In today’s digital world, attention is precious, and unless your brand is instantly recognisable and memorable, it risks being lost in the crowd. With so much competition to create and maintain an iconic brand, it is important for your company to consider how you are managing your brand assets, and to ensure that your enterprise has the tools to enable its brand teams to succeed. 

In this article, we look at five reasons why your business could benefit from a quality brand management software solution.

What is brand management software?

Brand management software is designed to help businesses create and coordinate high quality brand experiences. A good brand management solution enables you to provide stylish and consistent customer interactions while empowering your staff with creative tools and clear brand guidelines. It also helps you plan and monitor effective brand marketing campaigns – all while adding to your brand’s integrity and ability to make a lasting impact.

Here are 5 different ways a brand management platform can help you reach your growth goals.

1. Building customer trust and brand equity

Customers trust brands that present as consistent, coherent, and well thought through. Often, the sign of a truly great brand is that we recognise it – whether in physical locations, advertisements or on social media – without even needing to see a name, logo or product. These brands generate huge revenue and are usually “household names”. Why? Brand equity. 

Brand equity is the perceived value and influence a brand has in its customers’ minds, accounting for factors like reputation, how recognisable the brand is, and long term customer loyalty. Put simply, customers trust brands that are familiar, consistent, and form part of the fabric of everyday life.

A brand management software solution gives your company all it needs to maximise the customer experience. It enables you to plan and deliver high quality brand campaigns, while minimising the communication bottlenecks and workflow inefficiencies that lead to incoherent strategies, out-of-date messaging and unidentified discrepancies. Whether we like it or not, we all judge books by their covers. Brand management software ensures that your customers are satisfied every time they interact with the brand.

2. Establishing brand security and integrity

Once a brand is active, it’s a constant challenge for marketing teams and managers to ensure the rest of the business understands the brand strategy, adheres to the brand guidelines, and keeps up to date with the latest modifications to brand assets. Even in a small company, it’s hard to maintain brand consistency when staff are busy juggling tasks and chasing important deadlines. In a large enterprise spanning multiple regions, languages and verticals it’s an even greater challenge.

Brand management software provides a central hub for brand assets, guidelines and updates, ensuring that staff are only interacting with the latest published versions. Custom controls and user access permissions ensure that every member of staff can instantly access and use the materials that they need, while preventing the circulation of out-of-date brand messaging and assets in emails, .pdf documents and virtual drives.

Prior to brand management tools, teams simply lacked the capabilities to establish dependable workflows, publish updates and monitor usage patterns. With a brand management solution, you can be sure that every time your staff are using brand assets, they are aligned with your overall brand strategy.

3. Improving workflow efficiency

We all know that in business, efficiency is the key to productivity. A great brand management software will dramatically reduce the amount of time staff spend rooting around through emails and file directories for brand assets, or creating them when they cannot find the ones they need. A Digital Asset Management system, with clear brand asset categorisation, search functions, and templates, will provide your people with everything they need to produce the assets they need, when they need them.

The same goes for brand team members and managers, who spend large portions of their working hours reviewing assets and materials to ensure they align with the overall brand identity and guidelines. Rather than leaving these review processes to long email chains, ad-hoc meetings, and other back alleys, a brand management solution can be cost effective too, as it provides all the tools and dashboards for staff to manage brand materials in an all-in-one platform designed to make operations slicker and easier to execute. 

4. Empowering your people with brand ownership

Today’s employees value participation and meaning. They want to work in businesses that provide opportunities for creativity and pathways for learning and growth. They are not isolated economic agents – they want to belong.

Brand management software opens up organisation-wide sharing cultures, where employees are not passive users of brand materials but active owners and participants in their production. Using the most innovative tools, your people can use brand templates aligned to guidelines, edit them based on their needs, and keep them on the brand platform for other users to explore and rework. Teamwork and collaborations can be streamlined, with staff interacting via the brand marketing platform and motivated to create great brand experiences for customers. 

Teams can also quickly access training and guidance for correctly maintaining brand consistency, and can participate in the creation of quality, market-ready brand assets – without needing to learn complex design skills and install expensive creative suites. With great internal branding processes, employees quickly become brand ambassadors, enjoying innovative brand usage and championing well-executed campaigns.

5. Enhancing marketing strategies

In the digital environment, organisations can coordinate and integrate their activities like never before, leading to real brand recognition and lasting competitive advantage. However, it is just as possible to leave teams and decision makers working from different information sources and platforms, effective collaboration and strategic brand management near-impossible.

Brand management software gives your company the measurements and the levers to coordinate brand campaigns and strategies in real-time, learning and improving along the way while ensuring the entire business is up-to-date with changes and developments. Via the central brand platform, decision makers can access accurate insights into how specific campaigns are performing and how staff and customers are interacting, and can make effective tweaks and changes in light of new knowledge, market shifts, and over- and underperforming brand assets. 

Discover the all-in-one brand management platform

In this article we looked at 5 reasons why brand management software is essential for a modern brand. Investing in quality brand management software is essential in today’s digital landscape, not only for maintaining brand integrity and coherence but also for creating thriving working cultures and customer relationships.

