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Retail Marketing

What is ethical consumerism and why should you care?

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Papirfly
7 minutes read

Consumers today have never been more conscious of where their products come from, the impact of their purchases and the conditions of the employees working across their favourite brands.

As well as wages and working environments, customers are also paying close attention to where companies source materials, where goods are manufactured, as well as a brand’s values and commitments.

This ethical consumerism is such a great consideration for shoppers today – whether B2B or B2C – that customers are voting with their wallets. They are buying from companies that align with their personal values or demonstrate certain ethics, instead of the companies they may simply already be familiar with.

What is ethical consumerism?

Every product or service you provide has an impact on the world. A growing number of consumers realise this and want to buy from organisations that have a more positive influence on certain social and environmental issues.

This phenomenon is called ethical consumerism, and is a purchasing practice that has been gaining momentum and popularity in recent years all over the world. To illustrate just how prominent this market is, recent reports suggest that it’s now worth over £122 billion in the UK alone.

Beyond the environment and employee working conditions, ethical consumerism is a broad term that can encompass a range of things.

Ethical consumerism can encompass whether or not a company…

  • Tests on animals
  • Uses sustainable materials
  • Supports what they say they do
  • Uses animal products

Although many factors have contributed to the boom in ethical consumerism, one of the primary reasons for this seismic shift in customer behaviour is down to the rise of social media.

These platforms are home to billions of users, all following, researching and discussing their favourite brands every single day. And, as word spreads fast on these platforms, a single post shining a spotlight on a company’s unethical practices could quickly gain traction. With sites such as Glassdoor offering current and former employees to anonymously review companies, it can also affect your ability to attract the right people.

Why is ethical consumerism important for your brand?

As well as benefiting the world, incorporating policies and actions that appeal to the ethical consumer can have several direct benefits to your brand.

Encourage brand loyalty

Many of the world’s most well-known brands grow and succeed because they encourage people to come back and purchase, time and again. Repeat custom rarely happens naturally, and more often than not hinges on a brand developing a trusting relationship with its customers.

Fostering meaningful buyer relationships isn’t something that takes just one action of goodwill. However, by aligning your corporate values with your customers’ expectations, and becoming more responsible as a provider of goods or services, you help lay a solid foundation from which to build a loyal customer base.

To highlight how valuable brand loyalty can be for your business, consider that 50% of loyal customers will make more purchases with their preferred companies, according to Hubspot.

Bolster your reputation

Although the ethical market is growing, this paradigm shift in consumer behaviour has also brought about a rise in ‘corporate boycotting’. This is when consumers avoid specific companies or products because they fail to meet certain common standards or expectations.

By catering to the ethical consumer in your shop, you can work to meet the rising expectations of prospects and help avoid the negative impact on sales and brand reputation a boycott could bring.

Although the severity of corporate boycotts can vary, sportswear titan Nike was at the centre of a labour controversy all the way back in 1990 that damaged the brand so much that it caused the company to completely rethink how it operated and presented itself on the world stage.

Future-proof your brand

Year on year, ethical shopping continues to make up a larger and larger portion of the market, as individuals become more aware of their impact on the world around them.

Moreover, as Gen Z, one of the most ethically conscious cohorts enters the workforce, this consumer movement is unlikely to slow down. 

By taking steps to become a more responsible brand, you help ensure your shop remains appealing to customers today and tomorrow.

3 brands accommodating the conscious consumer

With customer sentiment continuing to evolve, countless brands have made great strides in the way they operate and market themselves. 

To give you some inspiration and guidance on how you can become a more ethically-minded company, here are three of our favourite examples.

1. Reformation

Reformation, a fashion company focused on minimising its impact on the environment, aims to bring sustainable fashion to everyone.

To do this, the brand uses low-impact materials, rescued deadstock fabrics and repurposed vintage clothing. Beyond sustainability, the retailer is also committed to providing a safe and comfortable working environment for its garment workers, building its own factory in Los Angeles to make this a reality.

Launched in 2009, the retailer’s ethics resonate with customers, with Reformation being profitable every year since 2016, $150 million in 2019, and more than doubling to $350 million in 2023.

2. Salesforce

Salesforce, a global leader in cloud-based CRM, demonstrates that ethical consumerism isn’t just for B2C brands. The company has embedded sustainability and social impact into its DNA – turning responsibility into a competitive differentiator for its B2B offering.

Referring to the planet as a “Key stakeholder”, Salesforce reached net-zero residual emissions across its entire value chain and powers its operations with 100% renewable energy. It further underlines the value in their Sustainability Cloud solution to help enterprise customers track and reduce their own carbon footprints, effectively turning ESG reporting into a shared value.

This values-first approach resonates deeply with modern business buyers, positioning Salesforce as a tech partner that delivers both innovation and integrity – earning it continued growth, industry trust, and long-term customer loyalty.

3. Patagonia

Last, but by no means least, is Patagonia. This trailblazer in sustainable outdoor apparel, has long positioned ethical consumerism at the core of its business. The brand doesn’t just talk about responsibility – it embeds it into every layer of its operations.

From pioneering the use of recycled materials to launching the Worn Wear program, which extends product life through repairs and resale, Patagonia champions circular fashion. It allocates 1% of sales to environmental causes and has even gone as far as transferring ownership to a trust and nonprofit, ensuring that profits are used to fight climate change and protect undeveloped land.

This unwavering mission has earned Patagonia a loyal following of conscious consumers, with annual revenues topping $1.5 billion and continued growth driven not by trends, but by values.

How to embrace ethical consumerism

Because ethical consumerism is such a broad and varied topic, there are dozens of ways your business can cater to the ethical consumer – from changing the way you ship your goods, to the way you front your brand in the public eye.

Reduce your brand’s carbon emissions

One way to meet customer expectations is to reduce your carbon footprint as a store. While there are many ways you can approach this problem, we have selected a handful of simple potential solutions you may want to try:

✅  Install energy-saving bulbs in-store
✅  Ship orders to the same address together
✅  Turn off the air-con when it’s not needed
✅  Switch lights off overnight when the store is closed
✅  Encourage employees to cycle or walk to work
✅  Set up a customer recycling scheme to safely dispose of old goods

Even making microscopic changes to the way you operate, such as favouring digital receipts and printing documents double-sided, can all help reduce your emissions and create a more eco-friendly image for your brand.

Align corporate values with corporate actions

Another way you can embrace ethical consumerism is by ensuring your corporate values align with the actions your shop takes. 

For example, if your brand pledges to reduce its impact on the environment, but keeps all of its lights on overnight, people may feel as though you aren’t taking your corporate social responsibility seriously. This, in turn, can quickly harm your reputation.

Take some time to ensure your values correlate. If this means reducing the scale of your commitments to make sure your enterprise can actually achieve what it has set out to do, this will be better for your brand than overpromising and underdelivering.

As well as that, you should also ensure your values are easily found online or across your social platforms, as hiding this information away could seed distrust. Most importantly, your employees need to be able to be given online resources understand your values and ethical goals, as well as talk about them – whether verbally or in marketing materials.

Educate your customers

A third way of catering to ethically-minded customers is by using your reputation and platforms, such as your social pages or blog, to educate prospects on issues pertinent to your brand.

Tell people why you support what you do, and the steps you will take to achieve your desired goals. By committing to causes publicly, you help build trust with new and existing customers, while also raising awareness for good causes and charities.

