the cost of content, you will have to consider aspects like:

• The cost of the technology and tools required to facilitate content production
• The amount of content that must be created for a particular campaign or channel
• The hours it takes for your team to produce content
• The financial cost of the hours, namely employee wages and overheads
• The type of content being produced – a blog post or static image will probably be less costly to produce than a video or brochure

This can rapidly eat away at your marketing budget – and that is before incorporating the time and resources spent on the strategy and ideation of content, the project management surrounding each stage of the production process, how content will be distributed to the audience, and analysing its performance in the following weeks and months.

In short, the reason why content production is so expensive is that so many steps and moving parts go into creating, verifying and publishing any piece of content. It is much more involved than many outside of the marketing world give it credit for, and that comes at a substantial cost.

An example: the costs of video production

Video is the most-used content format, with 59% of marketers that perform content marketing using video. But consider the stages that may be involved in video production – all of which come at a price.

Depending on the scale of production, it can account for numerous hours of employee time and considerable resources.

The challenge sustaining mass content production

The heavy processes behind most forms of content production can often make performing this on a mass scale very challenging. With budgets and available time limited, something’s got to give, whether it’s the amount of content you produce, the number of resources you can devote to each element, or the overall quality of the output. Something inevitably suffers.

Many marketing teams seek to remedy this problem by outsourcing content creation work to freelancers or agencies. While this alleviates the time and cost problem associated with conducting this work in-house, this approach has its own limitations in respect to enabling mass content production:

• Freelancers and agencies will have other priorities to focus on beyond your brand, meaning work may arrive to their schedule, not necessarily yours
• The more your organisation relies on these third parties, the more costly their services will be
• Being outside of your company, the content they create may not reflect the nuances and identify of your brand, leading to numerous edits and rewrites

This leaves marketing teams with a conundrum. They recognise that content is vital to their overall marketing efforts, and will want to produce as much as possible to meet their audience’s needs. 

However, they cannot break the bounds of their budget, without compromising the quality of their output, or forcing employees to work unreasonable hours to meet this demand.

BAM – the ultimate budget stretcher

If you are one of the many trapped in this uncomfortable state, BAM by Papirfly™ is empowering brands across the globe to stretch their budgets further than ever before, while producing more content than they could have possibly envisaged. All in-house. With no specialist support.

BAM enables teams to be more agile and cost-effective with their content production. Intelligent, pre-set templates lock down brand consistency and provide users with a simple, straightforward environment where they can produce high-quality assets in a matter of minutes.

All variables are kept within a predefined format, allowing those with little-to-no design knowledge or experience to create, edit and update assets with no risk of tarnishing your brand identity. This spreads across digital and print formats – social media posts, HTML emails, posters, digital signage, videos – all this and more can be exported in the correct size and style in a fraction of the time it would take to do from scratch.

Through this easy-to-use platform that allows no margin for error in branding and quality, any organisation can immediately scale up their content production exponentially – all while simultaneously saving costs that can be dedicated to other projects or marketing areas.

Plus, this isn’t the only way BAM makes life simpler and more empowering to marketing teams:

• A safe and secure DAM platform allows teams to easily share resources with coworkers around the world, rather than waste time sending over large files
• Entire version histories and audit trails are recorded, while approval workflows ensure that content can be checked, amended and approved promptly
• Multi-language and localisation capabilities mean content can be rapidly translated for specific international audiences

Over 1 million users worldwide are harnessing the power of BAM. If it sounds too good to be true, download our dedicated pitch deck to explore the far-reaching benefits of our software, and give you all the information you need to secure buy-in throughout your company.

As content demands continue to grow at a greater rate than most marketing budgets, take a step today to transform your production power forever. Get in touch with our team to learn more about BAM, or get to grips with it yourself by booking a free demo.

Even if you have an abundance of project managers, marketers and creatives a-plenty, the life of a marketing team is often erring on the border of chaos. The nature of the industry means that things are constantly moving – perceptions shift all the time and the way we deliver always needs to be reinvented as we learn and grow.