If you are interested in learning more about brand management solutions with Papirfly, discover our all in one brand management platform.

Today marks a significant shift in Papirfly’s vision for empowering enterprises to give their people the tools to activate their brands – everywhere.

Having delivered innovative brand management solutions for over 20 years, we’ve consolidated the 32 products we have built over this time to create a single user interface, giving our customers access to the full range of product functionalities, simplifying their operations and empowering them with an all-in-one platform – offering the ultimate brand management experience.

What does this mean for you?

Watch our launch video to hear from our Product team on what you can expect from Papirfly as we continue to support brands in the increasingly challenging landscape of brand management – as we endeavour to make things as simple as possible.

A customer-centric approach for unparalleled possibilities

At Papirfly, our customers are at the heart of everything we do. Whilst we may refer to this moment as Unification, this is our new normal – improving brand management software to the point that our customers can access an array of possibilities that were previously unattainable. We understand the challenges brands and teams face, and we meet those challenges head on with a mindset of constant innovation for our customers.

Our suite of enterprise-grade products

Gone are the days of navigating through multiple disparate MarTech solutions. Instead, Papirfly offers a unified platform that allows our customers to centralise their brand management efforts, reducing complexity and enhancing efficiency. By relying solely on Papirfly, they can unlock new levels of productivity and creativity with our comprehensive suite of products:

Point

Support global teams to understand your brand, through clear guidelines, official assets, core values, and more from one online access point. Go local with unique hubs with local languages and nuances.

Place

Centralise all assets with a dedicated DAM solution, categorising content for global and local usage in one secure place for all approved material. Ensure every location has assets that serve their unique audience nuances.

Produce

Guarantee 100% brand consistency with design templates aligned to brand guidelines and produce infinite studio-quality digital, print and video assets. Empower everyone to personalise to their audience using localised images, video and text options.

Plan

Achieve your bird’s-eye view of all campaigns and activities, displaying status, budgets, contacts, and official design templates for use. Ensure every location utilises workflows that drive campaign responsivity.

Prove

Analyse marketing activity via your dashboard, delivering reports and data across your business. Ensure local sites get feedback on best-performing content across the business, and give them data to let them know when their efforts are driving brand strategy success.

Plus

Papirfly’s integrations mean our platform works seamlessly with your agency tech stack removing hacks and workarounds, improving productivity and organisational efficiency across the business.

Collaborating for the Future

The future of Papirfly is a collaborative endeavour. We actively engage with our customers to shape the direction of our platform. Through direct user feedback and the establishment of a customer council, we have gathered, and will continue to collate valuable insights and that guide our development efforts. By involving our customers in the innovation process, we ensure that our platform remains future-proof and adaptive to the evolving brand management landscape. Together, we co-create a platform that empowers our customers to thrive in an ever-changing business environment, even as their own enterprise grows in complexity.

Empowering people to unleash their brands

While we are excited about this launch moment, this really is just the start of a new era at Papirfly – and we can’t wait to continue the journey with our existing customers, as we continue to welcome new brands to reach new heights of success.

Our commitment to revolutionising brand management drives our pursuit of a unified platform. You’ll be hearing much more about the individual Products of With Papirfly’s unified platform, we embark on a transformative journey, unlocking the power of brands and revolutionising the way they are managed.

Brand development is a cornerstone of business growth. With the sheer scale and complexity of developing a brand, which only increases as the brand grows bigger, an organised approach is necessary to be successful. Between brand guidelines, digital assets and campaign planning, there are a lot of moving parts among a rising number of employees and stakeholders. Keeping it all organised and under control only becomes more challenging as the scale of your brand increases, unless you have a good software solution in place to simplify the brand development process as a whole.

A single source of truth

It can’t be understated how important it is to get your digital assets organised, and make them easily accessible for the people that need them in your company. If your files and assets are in disarray and spread in all directions, stored on the designer’s computer or in a mess of folders in a cloud storage service, a lot of time is wasted trying to track them down.

There might even be old versions floating around that employees will come across. If they don’t find the right assets, they might resort to using outdated material or creating their own from scratch that breaks with brand guidelines. The consequence? Weaker brand recognition in the market due to inconsistent and ambiguous presentation, which in turn leads to loss of revenue.

With Papirfly’s Brand Hub you get a single source of truth that stores everything in one place, and is accessible by all employees and stakeholders. No more wasting time searching for missing files, and no risk of having old and outdated material in circulation, causing harm to your brand. When you can be certain that every asset is always on-brand and up to date, you can focus on brand development instead.

Central control – local empowerment

CEO of Jaguar Land Rover Ralf Speth once said: “If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design”. The second someone can’t find digital assets or the material they need for a new campaign, they will most likely create something themselves. These assets can quickly end up breaking with brand guidelines and dilute your brand, and so this situation must be avoided to preserve your brand’s integrity.

Our platform not only gives you complete control of your brand, it also empowers permitted users to create and tweak marketing material using your digital assets. By making your brand templates available online and linked to your brand guidelines, your graphical assets are ready for self-service across all your markets and time zones, with no risk of off-brand material being created and published.