Naturally, content is crucial in spreading the word about your brand’s values online and in-store. However, as campaigns and charities come and go often, enlisting the expertise of a third-party agency to produce assets may not suit your budget or timescale.

Bringing content production in-house is often seen as unworkable too, as the content creation process is traditionally time-consuming, and would likely clash with other employees’ responsibilities. As well as this, building branded visuals takes skills your team may not have access to.

Readying your brand for an ethical future

With customers more aware of social and environmental issues than ever before, ethical consumerism has seen a boom in popularity in recent years, and is a core consideration when building brand equity with customers.

Although this consumer movement may present a prime opportunity to grow the trust and authenticity of your brand in the eyes of your target audience, it’s important to be clear and honest when making commitments.

While there are many facets of this more conscious form of shopping, content is crucial in demonstrating your pledges to becoming a more responsible business. 

Whether B2B or B2C, creating signage, social media content and visuals for the web can be a costly and time-consuming practice, especially if you spend your budget on asset reproduction rather than high-powered creatives to articulate your commitments.

Building captivating visuals that showcase your ethics doesn’t have to be a grand investment in time or money. By providing teams with on-brand digital assets and templated content creation working together, you can scale content production without any design expertise.

With such a demand from your audience to hear the right message, it’s key you communicate authentically and consistently so customers know your ethics align with theirs – in every single message!

Table of contents:

  1. What is ethical consumerism?
  2. Why is ethical consumerism important for your brand?
  3. How to embrace ethical consumerism
  4. 3 brands accommodating the conscious consumer
  5. Readying your brand for an ethical future
Employer brand

Back to basics: how to improve your talent retention

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Papirfly
5 minutes read

It may sound obvious to say that it pays to hold on to your best talent, but you may be surprised at just how big of an impact it makes. A recent study of more than 600,000 researchers, entertainers, politicians, and athletes found that high performers are 400% more productive than ‘average’ ones.

Over the last decade, there has been a widening skills gap across all sectors and a growing trend in changing jobs much more frequently. According to research by McKinsey, nearly a third of senior leaders cite finding talent as their most significant managerial challenge. Be sure to read our previous article, ‘Employer branding – how important is your employer brand?’ to gain some expert tips on navigating today’s unique recruitment landscape.

The gap in skills is largely due to a gap in experience. We are at a time when many baby boomers who have developed their skills at a company over a long period of time are beginning to retire — taking decades of knowledge and experience with them. 

On top of this, millennials tend to be less loyal towards their workplace. In their report, ‘How Millennials Want to Work‘, Gallup found that one in five millennials have changed jobs in the last year and two in five are currently looking for a new job.

What does it take to attract and retain talent in 2022?

Remote-friendly interviews and onboarding

65% of candidates say that bad interview experiences will make them lose interest during an application process. Hindered by technical issues, a lack of face-to-face interaction and not being able to convey the atmosphere of the office can make it difficult for employers to make the best first impression.

“Trust has to exist from day one. When you’re remote you don’t have the opportunity to lean into someone’s cubicle to see how they’re doing. You have to get creative about ways to nurture that relationship.”
Chloe Oddliefson, Head of People Operations at Dribbble
(via Miro)

How a company supports employees working remotely will also have an effect on how long they decide to stay at a company. This all starts with a well-thought-out onboarding process that accounts for the challenges of not being in the office. If you want to retain great candidates from the get-go, using a digitised version of your onboarding document and omitting anything in-office related won’t cut it.

When new starters aren’t able to meet their team in person, onboarding is even more important for sharing elements that will help them learn all they need to know to become a successful addition to the company. Depending on the role, a comprehensive onboarding process may last around three months and cover these five areas:

  1. Pre-onbording by HR, line manager and recruitment team
  2. Onboarding by HR, line manager and payroll team
  3. Orientation by line manager, colleagues and senior management
  4. Feedback on first tasks and assignments by line manager
  5. Ongoing support into their new role by line manager and colleagues

Promoting health and wellbeing

For obvious reasons, health and wellbeing has taken the spotlight over the last year. After companies saw first-hand the effects of employees suffering from poor physical and mental wellbeing during the pandemic, this will be an important value in employer branding going forward.

Many companies already offer health and wellness benefits like gym memberships, cycle to work schemes and free healthy snacks. However, these make no difference when your employees are working unreasonable hours or are not getting the right kind of support.

More than creating a more enjoyable place to work, addressing employee wellbeing issues at their root cause will help reduce burnout, increase productivity and retain employees for longer. Consider initiatives like:

  • Allowing flexible hours
  • Organising social activities
  • Regular employee check-ins

Empowering employee growth

Companies that leave their employees’ career growth stagnating have always been more likely to lose their most enthusiastic people more quickly. 

In fact, 70% of high-retention-risk employees say they’ll be forced to leave their organisation to advance their careers.

A focus on offering opportunities for personal and professional development will be a key factor in facing the current global retention crisis. These are especially important for retaining new talent at the beginning of their careers who are looking to learn fast and constantly improve. Some of these opportunities could include:

  • Internal learning and development programmes
  • Access to online courses 
  • Room to grow within roles
  • Mentorship from senior employees
  • Opportunities and encouragement to put ideas forward

Internal comms is key

Internal communication is often one of the most overlooked areas of an employer brand proposition, yet it’s evident in the employee experience every single day. Part of making it a positive one is determined by building a connection and maintaining engagement. 

Too often, internal comms is kept to the bare minimum and lacks the personality and culture traits that a company’s employer value proposition is centred around. Focusing more attention on what’s relevant and interesting to employees helps make them feel more engaged with the goals of the business. This not only instils more purpose in their role, but builds more loyalty too.

If you are keen to tackle work-related challenges that might encourage team members to look beyond your company, download our handy checklist outlining what you can do to address these issues and make a positive difference to your employees’ experience.

While email, surveys and text messaging are an essential part of the day-to-day running of a business, there is nothing stopping you from exploring other channels for more engaging communications. Video, social media posts, podcasts and blogs are a great way to share information, invite discussion and garner enthusiasm about what’s going on in the office and the wider business.

With a brand management solution you can streamline your internal asset creation with easy-to-use templates that help teams produce studio-quality materials in minutes. It also gives you a bird’s eye view of your campaigns and makes it quick and easy to share relevant and on-brand assets within your organisation.

Here are some great examples of companies that got it right:

The NHS
To make sure that all their employees were getting their flu jab, the NHS used the power of video to create these engaging posts for their social media channels.

Waitrose
UK supermarket, Waitrose, created a digital suggestion box to help all employees make their voices heard.

Pizza Hut
At the beginning of the pandemic, Pizza Hut acted fast to create a two-way conversation between staff, franchises and restaurant managers. Using the simple medium of WhatsApp, they helped employees feel valued in their role in feeding Britain during a challenging time.

Back to contents

How to revitalise your talent retention methods

Improve personalisation

A more personalised approach shows a company’s ability to listen to the individual concerns of their employees. To retain the best talent, companies need to ditch the ‘one solution fits all employees’ approach.

Develop retention strategies that…

  • Understand the different visions and goals of their staff – both professional and personal
  • Allows employees to make their voices heard
  • Provides opportunities to take on new challenges and steer their own path

“Personalisation for millennials in the workplace is about them seeing their work and organisation as a projection of themselves, and that drives loyalty.”
Felicity Furey, Founder of the Professional Leaders Institute
(via The CEO Magazine)

Be more flexible

When workplaces were plunged into lockdown, some were more prepared than others to support their employees to do their jobs effectively from home.