We like to shout about Brand Activation Management (BAM) because we know the difference it is already making to some of the world’s biggest brands. Coca-Cola, IBM, Vodafone, HSBC and more are benefiting from a much easier way of working, increasing their capacity, productivity and job satisfaction through our leading BAM solution. 

Here we take a look at the 9 best-loved features of our leading portal…  

#1 Multi-asset creation

This feature allows you to take any new or existing digital or print creative created with Papirfly, and quickly adapt it for any other format and size. For example, you may have a new billboard creative and need to turn it into a social media post across multiple platforms. All you have to do is open the file and select which platforms you need it adapted for – BAM does the rest. You can then make additional tweaks and edits until you get it just right. 

• Easily create and edit video, social, email, digital and print assets
• What used to take hours now takes minutes
• Teams can quickly resize and edit without using a third party

#2 Flexible templates, fixed guidelines 

Templates are created by your in-house team or external agency with lots of editable features, including logos, imagery, colours, text, layouts and more. What’s great is that you can put exact guidelines and pre-defined rules in place to give your teams as little or as much freedom as you like. It prevents the wrong colours, imagery and text being used, off-brand assets being shared and logos being skewed. There’s little-to-no room for error with these easy-to-use templates.

• Flexible digital and print templates
• No skills required, anyone can use it
• Pre-defined rules mean everything is delivered to agency standard

#3 Branded videos

Video is now a must-have for marketers. It can feel like a dark art if you’re not familiar with how to produce them, but our in-platform branded video tool takes away any doubt and allows you to create powerful promotional videos without any of the fuss, headache or expense. You can easily import and select your footage, add bespoke intros, bring in titles, subtitles, dividers, add music and more. Training takes less than half an hour and once you have it mastered, your team will be able to create what they need in minutes.

• Professional looking videos made in-house
• Straightforward software 
• The ability to resize videos for different channels and platforms

#4 Digitised sign-off 

When there are multiple people that need sight of a creative asset before it’s set loose into the world, having a single place to see, amend and sign off each piece of marketing makes life a lot easier. With BAM you can put approval workflows in place for different teams or asset types, enabling you to release the asset only once it’s approved. 

In a nutshell…

• Digital trail of sign-offs
• Make comments directly onto assets
• Complete edits inside the portal

#5 Configurable DAM

BAM includes an integrated Digital Asset Management tool, that organises each of your assets in an accessible and visual way. Acting as a central database for all campaigns, imagery and documents, employees can quickly save, search, edit and send anything in the DAM (providing that they have the right permissions). The DAM acts as a single source of truth for all teams, and allows management to see how frequently each one has been used and by whom.

• Store and categorise assets by team, sub-brand, campaign or country
• Download, save, share and edit from within the portal
• Keep on top of what’s being used and how frequently

#6 Multi-language and localisation capabilities

When you are looking to adapt core campaigns for different markets, the BAM creation suite gives you the ability to switch out text in the right language and import culturally relevant imagery and sub-brands.

In a nutshell…

• Pull in country-specific product data 
• Right-to-left support 
• React to local market demands quickly

#7 Campaign planning and asset categorisation

A visual planner lets you create campaigns and store everything you need in relation to it within a dedicated part of the DAM. You also have the ability to make certain briefs, templates and imagery only available for relevant teams and countries. This feature helps you keep everything neat and tidy, leaving no doubt on what is going to market and when. Create a timeline so you can see what you have coming up and plan ahead. 

• A central, visual campaign planner
• Reduces wasted time locating files
• Pull stats to see how often assets were used in dedicated campaigns or across regions

#8 Tailored view for brands, sub-brands and locations 

The software is available through a single login and can be accessed remotely, without having to download anything. Each team has a dedicated view where they only see the campaigns, guidelines, assets and templates relevant to them. Management teams have a birds-eye view of which teams are using what, how many times and calculate ROI of BAM across the business.

In a nutshell… 

• Access the documents and information relevant to them
• Use assets, templates, imagery and more that all are specifically tailored to a market or sub-brand
• Build a global view of activity

#9 Dedicated educate section 

While the templates will keep teams on-brand, your dedicated ‘educate’ section will contain all the guidelines needed to educate them on the importance of brand consistency and the nuance of each sub-brand. Users will be able to access colour palettes, typefaces, icons and more, as well as have a clear idea of how it’s used.