Always available

An online solution simplifies brand development. It provides greater flexibility and empowers your employees to be more autonomous, so that your marketing team can focus more on brand strategy and campaign planning.

This also allows brand managers to present and share all details and content related to the brand with ease across the entire organisation and to collaborators.

Digital Asset Management

The impossible challenge of a retail marketer

Control your brand in real time

If you are responsible for brand development, our brand management platform will provide you full control. Changes in your brand guidelines happen in real time and you always have full insight into how, when and where your content is used. In addition, we have solutions that allow you to create and execute branding initiatives with simplicity and make sure your launch is smoothly completed and reaches your designated target groups – always on brand.

Brand Hub – One home for your brand

One single source of truth. This is Brand Hub – your online portal connecting your people with every aspect of your brand.

A marketing portal where brand assets can be accessed, brand guidelines can be understood and the tone of voice, values and personality of your brand is there for everyone to see.

• Showcase brand guidelines with clear examples for employees at all levels of the organisation, across every location.
• Easy to use and update in real time, build your Brand Hub to your own specifications with the help of modules and pre-built functionalities.
• Connect with other tools in Papirfly’s all-in-one brand management platform to unleash the full benefits, with features including Digital Asset Management, Template Studio, Marketing Planner, Collaboration Tool and Reporting and Analytics – everything you need to activate your brand.

Brand Hub is a home for your brand – a base of operations from which you can manage your brand and work on brand development with greater efficiency and coordination. Transform the way you work and help your brand come alive with Brand Hub.

If you want to read in more detail about what Brand Hub can do, and the problems it will help you to solve, download our brochure here.

Establishing brand recognition is essential if you want to build your brand successfully. When you’re going to market, you should also know that it takes 5-7 impressions before people remember your brand. This means that keeping your brand consistent, so that it looks and sounds the same every time, is highly important to attract customers. Without this consistency, customers may not give you as much as 7 opportunities before dismissing you completely.

We know achieving this consistency is easier said than done, but it is possible – with the right structure, system and the technology at hand, brand recognition is within reach. Graphic design templates make it far easier to create and publish marketing material, and keep your brand looking the same every time.

Accomplish brand consistency, establish brand recognition

Achieving brand recognition takes time and effort. You have the recipe, and you know the drill, but at the end of the day, how your brand is presented is often out of your control. Sometimes colleagues will create material that breaks with your brand identity guidelines – or worse, they use old collateral. Sound familiar?

With design templates, this will no longer be an issue. This tool allows you to streamline design tasks and increase operational efficiency without risking a broken brand.

The power of online design templates

Graphic design templates are a powerful and lifesaving tool for marketers and brands everywhere. They allow you to automate the production of brand assets and marketing material, enabling anyone to create what they need, when they need it, with no special skills required.

Some amazing capabilities of online design templates:

Accessible online at any time:

• When time is of the essence, keeping the templates always available is key. Log on, choose the desired template, and create a brand asset in an instant.

Self-serviced:

• Usually, when it comes to creating brand and marketing assets, you either need a designer or designer skills. Not to mention the knowledge and capability to use design software. With self-serviced design templates, this is no longer a problem. Anyone can be a designer with this online editor, and you don’t have to worry about brand disruption. The templates have your brand identity covered.

Smart and flexible

• Unlike Office templates or Adobe Indesign templates that can be altered by the users even though it is a “template”, graphic design templates are smart. The technology lets you pre-define what can and can’t be changed, giving you total control of your brand output. Every object and item has rules that narrow the design and creation options, you decide the level of flexibility.

Digital Asset Management

The impossible challenge of a retail marketer

Why building brand recognition is essential

59% of consumers prefer to buy from brands they trust, and 21% say they purchase new products because it was from a brand they like. In other words, branding and your company’s ability to profit are connected. And this reason alone makes it clear why brand recognition is essential for success.

Consider also that the ability to build brand recognition is a key driver for establishing brand loyalty, which again leads to trust and brand equity. To put it another way, the better known your brand is, the more likely it is that customers will choose your brand. When your customers then realise that your brand is what it claims to be, they’ll become loyal and start spreading the word.

If you are now thinking to yourself: “I know all this, but it’s impossible to practise in real-life, there are too many things getting in the way of my branding strategy and long-term tasks.” We understand. That’s why you need graphic design templates.

Key benefits of graphic design templates

With design template technology at hand, your branding processes will become a whole lot easier and you’ll be on your way to build brand recognition better than ever.

Your brand will always be up to date

By transforming your designs to online templates, keeping your brand updated is easy. Any change or alteration you make is done within the template and your users will always have access to the latest version. No more old and outdated brand assets.

Your brand assets are always available

Part of the challenge with brand inconsistency is when colleagues either create their own assets or use outdated files. By keeping your assets available online 24/7 and easily accessible, you eliminate this problem once and for all.