The most successful strategies included…

  • Adopting the hybrid working model
  • Testing out the four-day week
  • Investing in technology that makes remote collaboration possible

Go further than raises and bonuses

Higher salaries and monetary rewards are one of the first considerations for an employee thinking of leaving an organisation. But they aren’t the only deciding factor. While having a competitive salary is undoubtedly a good thing, it does nothing to make a company stand out from the competition.

Establish a remote interview processes

Even if you have no immediate plans to bring in new talent, having a remote hiring strategy in place is vital for future-proofing your turnover, which is likely to increase going forward in 2021.

What should the remote interview process achieve?

  • Can assess a candidate’s ability to work independently
  • Reviews their proficiency communicating via digital channels
  • Highlights their ability to collaborate remotely

Discover more insights in our Ultimate Employer Brand Checklist — download for free here!

To learn more about how Papirfly’s all-in-one brand management platform can help you attract and retain the world’s best talent in 2021, and beyond, get in touch today.

Table of contents:

  1. What does it take to attract and retain talent in 2022?
  2. How to revitalise your talent retention methods
Brand management, Template Technology

Digital design templates: content creation tools for brand consistency

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Papirfly
3 minutes read

In an increasingly competitive market, brand consistency isn’t a nice‑to‑have. It’s how you build recognition, loyalty, and long‑term value. And that’s where digital design templates come in. With digital design templates, you can ensure your brand shows up the same way every time, strengthening your brand identity and helping you stand out.

How can every team create on‑brand content without needing design support?

When content needs to go live fast, brand identity is often the first thing to suffer. With teams working under pressure and without the right tools, off-brand assets can creep into your channels. Templated digital content creation changes that.

Editable templates empower anyone in your business to create assets without compromising your brand – and without needing to chase down files or request support. Workflows get smoother. Bottlenecks disappear. And your brand stays protected.

How do you stay agile without compromising brand consistency?

Marketing teams must move fast – but not at the expense of consistency. While you don’t want to be the last brand to react to an important new social media trend, you also cannot risk rushing out a message that doesn’t fit your brand personality or target audience.

With pre-designed templates, anyone in your company can create consistent and on‑brand assets in moments. Logos, fonts, color palettes, tone – every element is pre‑set and locked into the content creation process. So even when timelines are tight, your messaging stays sharp and on‑brand.

Reduce costs. Increase efficiency.

Templated content creation tools don’t just make brand execution easier – they make it more cost‑efficient. By shifting digital content creation in‑house, you can minimize revision cycles and free up agencies and design teams to focus on more high‑impact creative work.

The result?

  • Faster turnaround times
  • Fewer approval delays
  • Lower production costs
  • More content created without more headcount

What types of templates should your brand be using?

Best-in-class digital template solutions should cover every channel and format your brand needs. That way, they can become the essential building blocks of your campaigns. Key formats include:

  • Ads
    Ensure brand recall across paid and owned channels with ad templates built for cross-platform consistency.
  • Social media
    React to events and social media trends instantly with templates that help local teams post quickly, without compromising the brand.
  • Print
    From posters and brochures to event roll‑ups, your physical assets should reflect your digital brand with precision.
  • Video
    Video is no longer optional. Templates make it scalable – empowering non‑designers to produce compelling, brand‑aligned videos with ease.
  • Dynamic content
    Create, edit, and personalize assets across markets. Templates with dynamic fields give teams the flexibility to adapt, fast.

Why is templated content creation key to future‑proofing your brand?

Your brand doesn’t stand still. It evolves, adapts, and expands. So your tech needs to keep pace.

Templated content creation tools – built into a centralized solution like Papirfly – give you the control to safeguard your brand and the flexibility to empower every team to contribute. It’s how modern content creation services stay responsive, consistent, and cost‑effective.

Table of contents:

  1. How can every team create on‑brand content without needing design support?
  2. How do you stay agile without compromising brand consistency?
  3. What types of templates should your brand be using?
  4. Why is templated content creation key to future‑proofing your brand?
Employer brand

EVP 2.0: Is it time to refresh your employer value proposition?

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Papirfly
4 minutes read

The world of work has been turned on its head several times over in the last few years. The roles of HR, recruitment and talent acquisition teams have been especially challenging as they’ve worked to navigate the complex nature of the pandemic and other changes taking place across the globe.
While the basic principles of your EVP won’t have shifted miles from where it was, there will be new considerations and an element of realignment that needs to take place as part of your employer brand management.

Whether you are continuing in a similar vein to pre-pandemic strategies and trying to realign your team, or have completely transformed the way you work over the last couple of years, revisiting your EVP is an important step.

Why is an EVP 2.0 so integral?

The purpose of your employee value proposition is to align the company’s offering to your employees’ needs, wants and expectations. Employees and companies have seen some unprecedented events take place, but many have thankfully made it out of the other side. This leaves your recruitment colleagues and employer branding team with the following challenges:

  • Understanding the mindset and priorities of existing employees
  • Discovering what’s motivating top talent 
  • Differentiating your EVP from others in your industry

Your EVP 2.0 essentials

Take your purpose even further

It’s one thing joining a company because of its values, it’s another taking action to support those values. As people become more personally purpose-driven, it’s important that the brand they work for matches this.

For example, if your brand is known for its green credentials and helping the world become more sustainable, there should be an internal scheme that rewards ‘green’ behaviour – it’s all about building a great place to work. This could be vouchers towards owning a bike to encourage people not to drive to work, an internal recycling scheme, or special funding for sustainability projects (with additional holiday allowance to accommodate this).

Whatever your purpose, ensure you create a good workplace culture that is reflected in everyday working life as well as your initial promises – this includes ensuring that your internal communications are on-brand to show you’re committed to delivering them. 

Benefits that go beyond just the individual

Family and personal goals are a key career driver, but often employees spend so much time at work that these goals can be hard to fulfil. Explore benefits that will build a greater emotional bond with your employees to foster a positive and supportive  work environment.

This could be providing private health insurance for immediate family members or a training allowance to help the employee achieve new skills.

Get more flexible than ever before

If working from home mandates proved anything, it’s that employees can be trusted to work when and where they want or need to. Many companies are taking this one step further, and we’ve seen a range of working options and employee benefits including:

  • Working from home permanently
  • Hybrid working
  • Flexible start and finish times
  • Early closures in the summertime 
  • Unlimited holidays (providing that work is completed)
  • Extended maternity/paternity leave
  • Paid sabbaticals after a specified amount of years

Prioritise mental health support

A supportive company culture will help instil positive mental attitudes, but that alone isn’t enough to ensure your employees remain happy.

Create a forum that encourages open conversations – this could be through the acquisition of a digital mental health platform that employees can engage with as and when needed, regular mental health workshops, the introduction of wellbeing champions, and training for existing managers to effectively support someone who is struggling. There are lots of mental health awareness courses that can be taken, including mental health first-aid.