In a nutshell…

• A central place for all guidelines, documents and brand materials
• Specialised views for different teams
• Help teams understand why your brand is executed in a certain way 

Transform your marketing production with BAM

BAM by Papirfly™ is a market-leading, all-in-one brand activation solution. Teams of any size and ability can produce studio standard video, social, email, print and digital assets in a matter of minutes. An infinite amount of assets with a single annual license.  

Find out more about BAM or speak to our team for a demo today.

As the pressures and demands on marketing teams worldwide grow year upon year, it seems budgets are going in the opposite directions.

At least that is the impression Gartner’s Annual CMO Survey presents. In 2021 marketing budgets plummeted to their lowest percentage of overall company revenue on record at just 6.4% – significantly lower than 2020’s 11%. In addition, Gartner also found that:

• No industry averaged a double-digit percentage, with consumer products and goods (CPG) the highest average at 8.3%

Obviously, this has no doubt been influenced by factors like the global pandemic. But, there is no set timeline for how long the economic effects of COVID-19 will remain. This, and other global events yet to play out, may be a situation that marketing teams may have to contend with for a while – which is problematic considering the challenges they face in the current landscape.

A need to be agile to consumer trends. Maintaining a frequent stream of consistent content across multiple channels. Future-proofing processes against external disruptions. Preserving employee wellbeing and ensuring they have the tools to do their jobs as capable as possible. 

That’s a lot of plates spinning at once, and with less budget than ever to keep them going. Now knowing where to focus your budget is critical; you cannot afford to waste it on short-term fixes. 

You need a solution that will bring widespread benefits to your marketing efforts, empower your employees and maximise the full potential of your budget. In short, you need Brand Activation Management (BAM) – our area of expertise at Papirfly.

Here, we cover 4 key areas that marketing teams must re-evaluate in the face of restricted budgets, and why investing in BAM makes a big difference.

Strategic, creative and brand

Strategy, creative and brand development should be among the core focuses for any marketing budget. Without these, your brand experiences no innovation or growth – it is left in limbo, or constantly putting out the same material regardless of how the world changes around it.

This therefore is an area that requires ongoing investment, and Gartner’s research backs this up. Their surveyed CMOs report that an average of 11.3% of their marketing budget into programs and operational areas is devoted to brand strategy. This is the third largest segment behind digital commerce and marketing operations.

But, with budgets tighter than ever, the knock-on effect of maintaining investment in strategy, creative and branding means it has to be taken away from other areas. Production levels decline. Employees are let go. Campaigns are restricted. More advanced marketing techniques are taken out of the equation.

So, marketing teams are left with a choice:

• Restrict their spending on strategy and brand development, hindering innovation and creativity in your organisation;
• Find a way to cut down the costs of other processes so strategy and branding can still receive the attention they deserve.

Where BAM makes the difference

BAM can be a crucial difference-maker in allowing you to devote as much time, focus and resources (if not more) to your strategy and branding as you would have with a larger budget.

By enabling your team to streamline and simplify the production of assets across all marketing channels, this will save a significant amount of time and money that can be dedicated to continuously evolving and adapting your marketing strategy, creative direction and branding. This helps to ensure it doesn’t go stale, so you keep up with ever-changing customer trends and demands and don’t fall behind your competition.

We’ll talk about production more closely in the next section. But BAM’s capacity to support your strategising extends even further:

• It provides a central, online repository to house all key documents and files relating to branding, marketing strategy and creative direction
• The brand guidelines you spend time crafting during your planning sessions are easily accessible by your team members, ensuring they aren’t ignored and that consistency is maintained across all channels
• Campaign planning gives you a birds-eye view overall marketing activity throughout your organisation, empowering you to set up, monitor and adjust campaigns with total ease and complete control

With consumer expectations reaching all-time highs, prioritising and evolving your marketing and brand strategies are more crucial tasks than ever. BAM allows you to maintain that focus in the face of tightening budgets.