Your brand assets become self-serviced

Another part of the inconsistency challenge is the need to adapt to local needs. Today, with the large range of platforms, channels, and market needs, this is more important than ever. Adapting your assets is key to staying relevant in the market. Using online graphic templates, your colleagues and stakeholders will have instant access to the assets they need, and can modify them to fit their needs in a few simple steps.

Self-serviced templates streamline branding processes

Speed is of the essence in today’s digital marketing space. You need to be prepared for fast changes and updates, and you need to be able to deliver swiftly. Without technology and tools at hand, this is almost impossible. By allowing colleagues and stakeholders to create their own brand assets based on branded templates, you won’t risk putting off-brand content in circulation, and they can have their assets created in no time. It’s efficient and seamless.

Graphic design templates secure brand consistency

Another important factor in today’s fast-moving market space is that consumers are using a whole range of channels and platforms. This makes your market presence more complicated, but your customers also expect a consistent brand presentation across all channels. By having online templates for all the relevant platforms prepared and ready for use, it becomes far easier to have a quick turnaround time and be where your customers are.

Build brand recognition with an all-in-one platform

Our Template Studio comes as part of our brand management platform. Providing every person across your organisation with the tools to create studio-quality on-brand assets, with Template Studio you empower your people with the opportunity to champion your brand – and give your marketing team more time to focus efforts on core strategic goals.

While reaching target audiences has always carried its challenges, cutting through the sea of noise amid the millions of competing organisations in today’s hyper-competitive market is one of the most difficult tasks for any business.

In addition, according to a recent study, only a quarter of stakeholders can differentiate between individual brands. With no stand-out qualities, it is likely that success for these enterprises is down, at least in some part, to chance.

Naturally, relying on the luck of the draw to attract customers and clients to a brand is no basis for ongoing success. But, how can you improve your brand, take control and truly shine? It all comes down to effective brand communication.

The role of brand communication

Winning business communication involves the use of many different techniques and mediums to convey a consistent, appealing and attractive image of the business to target audiences and shape positive perceptions.

Over time, as content imparts valuable information to customers and stakeholders, people begin to associate this enterprise with trust and value, boosting brand equity. If done successfully, robust brand communication can turn an uninformed prospect into a returning customer.

Think of some of the most well-renowned brands in the world, like Coca-Cola and IBM – you’ll likely associate these enterprises with positive terms, like ‘professional’, ‘expert’ and ‘trusted’ even if you’ve never been a customer.

This is the power of effective brand communication. It’s what differentiates generic cola drinks from Pepsi, and what helps keep the name of organisations ringing in the minds of the public for years.

As well as customers, communicating your brand effectively can also be an excellent way to better establish your brand, engage prospects and attract top talent in today’s connected world.

Now, more than ever, a strong brand has to be three-dimensional and stand up to the scrutiny of customers and candidates on the outside of the business, as well as existing employees on the inside. To do this, internal and external communication must be:

High-quality

• To keep teams in the office productive and customers engaged, it’s crucial to communicate your brand, its values and its merits outwardly.

Consistent

• While customers and employer brands are often regarded separately, the lines between both are blurry, making business continuity a must.

Authentic

• With social sharing ubiquitous today, portraying a transparent and honest brand is key in retaining the admiration of employees and clients.

How to improve your brand communication strategy

Brand communication is one of the most important elements of an overarching marketing strategy. It’s how a brand portrays itself, how it forms deep connections with prospects and how it stands out in a saturated market.

But because this area is so complex and valuable, it can seem illogical to constantly update and refine your approach. However, the world of marketing is fast-paced. Platforms change. Customer and staff expectations shift. Best practices evolve. 

To keep up, it’s vital to implement brand communication strategies as living, breathing entities.

Choose the right media channels

To shape how your brand is perceived by its employees and customers, your brand should strive to have a presence in the places where your prospects will be, whether that’s in physical destinations or on platforms like Facebook and TikTok, for example.

This is crucial because as many as 13 touchpoints are needed to turn a prospect into a customer, or an employee into an ambassador. If this content isn’t within reach, how can you expect your brand to leave an impression?

By carefully considering where content is placed across multiple channels, not only is marketing more effective, but promotional efforts are more likely to generate a greater ROI for your company.

Digital Asset Management

The impossible challenge of a retail marketer

Nail a consistent look and feel

In order to boost the equity of a brand, and ensure prospects can recall the business, it’s important to maintain brand consistency on a global scale with a unified look, feel and brand voice. 

Although your collateral could be ticking all the right boxes and addressing the audiences’ specific pain points, if people aren’t able to attribute that goodwill to your unique brand, that positivity and trust are lost.

By nailing a consistent look and feel across your website and social media channels with the help of purpose-built Brand Activation Management software, a brand can become more recognisable and stand out from the competition. In the real world, this can improve revenue by as much as 23%.

Embrace crisis communication management

Brands dread the day when things go wrong. And while there is a small percentage of companies that have managed to dodge controversy, maintaining a spotless image – especially within a large or well-established business – is near impossible.

All it takes is a single brand ambassador to misrepresent the brand with a poorly worded post or a typo in a piece of corporate collateral to dent your reputation. While this is detrimental on its own, word can travel fast on social networks and magnify blunders small and large quickly.