EVP 2.0: Company culture checklist

Ensuring all bases are covered

Our hierarchy of needs as humans is different in employment than it is in everyday life. Your EVP will be unique to your brand – hopefully including many of the initiatives mentioned already – but there are four basic boxes that your EVP 2.0 needs to tick. If lacking in one of any four areas, you could see your brand lose good talent to competitors and increase your employee turnover. To become an employer of choice, consider the following:

Physical needs

  • Health incentives such as gym memberships or on-site classes 
  • Partner with apps that can support sleep and wellbeing, such as Calm or Headspace
  • Provide access to private healthcare or nutrition services

Emotional needs

  • A supportive and open work environment
  • Access to therapy tools if needed
  • Offer coaching for high-stress positions
  • Conduct employee surveys to understand how people are feeling and what improvements could be made

Social needs

  • Regular meet-ups virtually or in-person to ensure teams feel connected
  • Embrace diversity
  • Encourage cross-department collaboration
  • Encourage giving back and volunteering days in line with your brand purpose

Financial needs

  • Offer employees access to financial advisors where possible
  • Provide interest-free loans for medium-sized purchases such as annual travel tickets, holidays or cars
  • Ensure peace of mind for employees’ families with life assurance
  • Conduct regular pay reviews

Communicating your EVP with Papirfly

A creative brand management solution can help to support the good workplace culture you are aiming to build. The platform we offer at Papirfly is used by some of the world’s most notable employer brand teams including Unilever, Vodafone and more. Teams are able to own and control their EVP in every aspect of marketing.

This gives your employer brand team the freedom to:

  • Create an infinite amount of on-brand digital, print, social, video and email assets in a matter of minutes – no design skills are needed. These documents are stored in a centralised system and you can manage all campaign
  • Store, edit, find and share every asset created in a centralised DAM system
  • Access all educational brand and employer brand documents 
  • Manage all campaign timelines, briefs and assets from a single portal. On the go. Anywhere in the world. 

So if you need agile talent acquisition, a brand management platform can help you keep consistency throughout your campaigns.

Discover our brand management platform for employer brand teams, check out our customer brand stories or book your demo today.

Table of contents:

  1. Why is an EVP 2.0 so integral?
  2. Your EVP 2.0 essentials
  3. Company culture checklist
  4. Communicating your EVP with Papirfly
Brand Activation Management

How BAM directly supports work-life balance

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Papirfly
4 minutes read

The definition of work-life balance is quite different depending on who you work for. For some, it’s unlimited holiday, flexible working hours and perks-a-plenty. For others, the reality is much starker.

However your work-life balance scale is tipped, one thing’s for sure: If your time at work is full of stress, all the perks in the world won’t make a difference.

BAM by Papirfly™ was designed with one aim in mind: To give teams the freedom to fly. To free them from the fast-paced, ever-changing environment that demands high-level thinking, concentration, energy, multi-tasking and more.

Software isn’t going to save the world, but it can help to make work-life more enjoyable and fulfilling.

How BAM supports individual employees

Manageable hours and no longer working late

Whether resources are low or your team is stretched, there’s nothing worse than working through lunch or staying late just to meet deadlines. Rushing not only compromises the quality of output, but also leaves it more prone to errors. Working this way is unsustainable and unfulfilling. 

Working long hours is mentally draining and sees people missing out on important events with family and friends, as well as leaving them with less time for self-care and other activities that keep their mental and physical health in check.

BAM automates many time-consuming and manual processes, meaning that work gets done more quickly. There are predefined templates in place meaning that anyone in any team can create what they need when they need it. There’s no need to worry about things going wrong because the sign-off process is digitised and the creative is completed with guidelines enforced. 

In summary…

  • No more long hours 
  • Automate time-consuming tasks 
  • Digitise sign-off 
  • Prevents rushing 

Feeling less stressed

Many of BAM’s features are designed to make marketing as stress-free as possible. There’s less reliance on agencies or others around you, the responsibility of creation or editing can sit almost anywhere – with no design experience needed to create an infinite amount of assets, including print, digital, video, social, email and more.

These can all be made on-brand in a matter of minutes, so no panicking to push through any last-minute changes or amends. All the power is in your hands.


Able to meet deadlines and keep up with demand easily

When your marketing team is relied upon by all areas of the business, demand can quickly outweigh capacity. Often there’s not an option to say no and teams need to muddle through to achieve what they can, as quickly as they can.

With a dedicated campaign planner built-in to a DAM, everyone understands their deadlines. Marketing materials can be created quickly thanks to smart templates. Technically, anyone in the business can create the assets they need by themselves, as long as they have had the initial hour of training they are good to go.

This means no more over-committing, only seamless execution.

In summary…

  • Shared responsibility and burden
  • Deadlines met with ease
  • Capacity is increased to cope with demand

Reduce the risk of anything going wrong

Anxiety and panic are significantly reduced when the scenarios that can cause them are eliminated. Having the assurance that stops things from going wrong is one of many ways to do this with BAM.

Predefined smart templates are built tailored to your brand. Locked down image libraries, colour combinations, layouts and more so that nothing can be created off-brand.

An optional digital sign-off process can also be embedded into any asset you create. This allows people to comment on particular elements of an asset, approve changes and give ultimate sign-off on the marketing’s release. A full audit trail is left which means you can see who did what and when. 

In summary…

  • Full audit trail on assets
  • Digitised approval process
  • Pre-defined templates prevent anything being off-brand

More scope for remote working

When all or part of your team is working remotely, it’s important for them to be able to access what they need without always needing server access or software installed. Your brand’s dedicated brand portal is accessed via a URL and login on your normal browser, which means anyone can access and create what they need from anywhere in the world.

This pulls down huge barriers for teams who have been unable to embrace hybrid working. The power of BAM means they can always pick up where they left off, whether they’re at home, on-the-go or in the office.

Unmanageable workloads are a thing of the past

Taking on too much or feeling under too much pressure often only ends in one way – an unhappy person that looks elsewhere for a new role. Marketing is by its very nature a complex beast, but too much to deliver and too few resources is an unnecessary strain on teams.

Each of BAM’s four feature categories work to make workloads more manageable in the following ways:

Create – An infinite amount of print, digital, social and video assets. There’s no limit to the amount you can create so budgets can be stretched as far as you need them to go. Assets can be created in a matter of minutes, which means more time is freed up for individuals.

Educate – A central place for teams to access all brand guidelines and documentation, ensuring that everyone knows what they’re doing and when. The right teams in the right territories have access to the resources that are relevant for them, which helps to improve accuracy, eliminate mistakes and prevent duplication of effort.

Store & share – A built-in Digital Asset Management (DAM), where everything is centrally stored and accurately organised. Teams can access, edit and share any marketing materials that have been created without having to hunt for what they need. The latest versions and their history is all recorded, and prevents having to go back and redo assets.  

Manage – A central birdseye view of everything that’s going on, no need for back and forth on emails or endless Zoom calls. Create and access timelines, briefs, project information and files in one place. Manage sign-offs digitally and only release artwork for download once it’s signed off.

Ways BAM supports brands

Smart templates ensure everything’s on-brand


There’s total peace of mind that teams across the world are all on the same page and delivering to a high standard.

Teams are always informed and educated

A dedicated education section means that teams in every country have access to the information relevant to them and that brands are activated correctly.

Time is used more effectively


Reduction in time searching for files. Assets created in minutes. Less time liaising with agencies. Amends made in seconds. Time freed up for strategic thinking. There’s no end to the productivity gains made possible by BAM.

Transform the way you work forever


Learn more about the power of BAM for your corporate, employer brand or retail marketing team. Book your demo today. 