Content production

Content production represents one of the biggest overheads for marketing teams worldwide. With more channels available than ever before for brands to engage their audiences and build visibility, taking full advantage of these has traditionally required a great deal of time and resources.

But, with budgets shrinking, it is becoming a real challenge for marketing teams to uphold the same level of production through conventional processes. Sacrifices have to be made somewhere, whether that is limiting the number of channels utilised and how frequently content is created for them, or budget being pulled away from other areas.

Additionally, Gartner’s survey has illustrated that marketing teams’ reliance on agencies to bear the burden of content production is noticeably declining.

So, with agencies now less available to pick up the slack on content production, how can internal marketing teams continue to populate their channels with the same frequency, consistency and quality with less budget?

By revolutionising their approach to content production…

Where BAM makes the difference

One of BAM’s primary benefits is the ability to ramp up the efficiency of content production, while simultaneously allowing you to bring more of this work in-house.

In a matter of minutes anyone in your organisation, regardless of design skills or experience, can produce studio-standard, perfectly branded assets across all mediums. Social media posts, videos, digital banners, emails, posters, brochures – all of these and more can be produced faster through BAM.

How is this possible? Well, it’s because BAM:

• Harnesses intelligent, custom-built templates, which can be instantly adapted to fit the dimensions and requirements for all of your digital and print channels
• Utilises templates with locked-down elements, ensuring that there is no risk of going off-brand regardless of who is creating an asset
• Empowers your teams to use pre-programmed templates with set design, text and database parameters, so high-quality designs can be produced with ease
• Has dedicated language and localisation features so that assets can immediately be translated and adapted for your international markets
• Helps you get organised with an in-built DAM system – allowing you to store all approved assets in one location, to be shared, reused and adapted by your teams worldwide

By using BAM, marketing teams across the globe are seeing the time, cost and effort involved in production shrink significantly, allowing them to overcome tight budgets and even ramp up both the number of channels they use and how frequently they post to each of these.

In fact, BAM by Papirfly™ users save an average of £421,000 per year on production fees alone, as well as 297 days’ worth of production time. That is an extraordinary amount of time and budget you save to be reinvested into other areas. Especially when you consider that you only have to produce 20 assets per month for the solution to pay for itself.

Furthermore, with your employees more capable of producing exceptional assets in-house, this helps your team handle the fact that there’s less budget available for agency support. This way, you can devote your limited agency budget on important high-value projects and strategising, rather than let this go to waste on routine production.

In short, BAM puts the power of content creation into the hands of internal marketing teams. They can produce content faster and more cost-effectively with no drop in quality, enabling them to make full use of their marketing channels and get campaigns to market sooner.

Team dynamics

Restrictions placed on budgets will likely have knock-on effects on the composition and dynamics of marketing teams. Personnel may be let go due to the lack of funding or their roles becoming obsolete, while at the same time the remaining employees will be expected to maintain standards and spur growth despite these new limitations.

This could lead to a very precarious situation in many organisations. Employees being asked to work harder and under greater levels of pressure is unlikely to inspire job satisfaction. Performance levels could drop due to a lack of motivation, and talented people may walk.

If you are having to streamline your marketing team in response to budget cuts, investment in technology will be crucial to maintain performance and help those remaining to fulfil their role as capably as possible.

Where BAM makes the difference

As noted earlier, BAM works to make life easier for its users by minimising the time and effort it takes to produce on-brand assets. Rather than designers and other employees spending hours at a time creating, revising and adapting materials, this can now be done in a matter of minutes, with proofing and amends happening in real-time.

This upskilling through technology has an overall positive effect on team dynamics:

• Employees feel empowered to perform their roles with maximum efficiency and effectiveness
• They feel like they are directly contributing to the development of their brand
• They feel like their organisation is investing in them by training them to use this technology
• They benefit from completing their work in a shorter space of time, allowing them to maintain a healthy work-life balance

Furthermore, by being a completely digital and online platform, BAM can be set up to be used from anywhere at any time. This can allow an organisation to institute flexible or remote working opportunities for their marketing teams, which may boost morale, increase productivity, and make your brand more attractive to potential candidates.