To plan for every eventuality, a robust crisis communication plan is a valuable component of every effective messaging strategy. While these documents will vary from brand to brand, a good crisis plan should:

• Note who has the authority to activate the plan under what circumstances
• List the employees responsible for each task throughout the process
• Draft messages for the possible crises your business could face
• Collate the contact details of people and services valuable during an emergency

With a contingency plan in place, your brand can control the narrative in an adverse situation, and create a less stressful environment for workers both in and outside of the office.

Adapt brand personality for multiple scenarios

While a business must have a consistent brand voice, it’s important that this isn’t taken too literally. In order to appeal to candidates and customers on different platforms, the core message must be adapted to suit different spaces.

By taking a middle-of-the-road approach to brand voice, and failing to adapt the personality of the brand to different scenarios, messaging can seem stilted, irrelevant or unengaging as the content is not entirely relevant to the platform or audience.

Carefully tailoring internal and external communication using insight gathered from a strategic brand communication audit can drive better performance, as 74% of marketers say targeted personalisation generates greater engagement. 
A brand is a complex and incredibly valuable asset for any organisation, and it takes more than just an excellent customer communication strategy to form an image that employees, candidates and customers all look up to. To develop a well-rounded brand, it’s important to seek answers to the following:

• What does your brand identity look like?
• What values does your business image reflect?
• How does your branding strategy align with overall business objectives?

Propel your messaging to new heights with BAM by Papirfly™

Messaging is a broad, vast and incredibly important topic when it comes to brand building and communication. From how you talk to your employees to how you market your products or services, this strategy is an integral part of your brand.

Due to its breadth and importance, it’s crucial to have a solid company communication strategy in place before embarking on a new campaign. By taking a gung-ho approach, you could risk compromising brand continuity, authenticity and quality.

However, developing a corporate communications plan that ticks all of the boxes is no easy feat – marketing is a fast-paced sector, and deadlines come and go quickly. To keep on top of your daily duties without compromising on quality calls for a dedicated brand activation solution, such as BAM by Papirfly™.

As well as featuring a suite of time-saving marketing tools, BAM is ideally suited to corporate communication because:

• It allows teams the ability to develop quality, on-style content with confidence across several mediums, such as social media, leaflets, emails and more
• BAM’s intelligent templates allow in-house teams with no design experience to effortlessly craft collateral that adheres to brand guidelines 
• The built-in DAM allows crucial documents, like crisis communication plans, to be shared globally with ease, allowing increased agility
• Our all-in-one technology allows existing designs to be quickly adapted for new platforms or localised to different regions in just a few clicks

If you would like to learn more about BAM and explore how else it can help take your brand to new heights, get in touch with our team, or book a demo to see our solution in action.

A rebranding strategy can help you rethink, refresh, and reposition your brand as efficiently and effectively as possible. Approaching the decision that a rebrand is the right move for your business is no simple task. If you and your enterprise are at the start of that journey, and are still considering whether a rebrand or a brand refresh is the right thing to do, then understanding what to consider when rebranding your business is a natural first step. 

Should you have already been through that soul-searching process – and decided a rebrand is the right way to go – carefully considering your next move is crucial. The potential ramifications for your organisation and your relationships with your customers, employees, and the wider world can be significant. This means you need to consider three key areas; conducting research before creating your new brand identity, building the toolkit that will empower your people at launch, and choosing tools will provide strength and stability for this new era for your brand.
In this article, you’ll learn how to successfully rebrand to help you accomplish your specific business goals that are driving the change – efficiently landing your rebrand by rolling out your new identity to every location of your entire enterprise.

1. Conducting research in the rebranding process

Before making any changes, you need to do the research and find out how your brand can improve. What elements of your brand do people like? How can it connect more with your customers? There are endless questions to ask when building a new identity. The more knowledge you have, the more effective your rebranding strategy will be.

Carry out a brand identity assessment

It’s vital to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your branding to maximise your chances of success. It’s best to get a wide range of views by speaking to the company’s employees, stakeholders, customers, and prospective customers.

How do they perceive your brand? Do they think your company would benefit from rebranding? This insight is one final moment before crossing the threshold with certainty that a rebrand is the right choice for you.

There are various ways to canvass the opinion of key audiences, including one-to-one interviews, focus groups and consumer surveys. Some relevant questions to ask may include:

• How would you describe our brand to a friend?
• Who do you think is our target audience?
• On a scale of 1-10 how much do you like our branding?
• What words would you use to describe our branding and tone of voice?
• How much does our branding reflect your experience you have with our brand?
• How positive does our branding make you feel, and what could be improved?

The insights you gain from this research will shine a light on current blindspots, and highlight what is currently resonating with audiences – giving you what you need to help you shape a new brand identity, and a framework for an effective rebranding strategy.

Define what your business stands for

Once you know what your customers, employees and other stakeholders actually think about your brand identity, you can focus on what you want them to think about it. This requires a lot of self-reflection and discussion internally with your team.