 

Table of contents:

  1. How BAM supports individuals
  2. Ways BAM supports brands
Display Advertising, Marketing Tools

Why Display Ads are key in winning the battle for brand awareness

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Papirfly
3 minutes read

Standing out above your competitors is no easy task in today’s market. Even when you believe you offer a superior product or service, your brand won’t capture the hearts and minds of your target customers if rival brands are unchallenged in capturing their attention .

Launching display ads is an essential tactic for any brand serious about increasing its visibility and impact in their ideal customers’ lives. Also known as banner ads, we’ll help you understand just why focussing on display advertising can boost your brand’s chances in the market and increase your bottom line.

Is display advertising right for your brand?

Simply put, yes – that is, if you want to keep up with the competition. As 84% of marketers invest in display ads your brand is in the minority if it isn’t utilising this crucial method of increasing brand awareness.

This isn’t to say you should be following the crowd for the sake of it. Yet when you consider your own experience the chances are you can appreciate the benefit of display ads. For instance, when browsing the internet can you remember ever NOT seeing a display ad on a webpage?

Also read: What is a banner ad creator?

Target your brand’s perfect customers

Going further, can you remember seeing ads that felt totally relevant and specific to you – linked to your recent searches or completely in line with your long-term beliefs, needs or interests? We all have and, of course, this is a familiar experience for us all.

For example, if you’re interested in physical fitness then websites on this topic will likely display adverts that relate to exercise equipment, strength-building programmes or nutritional food products. In addition, ads on these themes might present themselves to you on websites of an entirely different subject matter as sophisticated, targeted advertising picks up your personal online behaviour. 

Display ads work exceptionally well at reaching the people your brand and your product will serve best, increasing the likelihood new customers will discover you and that your brand’s identity will be  more frequently visible in their day to day lives. 

Also read: How to create dynamic display ads that count 

Display Ads increase the likelihood of brand strategy success

A Cost Per Click (CPC) system is usually applied when paying for display ads. This offers great value as you know those who click are interested in your product and brand. Naturally, not every click ends up in a purchase, yet it creates a touchpoint and increases brand awareness that could lead the customer to make future transactions.

Yet there is even greater value in using display ads when you consider how they complement other channels. Sticking with TV, there is more than a 25% probability that someone recognizes a television commercial if they have previously seen it on a digital platform.

So while it’s difficult to track how a TV ad for, let’s say, physical exercise equipment will result in a customer purchase – when screened in the commercial break for a healthy cooking show for example – using display ads fundamentally increases the chance the ad will catch their attention.

In fact, one survey shows that your ROI’s can increase by as much as 35% if you use a wide range of platforms, including TV. With its more sophisticated ability to reach a pinpoint target audience, display ads must be part of that brand marketing strategy. This provides confidence that the structure of your brand can remain strong when this tactic is embraced, using a solution that doesn’t blow your marketing budget.

Also read: How to structure your brand with Papirfly

Invest in the right tech to manage your display advertising

Clearly there is some effort required to create display advertising which can be time-consuming and demand resources from marketing teams, with the right expertise and knowledge required to deliver optimal results. Such resources are often in short supply internally and with agency fees ever-rising, it’s easy to see why some brands avoid display advertising altogether.

Reassuringly, creating instant recognition by producing high-quality display advertising can be done by building ad templates and automating creation and publishing workflows. Achieving brand consistency across every digital channel and platform is within reach, as is a higher chance of brand awareness.

Our solutions support your display ad template creation and brand asset management, with technology that anyone can learn to use easily, so your marketing team can create ads aligned with your brand guidelines.

From here you can become quick, efficient and brand consistent with every asset as you begin to stand out from the crowd. So, when your customers consider whether they choose you or your rivals… there is no competition. 

Also read: How Papirfly’s Display Ads elevate your banner ad creation

Brand Activation Management

The art of approvals: How to keep your brand from going astray

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Papirfly
6 minutes read

Creatives conceptualise your campaigns.

Strategy keeps your marketing aligned.

Project managers ensure everything is delivered on time and on budget.

Whose job is it to make sure your brand is aligned globally, across all campaigns?

For a brand manager, that’s a mighty role to take on. Without the right approval processes in place and technology to support them, it’s a tangled mess of complexity.

In this article, we’ll share how you and your teams can enjoy an approval process that’s free from stress and chaos.

How to streamline your sign-off process 

There are many steps to successful approval approaches, and these will vary depending on the size and nature of your brand. This isn’t about micromanaging – this is about ensuring clarity, consistency and control over your brand’s campaign and outputs. Here are some fundamentals to consider:

Identification and audit

If you don’t have your sign off process mapped out, this is your first step. There’s a great tool called Diagrams that can help you plot everything in a logical, easy-to-understand way. Identify all the people and processes that are required in order for something to be signed off. This may be organised by sub-brand, particular formats, divisions or countries. 

Here are 8 things you will need to include:

  • The types of content and campaign material teams create
  • Which stages are involved in the creation of each type
  • Who is accountable for each of these stages?
  • How long should each of these stages last?
  • What is the key action for each stage that triggers the next one?
  • Once each part is completed, how is this communicated?
  • How do these campaigns then get reviewed and amended for different markets? 
  • Is there a separate flow for ad-hoc/urgent jobs? If there is a time-sensitive topical piece, for example, how does this differ and can this be an abridged process?

Once you have this down, it’s important that refresher training is put into practice so that teams know who is responsible for what. If you have BAM by Papirfly™, you can completely automate this process, as well as create all your digital and print assets from within the dedicated portal.  

Documenting

You’ve got the bigger picture mapped out, but now you need to talk about documenting the process in further detail and working out your audit trail. If you are yet to go fully digital, you might use a PDF annotation tool to submit requests, do it via email, use a project management tool or fill out a physical form. 

It’s worth creating a base template as a starting point. This may be in the form of a checklist, comment boxes or signature sections. So even if you fill out the PDF, you can keep an audit trail within this template and ensure you’ve checked everything you need to. 

Don’t just stick with what you have because it’s working right now – consider whether this will work in the longer term and ask yourself if you have documentation for the following scenarios:

  • How do you submit change requests? 
  • What are the steps after approval or refusal? 
  • Who is accountable if something goes wrong? 
  • What happens if the person who needs to give approval is off sick? 
  • How many revisions are allowed before the issue is escalated higher? 
  • How will the general review phase be separated from approvals?

There’s a lot to consider. But having these details in an approval guide or spreadsheet can help existing employees and new starters get to grips with how things work. It will also give you complete peace of mind that nothing will go wrong in your absence.

5 tips to get the most out of approvals

#1 Timing is everything

There’s no point in sign off taking place too early or too late in the process. Involving stakeholders at the wrong time may have big implications on deadlines.

#2 Give prompts to avoid vagueness

In your approval guide or as a separate piece of training, give examples of what’s considered constructive feedback and what isn’t. It might look something like this:

❌ Vague

  • “That logo doesn’t look quite right.”
  • “The information looks too much.”
  • “I don’t really like the image for UAE. Replace it with something else.”

✅ Useful

  • “That logo looks skewed. Revert to brand guidelines to ensure it’s correct.”
  • “Volume of information makes it hard to read. Remove section B. (marked up).”
  • “This image is culturally inappropriate. Please see UAE-specific imagery folder and replace.”

#3 Ensure next steps are clear

When giving feedback make sure the recipient knows what to do after they’ve implemented it. Be very clear in the next steps. If you’re not, and a deadline is missed, it could come back to haunt you. Be as specific as possible in how the process moves on.