Even if you are in the fortunate position to be growing your marketing team despite shallower budgets, empowering your team with digital tools like BAM helps create a more dynamic work environment, as well as enabling you to push more budget towards recruitment, onboarding and other areas of marketing.

Digital advertising and media spend

Bucking the trend illustrated by Gartner, the IPA Bellwether Report indicates there is a big boom anticipated for digital advertising spending, with global ad spend expected to grow by 12.6% and reach $665bn by the end of 2021.

This demonstrates how high a priority marketing teams and brands generally are placing on this form of advertising. Gartner does reiterate this by noting that a massive 72.2% of total marketing budgets is being devoted to pure-play digital channels.

Therefore, the onus is on teams to maximise the potential of their own digital advertising, to help them stand out on these saturated channels against competitors – who will likely be looking to harness these as much as possible too.

Where BAM makes the difference

Again, BAM can help brands achieve this goal and accelerate their presence on digital ads by speeding up the process of creating and sharing these assets. By making production more efficient, your team can become more ever-present on these highly sought-after channels than competitors still relying on conventional processes.

Particularly at a time where marketing budgets are being stretched to their limits, this is an ideal opportunity for brands to ramp up production when others are lacking the resources to dedicate to this. If you have the technology like BAM that makes this attainable, you can steal a march on the competition and make a larger mark on the digital landscape.

Moreover, the speed and reliability of BAM enables teams to react quickly to events and trends that resonate with their audience. This enhanced agility empowers you to produce campaigns built around these trends, engaging both new and existing customers with up-to-date, relevant content.

At a time where digital advertising is a top priority among marketers worldwide, anything you can do to gain a competitive edge in this setting will improve your prospects tremendously.

Take marketing budgets further with BAM

With marketing budgets increasingly limited, it is important that teams focus on the right areas to invest in that will make the biggest difference to their overall performance.

As we have hopefully demonstrated here, making BAM a priority for next year’s budget will have a significant knock-on effect on your whole department. By streamlining the time and costs associated with production and enabling your team to do more in-house, you can free up your budget for other essential areas, from strategy and brand development to digital advertising.

Make this quarter count – discover the incredible potential that BAM by Papirfly™ offers and how it can enhance the potential of your marketing budget like never before, get in touch with our team today or book your free demo.

If you’re suffering from imposter syndrome, you may not even know it. That’s because it manifests itself as thoughts and feelings that leave you convinced that all your past successes are down to luck rather than hard work. 

No matter how much evidence suggests otherwise, this unfounded fear of being found out can cause major self-doubt, stress and anxiety for brand managers at every level.

Even the most successful people feel like frauds

Imposter syndrome is a phenomenon that has taken over the workplace. It affects employees just starting out as well as those with a string of career successes.

To become a brand manager in the first place, you will have already proved that you have the ability to keep your brand consistent, provide strategic direction and handle high-pressure situations. So, whether you feel deserving of recognition or not, being where you are now is something to feel good about.

In fact, high achievers are susceptible to imposter syndrome precisely because they have set a high bar for themselves. The trouble comes with not being able to accept their talents.

Why are brand managers being so tough on themselves?

Imposter syndrome in marketing has been bubbling away for a long time. However, there has been a noticeable spike in the last 10 years or so. But what’s causing it?

Social media has found its way into every part of our lives — including work. It puts us under constant pressure to maintain a polished image of career success that’s neither completely true nor realistically attainable. When we are only comparing ourselves to the very best of other people’s achievements, of course we will begin to question our own.

In 2020, brand managers had to deal with a huge shift in the way they work. During periods of lockdown, working from home has exasperated imposter syndrome for a number of reasons, most notably:

Online communication

As meetings and reviews move online, we’re missing the non-verbal forms of communication that can be difficult to get across in emails and video calls. Without these subtle cues, it’s easy to mistake a simple comment about your work for a harsh critique.