Here are some questions to pose to yourself:

• What’s our value proposition?
• What makes us different from competitors?
• What’s our mission, our core values and our beliefs?
• Who are our target audiences and what are the ideal customer profiles?
• Is the story of our brand’s history and where we are heading clear?

This exercise is useful in helping to clarify the reasons behind your rebrand and how your new or refined mission, vision, and values differ from when your current branding was developed.

How to write a brief for a rebrand

You should write a brief that sets out what you want to achieve from your rebrand, and what the work involved will be. Whether you are working with an external agency or carrying out the rebranding internally, a good brief will focus everyone on the purpose and expected outcome of the rebranding process.

A written brief is also vital in ensuring the ‘buy-in’ of other key people in your organisation, with all key decision-makers having approved it. Getting everybody on board is essential to avoid wasting time and resources when senior executives – often outside the marketing department – challenge key assumptions in the brief and changes in direction at critical moments can waste time and money.

The brief should include:

• An overview of your company, including history, products and services
• An overview of the current issues with the branding
• Your newly defined brand positioning
• A customer profile
• Competitor analysis
• Rebranding strategies
• Key product messages
• The scope of the rebrand and the activities it will entail

By including as much information as possible, you’ll be able to shape your brand proposal to apply the brand changes across all marketing channels, digital or print. And then its time to get the designers to work and bring your new identity to life.

Your new brand identity is almost there

Once you have some mock-up designs for potential new logos, web pages, packaging, or store designs, it’s wise to seek feedback before making final decisions. As well as allowing people within your company to have their say, you can see what your customers think by carrying out some creative testing.

Surveys can be an effective method for testing how a rebrand might impact an audience prior to its launch. You can reach out to existing customers or other people in your demographic to ask what they think of specific elements of a rebrand, testing how well it resonates and whether or not it creates the desired effect. Use online surveys to gather data from anywhere in the world – no matter how remote or widespread your target audiences might be, you can get useful data fast. Use open-ended questions to produce deeper insights amongst predefined questions that feel quicker and more simple to answer, such as multiple-choice, rating scales, and ranking questions.

Tweak. Amend. Test again if necessary. By doing this research, you’ll know when the next phase of your brand’s identity is ready to unleash upon the world. Now it’s time to empower your people to launch it.

2. Empower your people as you launch your rebrand

Once your visual identity and brand assets have been agreed upon, it’s time to compile everything into one handy toolkit. This will become a brand bible for anyone involved in marketing and communications for your company.

Creating a brand toolkit

Consider everything your teams will need to become fully educated on your brand guidelines. As well as elements that are specific to your enterprise and industry, make sure your toolkit contains:

• An overview of your brand identity
• Your logo and variations of it
• Your colour palette
• Your typography
• Rules for layout and alignment
• Brand illustrations and iconography
• Art direction principles
• Examples of your branding used across different applications e.g. landing pages, social media, product packaging, etc.

Your brand toolkit will be invaluable for communicating your rebranding strategy to business stakeholders and helping to make sure everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. It’s also very useful when you work with outside contractors, helping to quickly on-board them in your updated house style.

Ensuring your rebranded visual identity is an indisputable truth

Your next step requires some intensive team action, as implementing your rebrand will touch every part of your business – and your internal launch must be a success to give your external launch the best chance of success and making the time and financial investment worth it.

You’ll need to set out all the rebranding activities to be undertaken, assigning each one to an individual or department, and agreeing a time frame to work to. You should plan weekly meetings where each person can update the team on what they’ve been doing. It’s likely that some things will take longer than expected, and you’ll run into a few obstacles along the way, so be realistic with your schedule and leave time for ironing out any issues.

To support this process, consider these corporate marketing activities required for your rebrand to be launched internally as effectively as possible:

• Create a need-to-know sequence, so your rebrand is rolled out to your various audiences (executives, employees, customers, suppliers,media, etc.) in the appropriate order – some will be of a higher priority than others
• As part of this priority order, make sure that your rebrand has been announced and accepted internally several months before you intend to launch publicly
• Establish a narrative behind your rebranding, so it becomes clearer to those inside your company why you have taken this step, and can translate to your customers and how it will specifically benefit them
• Spend several weeks building hype towards the rebrand, and communicate these actions internally – as well as helping to cement understanding within your enterprise, this will prepare your audiences for the upcoming change, and make it something worth anticipating rather than hitting them as a complete surprise
• Create communication plans for the initial weeks and months after launch to make sure your employees, customers and the wider world are reminded about what your brand identity now is, so they can quickly familiarise themselves with your new look and feel – you new brand identity should feel normal after a few months

Keeping these steps in mind will ensure your launch is conducted as seamlessly as possible. You and your branding teams will be in the best position to receive an encouraging response, and with a solid rebranding launch strategy in place, be able to adapt to any needed changes along the way.

And when the rebranding is complete, make sure you have an internal launch party. Get your employees excited about the change, and they will be more likely to become brand ambassadors. If you have started to offer new products and services as part of your rebrand or you want employees to take a new approach to customer service, ensure they have been appropriately trained.