This doesn’t work…
“Please make these amends and send them back to me so we can hit the deadline.”

This does work…
“Please make these amends and send them back to me so we can hit the deadline. Also include Becky in case I’m in a meeting. She can give you final approval before this goes off to print.” 

This doesn’t work…
“I’m happy with this now. Send it across to David and see what he thinks.”

This does work…
“I’m happy with this now. You will need David’s final approval before posting. Please make sure he does this today and confirm with me when it’s done.”

#4 Give teams brand guidelines

Without comprehensive brand guidelines, your approvals process could end up being unnecessarily long and complicated. Or worse, campaigns could go to market completely wrong. Brand guidelines should include (at the very minimum):

  • Logo use across different markets and applications
  • Typeface and text sizing
  • Supporting visual assets and icons
  • Imagery guidance 
  • Tone of voice rules 

#5 Revisit briefing documents

If the same things are consistently being picked up on, it could be that the briefs aren’t comprehensive or clear enough. When checking work for the first time, make sure you have the brief to hand. If something significant has been missed, and it’s not on the brief, you know you need to give two sets of feedback. 

What could go wrong?

❌ Too many people involved in the process
❌ Lack of automation
❌ Unclear deadlines and sense of urgency lost
❌ Unrealistic time frames to turn around amends
❌ Poor communication

✅ Limited brand guardians for specific regions/sub-brands
✅ Digitise approvals process through BAM by Papirfly™
✅ No task can proceed without assigning a deadline
✅ Approval deadline set to feedback by
✅ One method of feedback is established

How to learn from mistakes

No matter how stringent your approvals process, things can and will go wrong occasionally along the line. What’s important is that teams can learn from these shortcomings, get better and move on.

Debriefing sessions

At the end of a big project, review bottlenecks and audit trails to identify any common themes of mistakes. Hold a quick session to talk about what went wrong and what can be implemented to prevent this happening again in the future.  

Mapping out imperfect journeys and realigning

Taking a step back when things really fall short may mean knocking down your approvals process and starting again. This can seem daunting, but the time you invest now to get it right will save you a lot more in the future. 

Reviewing briefs 

While the fundamentals of a brief should be consistent, it could be that different levels of employees need different levels of information in order to make sure their work is the best it could possibly be. In addition to tailoring briefs where feasible, include a link to useful resources such as brand guidelines, so that everyone’s knowledge is consistently refreshed. 

Essential approval features from BAM

Whether it’s a full campaign or an individual asset, the approvals process is what keeps production moving smoothly and on the right track. While teams across the world are using BAM by Papirfly™ to create all their digital and print assets, on brand and on time, they are also benefiting from a range of features that makes sign off seamless. 

Chat function gives multiple stakeholders a way of chatting about a particular asset together, before committing to the feedback. This prevents conflicting direction and makes sure everyone is aligned. 

Document markup provides physical points for the creator to review comments left, so that they can see exactly what needs to be updated and where. 

Locking down elements 

The creation tool features templates that are created in-line with your brand guidelines and places restrictions on how much can be changed. Stakeholders also have the power to lock down particular elements so they can’t be touched. This removes the need for feedback on basic brand etiquette as everything is pre-programmed. The creator still has flexibility, but within a predefined framework. 

Approval workflows

All workflows are documented, digitised and automated within the portal. Teams can access the assets, leave comments and receive feedback all in a single place. The entire version history and audit trail are recorded, and marketing materials can only be released and shared once final approval has been given. 

Re-approval of edited creatives 

If an additional amend is made to a campaign asset post-sign off, the approval process is reopened and the stakeholders will be notified. This gives an additional layer of assurance that nothing can be messed with or go out incorrectly. 

There are so many features that make BAM by Papirfly™ the perfect tool for marketing teams. Bring production in-house. Keep your brand consistent. Take global campaigns to market with complete confidence. From one centralised portal. 

Book your demo today.

Table of contents:

  1. How to streamline your sign-off process
  2. 5 tips to get the most out of approvals
  3. What could go wrong?
  4. How to learn from mistakes
  5. Essential approval features
Brand Communication, Digital brand book

Why an online brand book is key for your brand communication

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Papirfly
3 minutes read

When communicating your brand, do you ever get the feeling you’re talking to a wall? Or wonder if anyone ever reads your messages? Successful branding demands proper brand communication. And it requires an entire company pulling in the same direction. For this to happen, everyone needs to be on the same page, receiving the same information about your brand. But the fact is that 74% of employees feel they are missing out on company and news. So, what do you do?

You invest in an online brand book!

What is a brand book?

Brand book or brand guidelines are two and the same. It’s a document that describes your brand from a-z. The brand identity and its origin, the brand values, and its purpose in life. A brand book also includes branding rules – Every detail on how to apply your brand in different scenarios as well as how to communicate your brand. This all sums up to a brand book.

Your first reaction is perhaps that all companies have a brand book. Surprisingly, this is not the case. A study done among US organisations found that only 30% have well-known and used brand guidelines. The remaining 70% do not have any, or no one knows where to find them and it’s random who follows them. What does this tell us? First and foremost, having brand guidelines in place is not enough to secure your brand. Next, how a brand book is shared and distributed affects how your colleagues engage with your brand and communicate it.  

To get everyone pulling in the same direction, communicating ONE brand, everyone in your organisation needs to be informed and included in your branding efforts. You need to make sure everyone is familiar with your brand and its guidelines, and you need to secure availability and accessibility to avoid ending up in the same situation as the US companies mentioned above.

Also read: Who do you need on your team when building your brand?

An online brand book enables seamless brand communication

Aligning everyone can seem like an impossible task. You know first-hand how hard it is to get everyone to read your messages about brand updates and new assets, and they never seem to remember where to locate the brand book. At the same time, they feel left out of the communication loop. Clearly there is a mismatch somewhere.

Accessibility and user-friendliness are key if you want everyone aligned. Remember that for most of your colleagues, the brand book is perhaps needed once or twice a month and if it’s “hidden” in a marketing folder and the link was sent to them ages ago, how can you expect them to remember where to find it? And perhaps there was an update you emailed them about, but they have downloaded your brand book to their desktop for easy access, and they missed your email update. Then what?

An online brand book removes these worries and makes brand communication effective, easy, and seamless. One link, updated in real-time and everything collected in one single location. Everyone receives the same information at the same time. Communicating news, guideline updates, events, campaigns and more has never been easier.  

Also read: Build your brand with effective brand communication 

An online brand book enables consistent brand communication

Communication is part of any branding effort. How you communicate internally, how you communicate with the market, your customers, and other stakeholders. And it’s not only how you express yourself with words, visuals and choice of channels are also a form of communication.

All this needs to match and align. How your brand is presented and communicated by everyone in the company needs to match the brand strategy and the brand book. By managing all of this online from one single location, you can rest assured that your brand will look and sound the same everywhere.  

An online brand book unifies your brand communication

When everyone and everything is connected to one source of truth, getting your message distributed and your brand shared is easy.

Any update or news you have about your brand runs smoothly online. Publish updates and news, connect necessary brand assets, campaign information, marketing collateral and more and communicate your brand with ease.

Also read: How to communicate your brand

Get started with an online brand book

An online brand book is more than uploading a PDF document to your SharePoint or Google Workspace. This is about establishing an online solution where you can properly present and connect your brand securing automated workflows. This is where you connect your rules to the actual brand assets, and even self-serviced brand templates. The right brand book activates your brand online.  