Lack of office interactions

Working alone, there are less natural or informal opportunities to interact with your team. This makes it difficult to tell whether the right people are noticing, or appreciating, the work that you’re putting in.

Assuming everyone else is doing fine

Imposter syndrome loves isolation. Without an office full of people around you, it can be easy to lose perspective and convince yourself that you are the only person struggling with a particular project.

If you made it through, you did great

Feeling unprepared or out of your depth is a perfectly reasonable reaction to such an unexpected situation, but it left many brand managers feeling that they are not right for the job. 

Even if you made some mistakes or had to change tack more than a few times, managing a brand through a global pandemic is a huge achievement, all things considered.

5 types of imposter that could be hidden in every brand manager

Global pandemics aside, being a successful brand manager leaves you open to imposter syndrome at any time.

In her book ‘The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It’, Dr. Valerie Young highlights five ways that imposter syndrome can manifest itself:

The Expert

Due to their need to know every last detail about a subject before they can complete a task, ‘The Expert’ uses up too much time searching for information. This is the feeling that you will never know enough to be truly qualified for your role.

The Perfectionist 

By setting themselves unattainably high goals, ‘The Perfectionist’ experiences unnecessary anxiety, worry and self-doubt. This means they’ll ruminate over small mistakes and focus on failures over celebrating achievements.

The Natural Genius

This type of imposter is especially common in high achievers. When someone is used to mastering skills quickly, their ‘Natural Genius’ makes them feel ashamed when they are struggling with something particularly difficult.

The Soloist

With a strong preference for working alone, ‘The Soloist’ is afraid that asking for help will somehow prove that they are incompetent. 

The Superhero 

Through working unsustainable hours without time-off, ‘The Superhero’ can often experience burnout in an attempt to prove their ability and commitment to the role.

How to unmask your imposter

Identifying imposter syndrome is the first and most difficult step in overcoming the issues that are holding back countless brand managers. Next, you have to learn to catch negative thoughts and feelings before they take hold. These techniques can help you stop imposter syndrome in its tracks: 

#1 Accepting that you are a work in progress

As a brand manager, you will be dealing with new situations where you may not have all the answers. Learning to be OK with not knowing everything and seeking help from someone more experienced, will get rid of the notion that you have to be perfect to be successful. You may find out that they have been in a similar position themselves in the past.

#2 Beware the inner critic

Learning to silence the voice in your head that’s saying you’re not good enough means you have to find out where it’s coming from. Ask yourself if it really holds any evidence — does it really reflect what you, or the people in your life, actually think? 

#3 Spend more time looking outward

Imposter syndrome is introspective by its very nature but, as a brand manager, you need to be working as part of a team. As cheesy as it sounds, helping others is the best way to build self-esteem and shift the focus from where you think you might be failing, to where you can succeed together.

#4 Write down your achievements

When your mind is filled with fear and self-doubt, it can be easy to write-off everything you’ve worked for as sheer luck. If you made it to the position of brand manager, then that simply can’t be true. The quickest way to dismiss the idea that you’re a fraud is to write a list of everything you’ve achieved in the last five years. You’ll be amazed at how much you’ve accomplished.

#5 Learn how to fail

Despite appearances, every great brand manager has experienced more failures than successes throughout their career. The key takeaway is that they didn’t let it stop them. Instead of seeing failure as a sign that you’re not good enough, look at it as the driving force for self-development.

Give your team the tools they need to shine

When you have a strong team driving your brand forward, it’s much more difficult for imposter syndrome to halt your progress.  

Bringing your team together with regular group catch-ups, team Slack channels and funding for training will help them recognise what they’re already great at and give them the confidence to push their abilities — without the overwhelming fear of failure.

An all-encompassing brand activation management software like BAM by Papirfly™ will also help reinforce your team’s best attributes with features like:

A full asset creation suite

Making it easy to create studio-quality assets without having to budget for agency support.

Customisable templates 

Make sure your team’s flawless brand assets stay consistent across every market.

A single source of truth

Help your team stay up-to-date with your brand purpose, guidelines and evolution.

To learn more about how you can build on your achievements by bringing your team innovation through BAM, get in touch or book your live demo today.