Preparing your organisation for your rebrand is a big challenge and a huge accomplishment. Yet a key element to achieving the growth – a factor that would have been at least part of your reasons for rebranding in the first place – is thinking beyond the launch, and truly preparing your people to unleash your brand for years to come.

3. Beyond the rebrand – the right tools for a new era

Having done the necessary research, and putting together a complete brand toolkit that equips everyone for launching your brand, maintaining momentum on consistency is key – not least, to ensure customer loyalty is maintained to help sustain and increase revenue. 

Considering your current ecosystem is essential, as the user experience for your teams needs to be as seamless as possible to ensure mistakes are kept to a minimum if not eliminated completely. So ask yourself. “What do our people need to truly land our rebrand?”

While the importance of establishing all approved brand assets in your toolkit is undeniable, without Digital Asset Management (DAM) – one single source of truth for all assets – then old logos, out-of-date images and poor file storage could see your efforts diluted.

Having a powerful DAM is essential to centralising all documents, images and videos that you will need to activate your brand identity. When access is granted and integrated with one online home for your brand, guidelines are confirmed and available in real time, and concerns regarding ‘where to find what is okay to use’ can be eliminated.

When it comes to creating 100% on-brand assets – essential for any newly rebranded company – then the most useful way for everyone to feel reassured they are approving assets is to create a master design template from which many specific asset templates can be produced.

Keeping track of all rebranding activities and campaigns and simplifying execution of all global efforts is also an important factor to consider. When teams are spread out around the world, being able to see that you are aligned globally when you need to be is just as vital as ensuring every region and location has the autonomy to speak directly to their audience whilst keeping the core brand safe and consistent.

Supporting this is a continuous analysis of asset performance and brand adoption within your enterprise – essential in improving brand performance over time. Assessing the impact of rebranding on your bottom line goes in line with remaining aware of feedback from your target audience. Be constantly aware of social media channels, speaking to Customer Success teams, and committing to becoming more agile.

Download our guide to further understand how to map out the strategy and tools you will need to successfully rebrand your business.

Rebranding can be a huge undertaking but also marks a fresh, exciting phase in the life of your business. Done right, it will excite and re-engage your customers while also leaving you in a strong position to attract a new audience.

Good luck with your rebrand, and reach out to us at Papirfly to discover the power of our smart templates and the wider possibilities of our platform by booking your free personalised demo today. Papirfly’s brand management platform gives marketing teams everything they need to land their rebrand, in one single place.

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”

Churchill said this in response to criticisms that he changed political parties. Great leaders are both courageous and vulnerable. They reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, and course correct – sometimes in very public ways – to ensure their behaviours match their values and goals, even when it’s not easy.

We all grow and change over time… and so do brands. Whether in response to a new line of products and services, an evolution in visual identity, or to reflect a shift in a company’s mission and values, a rebrand can keep an organisation aligned with an ever-changing landscape.

However, this is not a step that should be taken lightly. The cost of rebranding a business can be a steep one if the purpose of this change and the approach to this problem is not carefully considered. Not only can it cost you a serious amount of time and money, but your company’s reputation could be at stake if you miss the mark.

What is rebranding?

Rebranding is an exercise in changing or improving any major branding elements e.g. logo, colour palette, typography, etc. The idea behind it is that a brand is evolving, and the company wants people to know about it.

A business can rebrand as much or as little as it wants, from simply changing its slogan or logo, to changing everything, including the company name. It’s helpful to consider three different types of rebranding:

• Brand refresh – You change minor details only, such as modernising individual aspects of your logo or slightly changing the hues of your colour palette.
• Partial rebrand – You change certain elements but not others, such as using a new logo that uses elements, themes and colours from your old logo.
• Full rebrand – You change everything as if you were a completely different company.

Whichever approach most appeals to your current circumstances, it is important that the purpose of your rebrand is carefully considered. History is littered with rebranding examples that had far from ideal outcomes:

• Tropicana’s simplification of its logo and packaging ended up costing the company a 20% loss in sales
• Pepsi paid $1 million to update a logo that alienated many of their loyal customers
• Gap’s rebranding attempt that was so roundly rejected by their customers it was reversed just days afterwards

These examples are not to say that rebranding a company isn’t a wise decision – given the right circumstances, a new look and feel can be a significant asset to a brand. Perhaps your existing image is lagging behind the times visually, meaning you are coming across as old-fashioned or limiting your chances of capturing a new audience. Or you reimagined your company’s objectives and values and want to reflect them outwardly.

In other words, it is crucial to carefully consider the reasons behind your rebrand, and weigh up whether this investment can benefit the business or not…

3 good and 3 bad rebranding considerations

Your motivations behind a brand change are vitally important to look upon with a critical eye. Due to the seismic shift a full-scale corporate rebrand could have on your organisation’s image, your relationship with your customers and more, it is vital that one is pursued for the right reasons.

Below, we give a quick breakdown of three worthwhile reasons to start the rebranding process, and three that might require a rethink:

Good reason #1: New company direction

Over time, the mission, vision and values of your company may have shifted to the point of being unrecognisable to what they were originally. Whether as a result of new market conditions, a change in senior management, or simply natural evolution, your brand identity may need to be freshened up or changed entirely to reflect your new direction.