Brand Activation Management

Why tone of voice and language are critical to a consistent brand

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Papirfly
8 minutes read

When it comes to building a strong, memorable brand, consistency is crucial.

Presenting your audiences with a dependable, distinguishable identity on all channels is the origin of them building trust with your brand. Without trust, there can be no brand loyalty, and you lose your opportunity at securing that sought-after return customer.

To preserve consistency at a time where the demands on content production are greater than ever, organisations are encouraged to create clear brand guidelines that underpin everything that is published. Much of these concern the visual aspects of the brand, ensuring these don’t deviate from their identity.

Why tone of voice is so important

Just as important is keeping tone of voice and language on-brand and markets specific. Yet, this is often overlooked when it comes to these guidelines, as it is viewed as difficult to enforce and manage in the way visual assets can be.

The end result? Copywriters that are unsure of how to evoke their brand’s personality across content. With incessant pressure to produce this content, they instead write in their own style to compensate.

These inconsistencies impact how audiences view your brands. If there is no binding thread between your various touchpoints, this will prevent potential customers from gaining a solid sense of what your brand represents, making you appear less trustworthy.

What is tone of voice?

Although tone of voice is a commonly held expression, it is important to recognise that tone and voice are two separate entities.

Your brand’s voice is the base of your verbal personality. It represents the core values, characteristics and features that make up your brand’s unique identity, and will be unwavering across every piece of marketing collateral.

Tone by contrast is much more malleable and flexible. Tone is the application of your brand’s voice to fit the context of where it is used. For instance, a social post on Twitter hopping on the back of a trending meme will probably have a notably different tone than a press release about your latest development.

The tone and style it is written can be markedly different, but they can still carry that overarching voice behind your brand. That is the secret to a tone of voice that maintains complete consistency, but perfectly adapts to the channel it’s placed on.

This is a difficult balancing act, and certainly one that some brands perform better than others. But at the heart of the most successful examples are tone of voice guidelines, that remove any room for interpretation and make it clear to everyone in your company how you should be projected verbally in all circumstances.

Building your brand’s tone of voice guidelines

Your tone of voice guidelines set the rules for every aspect of your written communications. It is the document that all writers, both internal and freelance, should refer to in order to ensure they are producing content in line with your personality.

This will also streamline the process of onboarding new copywriters in how they get to grips with communicating your brand, and used as a reference guide for when it comes to editing and proofing.

Below, we’ve outlined our 9 tips to making these guidelines as robust and useful as they need to be to guarantee consistency throughout your content.

9 steps to great tone of voice guidelines

1. Perform a language audit

First, it’s important to assess the content that your brand currently produces across its various channels to identify anything that you feel is inconsistent with how you wish your brand to be perceived.

What words stand out most frequently in your content? How long are your sentences? How often do you use colloquialisms or abbreviations? Do you employ emojis?

Ask these questions and more across a wide body of your existing content. This will give your team a base to determine the elements you like within your current copy, and what needs to be tightened up or addressed in order to consistently present your brand’s personality. Understanding these will be important to what you include within your final guidelines.

2. Identify your brand’s personality

When determining the right tone of voice for your brand, think of it as a person. Imagine meeting them at a dinner party:

  • Would they be loud and confident?
  • Would they be thoughtful and reserved?
  • Would they be assertive and forthright?

What would they be wearing? What subjects would they talk about? Who would they be inspired by? When you start to think of your brand in this context, you can develop a more vivid understanding of what its voice is and how it would be used in a variety of contexts.

By developing this persona, one that incorporates all of the top values and aspects of your brand, it becomes clearer how it would interact with your audiences.

3. Assess your target audiences

Speaking of your audiences, it’s important to perform some critical analysis on who they are and what they would want to hear from your brand.

Is your primary audience niche or is it more mainstream? Do they prioritise particular social issues over others? Is there particular jargon that they use day-to-day?

Building this understanding will cement what your brand’s voice should be to best engage your customers and, importantly, help you recognise how its tone needs to shift to capture the imagination of different audiences across your various channels.

4. Construct a glossary

An essential component of your tone of voice guidelines should be a glossary, which outlines specific terminology and jargon that is unique to your brand or industry, and that needs to be incorporated into your copy.

This will include product names, brand language, warranty terms and department names, and will span across both content you produce for customers, and phrases you use internally. It will also be valuable in outlining how terms will differ when used in different contexts or in a variety of languages (more on that later). It should also address any words that should be avoided at all costs.

Also, it’s important that this glossary is not left static. As your brand evolves and expands into different locations and onto different platforms, it’s crucial that this list is kept up-to-date.

5. List clear grammatical dos and don’ts

Alongside the glossary, your tone of voice guide should also have a distinct list of grammatical rules for your writers to follow. This should be as comprehensive as possible, but listed in a digestible way so it is easier for writers to understand and apply to your brand.

  • Do you want hyphens to be used in words like double-click?
  • What perspective do you speak with? (i.e. first-person, second-person, third-person)
  • What slang words or abbreviations are allowed and which are forbidden?
  • Are writers encouraged to use idioms, cliches, metaphors and other literary devices?
  • What are your rules relating to punctuation and formatting?
  • How long should sentences and paragraphs be in general?

This sounds like nit-picking, but if you want to achieve complete consistency, it is best that nothing about your voice is left to chance.

6. Put copy into context

Remember what we said about voice and tone being separate? That’s because the overarching language and grammatical rules you outline in your tone of voice guidelines might shift slightly depending on the context of the writing.

For instance, on a press release or product description, your copy might be more formal and to-the-point, with little margin for humour or creative expression. At the same time, your social posts could be more colloquial and quirky. The nature of these different types of content necessitates a change in tone to not appear jarring to the audiences reading it.

So, make sure your guidelines address any difference in approach on specific content channels. This will allow for the writing to be rightly adjusted for these various audiences, but not stray too far away from your brand’s core identity.

7. Provide plenty of examples

To give your writers complete clarity over how they should produce content for your brand, it is vital that you give them clear examples of copy that ticks all the right boxes, and copy that is completely off-brand.

Providing several examples, across all of your brand channels, will make it apparent to new and existing writers what is expected of them in a way that simply explaining doesn’t always cover. When you’re learning grammar in school, you will be presented with good and bad examples to make that process easier – this works in exactly the same way here.

Consider the “Goldilocks” technique here: If you want your brand to be perceived as “approachable yet professional”, you might title your emails with “hello” rather than “dear” (too formal and familiar) or “hey” (too colloquial).

8. Don’t forget the details

While it is important not to overwhelm writers with detail to make it as straightforward as possible for them to absorb and apply your tone of voice requirements, not covering all your bases widens the risk of inconsistencies creeping in over time.

With this in mind, make sure you also incorporate sections dedicated to:

  • The degree of formality of your content in various contexts
  • Your stance on swearing and other potential sticking points
  • How and when to reference news and pop culture

Continue to review and assess your copy over time to see if any off-brand tendencies start to emerge, and if they do, update your guidelines where necessary to reflect this.

9. Make it easily accessible

Finally, you can have the most complete, comprehensible tone of voice guide imaginable – but if nobody can access it or knows where it is, it will have no effect. So, it is vital that the location of the guide is known company-wide, and that your teams globally can access it at all times to inform their writing.

This is where a platform like Papirfly’s all-in-one brand management solution can be a powerful complement to your tone of voice guidelines. By providing a single, central destination for all your brand guidelines, this keeps your teams worldwide aware of your brand’s unique identity and how they should maintain this both verbally and visually.