Bad reason #1: Boredom with current identity

Just because you may have fallen out of love with your existing branding doesn’t mean your customers have. It is important to separate your own feelings from what your brand is meant to do – appeal to your target audiences. Making a change due to your own disillusionment could have major ramifications to your company’s future

Good reason #2: Reaching a new region or audience

Whether you are expanding to another part of the country or around the globe, or you have shifted focus to a new target audience, you might need to refresh your brand in order to better appeal to these customers. Alternatively, in the case of venturing abroad, you may consider adopting a ‘sister brand’ that aligns more closely to the culture you are entering.

Bad reason #2: A dip in sales

A recent reduction in revenue could be an indicator of many things, not just that people are bored with your brand. When Uber updated their brand a few years ago, half of their customers surveyed had no idea what their new logo represented. Instead of making this hasty decision, take the time to consider if other areas of your marketing strategy or overall business could account for this loss of sales.

Good reason #3: Mergers and acquisitions

If you find yourself in the situation of having joined forces with one or more additional companies, it can be beneficial to bring relevant elements of all brands involved into one united identity that previous customers of all sides (and future customers) can familiarise themselves with.

Bad reason #3: Covering up a crisis

While it might feel like a wise decision to rise from the ashes of a PR disaster as a completely different brand, today’s savvy consumers can see right through these attempts. This can actually exacerbate the crisis, making people feel you are trying to take the easy way out rather than owning up to and learning from your mistakes.

Added to this, you may have to convince important stakeholders in your organisation to opt for a rebrand. Make sure that you are well prepared by setting out any arguments clearly and draw up a strategy to help you make a decision that is fully supported by all parties.

Tips to prepare for your corporate rebrand

Once you have established your reasons for pursuing a rebrand are appropriate, a brand refresh rollout plan will involve several significant steps to best ensure a successful result.

Identify your company’s vision, mission and values

Start by reaffirming in your mind what your company stands for today, and how that differs from where you were when your current branding was introduced. How have your values shifted? Do you have new objectives and targets? By devoting time to this topic you’ll have a stronger sense of where your identity needs to evolve and in what direction.

Audit existing brand assets

You don’t necessarily need to reinvent the wheel to refresh your brand. Rather than start from scratch, look at your existing assets and see what can be salvaged. What still aligns with the new direction you wish to take your brand, and what needs to be reimagined?

These expressions of your existing brand will be indispensable for your team – only by understanding where your brand is now can you effectively plan for its future.

Secure buy-in from key stakeholders

Leadership. Employees. Customers. Shareholders. There are a lot of groups that you will need to convince in order to make your rebrand a success, so it is valuable to canvass their opinions and prepare them for the change that you intend to make.

Once you have their support, the chances of a good outcome greatly improve than if you were to spring the ideas or change onto them without any warning. It will also give you valuable insight into whether your rebrand would be accepted and if it is necessary.

Build the right team

A rebrand must be a collaborative effort across your team in order to make the move stick and to ensure the final product does not alienate employees. Get representatives from across your senior management, marketing, sales, human resources and further departments involved who can actively lend their insight into repositioning your brand.

Get ready to update brand guidelines

As the key documentation at the crux of your brand identity, it is important that you are ready to update your brand guidelines with the new visuals, colour palettes, verbiage and more that will underpin your new direction.

Furthermore, storing this valuable information in a digital brand portal could be crucial in ensuring that everyone in your team is aware of the change, limiting the potential for any of your previous brand assets resurfacing later on.

Plan a successful launch

Consider how you will intend to make the world aware of your new direction. You may want to tease the arrival of your rebrand through a social media or email marketing campaign, getting people excited about the arrival rather than springing it on the unaware.

Or, maybe you feel an out-of-nowhere advert or website update will have a more eye-grabbing effect. A classic example of this is the Old Spice viral campaign that absolutely catapulted the previously old-fashioned brand into the next generation.

Of course, there is so much that must be taken into account for a rebranding strategy to work as intended. If you’d like to know more, download our essential guide to rebranding below.

Are you ready for a rebrand?

Whether you are opting for a light refresh of your brand visuals and messaging, or a complete brand overhaul that pushes your company towards a bright new tomorrow, it is essential to have the tools alongside you to accommodate this massive shift.

Papirfly’s all-in-one brand management platform offers a powerful selection of features that can help ease the process of rebranding and ensure that the results stick across your future marketing campaigns.

• Use the template studio to bring asset creation in-house, locking down the key elements of your new branding so all assets produced are perfectly consistent
• Keep all up-to-date brand assets in the in-built DAM system, preventing outdated logos and obsolete branding from re-emerging
• Coordinate the steps involved in your rebrand with birds-eye campaign planning
• Introduce an online, accessible brand portal to act as a single source of truth for all your brand now represents

Discover the efficient, consistent and exciting future of marketing – get in touch to learn more about our brand management solution or book a free demo today.