A single source of truth for your brand voice that your entire team can engage with.

4 brands that know their tone of voice

Coca-Cola

A brand that is already benefiting from the Papirfly Platform, Coca-Cola’s tone of voice has been clear and consistent across its 130-year history – it is all about bringing happiness to people.

Coca-Cola maintains a positive, friendly and down-to-earth tone across all its primary communications, built around their core personality trait of helping people live happy lives. Through the language they use, no one is left in any doubt what their brand stands for, and that’s helped it become one of the world’s most celebrated brands.

Examples

“Open happiness”

“Together tastes better”

“Refresh on the Coca-Cola side of life”

Starbucks

Starbucks’ voice guidelines plainly outline their tone of voice in a way anyone can understand, including several examples.

By employing a blend of functional and expressive language, Starbucks sets out their brand identity as one that wants to be clear, helpful and digestible for their customers, but to unlock their passion for what they drink and to indulge in what they love.

Examples

“That first sip feeling”

“It’s not just coffee. It’s Starbucks”

“Our mission: to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time”

Dove

As a company built around beauty and self-care, it is important that Dove’s messages of empowerment and body positivity are projected throughout its communications.

Dove keeps this consistent in their various marketing and social media campaigns, through to their website, where their vision aligns them as an organisation that wants to make beauty a source of confidence, rather than anxiety.

Examples

“Making a genuine difference”

“Welcome to Dove…the home of real beauty”

“We believe that real beauty comes from confidence, and confidence comes from embracing who you are”

Old Spice

Following their rebrand in 2010, Old Spice unshackled themselves from their former tone of voice, which was associating them with a mature audience, and revitalised it to attract a broader, younger demographic.

By focusing on wit, humour and a new perspective on masculinity, Old Spice used its new voice to regain its foothold as a global leader in men’s deodorant.

Examples

“The man your man could smell like”

“How to keep excessive sweat from stopping your swagger”

“Get more awesomeness, good smellingness, and Old Spice exclusiveness than ever before”

Lock down your tone of voice

We hope this has helped you recognise the absolute importance of being clear and consistent with your brand’s tone of voice and language, and how you can guarantee this in your own marketing.

Consistency is the cornerstone of customers trusting your brand – and this needs to be maintained every time you engage with them. Your tone of voice and the language you use is just one component of this, but it is one that demands your attention to prevent your voice from becoming confused or inaccurate.

Our all-in-one brand management platform is designed to help your brand lockdown consistency across all areas of your marketing, both verbally and visually. 

  • Harness bespoke, intelligent templates to produce assets faster and more cost-effectively, with no chance of going off-brand
  • Make all guidelines, training videos and assets available company-wide
  • Set permissions for different team members to ensure they can only access features and assets relevant to them and their market

Start empowering your brand with a brand management platform – get in touch with our team today.

Table of contents:

  1. Why tone of voice is so important
  2. What is tone of voice?
  3. Building your brand’s tone of voice guidelines
  4. 4 brands that know their tone of voice
  5. Lock down your tone of voice
Brand Activation Management

Unlocking the Power of Brand Portals

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Papirfly
4 minutes read

A brand portal’s power can’t be understated. It’s a game-changer for not only your brand, but for you and your teams – but that’s only when you fully understand what you’re signing up for.

It won’t transport you to another galaxy, but this kind of portal will take your brand to places it has never been before. 

There are hundreds, possibly thousands of brand portals available. It’s a saturated market and the term ‘brand portal’ alone is interpreted in many different ways, delivering many contrasting solutions.

The problem is that they’ve been developed by teams from all different backgrounds, solving different pain points and problems – which leaves you with an overwhelming amount of choice but not a lot of context or clarity. 

In this article, we aim to help you understand the core features of every solid brand portal, what it should help you achieve day-to-day and how it can propel your brand long term. Lastly, we’ll help you navigate and narrow down your choices.

What is a brand portal and what does it do?

At its most basic level, a brand portal is a digital home for your brand. Many give you access to brand assets, videos, guidelines and campaign materials. It allows employees, agencies, suppliers and whoever else needs access to log in and get what they need, when they need it, without having to interrupt anyone else.

This is still an accurate description of many brand portals that exist. But there are many vendors taking this to a new level, and redefining what a brand portal is and should be.

The trouble with the traditional definition is that it only solves one of many brand problems. A comprehensive brand portal should give teams the ability to create and edit assets, as well as access them.

Otherwise, there’s still a great disconnect between what’s being produced and what’s available. There’s no true oversight or assurance of brand consistency, and mistakes can only be noticed once the files are uploaded. 

What features should a brand portal have?

A brand portal solution like Papirflys are being continually updated and invested in, so it can be hard to know what you should be looking for in terms of features. We’re proud to say our core product allows for the vast majority of features to be accessed, with very few module upgrades available. 

Here’s the list of features you should be looking for in your next brand portal: 

An easy-to-use, customisable dashboard or ‘homepage’

Tailored login credentials, so that certain individuals or companies only have access to what they need

A built-in, intuitive Digital Asset Management (DAM) system to organise and locate files and assets easily – with tagging functionality, as well as the ability to download in different file formats

Dedicated education section for brand assets, guidelines, usage and more to educate teams on the wider brand consistency mission and reduce internal requests

Intelligent design studio integrated into the portal, with guaranteed on-brand digital, print, social, video and email templates that can be created from scratch, edited or translated and adapted for other sub-brands, languages and regions

Campaign planning tools and timelines where campaign materials can also be easily accessed – with the option to discontinue asset availability once campaigns have finished

How will a brand portal make your life easier?

Aside from giving you a centralised place for your content production and brand management, it will also give teams a direct way to get the assets they need. They can create and edit anything themselves, while you are assured your brand guidelines are always adhered to.

This means no waiting around for agencies or third-party suppliers; teams can go to market quickly and you’re not bombarded with requests.

Wider than this, everything your brand produces will be on-brand and consistent, helping to create a more unified approach to marketing and communications. A brand that’s presented consistently tends to generate 23% more revenue.

Budget will be saved by reducing agency spending. Time will be saved by having a single place to go to for files and creation of assets. Teams will be more productive and deliver more in less time. 

There are very few (if any) downsides to implementing a brand portal. The benefits extend far beyond just being able to deliver more day-to-day – it has an incredible positive impact on the wider brand and business. 

Making an informed choice

We’ve compiled a list of key questions to help you select the brand portal that’s right for you. 

  • Are big, reputable brands using the portal?
  • How many active users do they have globally?
  • Can the company demonstrate reviews and detailed case studies (preferably video)?
  • How many years has the company been established?
  • How many employees does the company have? (this will help you to establish the level of customer service you can expect)
  • Are the pricing and package levels transparent?
  • Was the demo useful and informative?
  • Are the sales and customer service representatives knowledgeable? 
  • Is there a set roadmap for updates over the next year?

Could a brand management platform by Papirfly be your next brand portal?

We’re proud of the brand portal we created back in 2000. We’ve had a vision for over 21 years to become the best brand portal available and help global companies reach their full potential. And we’re doing it.

If you would like to learn more about Papirfly book your demo today. 

Table of contents:

  1. What is a brand portal and what does it do?
  2. What features should a brand portal have?
  3. How will a brand portal make your life easier?
  4. Making an informed choice