What are digital assets and how do you manage them?
Papirfly
4minutes read
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
Digital assets are indispensable valuables. They consume our surroundings more than we probably are aware of. In your private life alone, you have family photos, video recordings, insurance papers, banking papers, and personal papers to name a few. At work, any file you create, capture, copy or consume on your digital devices are considered digital assets. In 2020, this data required 64.2 zettabytes, in 2025 this number is expected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes.
Where is this data stored, and most importantly, how is this data stored? Do you have control of your digital assets, and are you prepared for the data growth?
Every company and every person has some sort of system for their digital assets, but the devil is in the details. How you do this means the world of difference and the impact when something backfires can be devastating.
Digital assets are valuables
Images are a good example of why digital assets are valuables. We constantly take pictures with our phones or cameras because we want to preserve a moment, whether it is of our kids, pets, partner, or a place. But then what? Do you store these images on your iCloud, Google Photos, or do you just leave them on the memory card?
Digital assets are indispensable valuables. They consume our surroundings more than we probably are aware of. In your private life alone, you have family photos, video recordings, insurance papers, banking papers, and personal papers to name a few. At work, any file you create, capture, copy or consume on your digital devices are considered digital assets. In 2020, this data required 64.2 zettabytes, in 2025 this number is expected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes.
Where is this data stored, and most importantly, how is this data stored? Do you have control of your digital assets, and are you prepared for the data growth?
Every company and every person has some sort of system for their digital assets, but the devil is in the details. How you do this means the world of difference and the impact when something backfires can be devastating.
Digital assets are valuables
Images are a good example of why digital assets are valuables. We constantly take pictures with our phones or cameras because we want to preserve a moment, whether it is of our kids, pets, partner, or a place. But then what? Do you store these images on your iCloud, Google Photos, or do you just leave them on the memory card?
Digital assets are indispensable valuables. They consume our surroundings more than we probably are aware of. In your private life alone, you have family photos, video recordings, insurance papers, banking papers, and personal papers to name a few. At work, any file you create, capture, copy or consume on your digital devices are considered digital assets. In 2020, this data required 64.2 zettabytes, in 2025 this number is expected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes.
Where is this data stored, and most importantly, how is this data stored? Do you have control of your digital assets, and are you prepared for the data growth?
Every company and every person has some sort of system for their digital assets, but the devil is in the details. How you do this means the world of difference and the impact when something backfires can be devastating.
Digital assets are valuables
Images are a good example of why digital assets are valuables. We constantly take pictures with our phones or cameras because we want to preserve a moment, whether it is of our kids, pets, partner, or a place. But then what? Do you store these images on your iCloud, Google Photos, or do you just leave them on the memory card?
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
Marketers are no strangers to rapid change. New technology, shifting channels, and evolving audience behaviors are all part of the job. But that doesn’t make it any easier to handle. In a Martech landscape where formats multiply and demand for creative content marketing keeps growing, producing and publishing quality assets at speed is a constant challenge.
Banner advertising is one of those ongoing demands. While not every brand has embraced it in the past, our increasingly digital world is making it harder to ignore. The question is not whether digital display ads will remain relevant, but how you can create banner ads that stand out — and sidestep the pitfalls that make audiences tune out.
Why banner ads still matter – and how to make them work
We see display ads everywhere – news sites, online stores, niche publications. But with their rise came a backlash: ad blockers. In 2019, 25.8% of internet users were blocking ads on their devices (Statista, 2025).
Time to give up? Absolutely not. The problem isn’t the format – it’s the execution. People don’t want intrusive, irrelevant messages. But that doesn’t mean they are opposed to all advertising – especially not if they are visually appealing ads for products or services they might actually buy.
Personalization is key here. Just as an in-store assistant offers tailored help, personal display ads can create a more human connection. Brands like Zalando use this to great effect, showing audiences products and messages aligned to their individual needs and interests.
The question is, do you have the skills and insight to do this on your own, or do you need expert help?
What is a banner ad creator — and why your brand needs one
A banner ad creator takes the complexity out of producing high-quality digital display ads. You don’t need to be a UX designer or have coding skills — the tool does the heavy lifting for you.
The process is simple:
Get the design right – work with a designer to create layouts that are on-brand and visually strong.
Turn designs into templates – these become the foundation for every ad you produce.
A good banner ad creator ensures brand consistency and makes updates painless across multiple channels, platforms, and formats. Need to change copy, swap imagery, or adjust an offer? Update once, and the changes roll out instantly across all formats.
The benefits of using a banner ad creator
Full control – manage all ad formats, platforms, and channels from one place.
Lower costs – reduce reliance on agencies for minor updates.
Increased efficiency – maintain, update, and publish from a single source.
Consistent branding – lock in your brand identity across every ad.
Multiple outputs, minimal effort – create every format without starting from scratch.
Personalization at scale – target the right audience with the right message.
Optimized performance – monitor results in real time and refine as needed.
Why should you avoid free ad creator tools?
Free ad creators and platform-specific tools (Google Ads, LinkedIn, Instagram) can seem tempting, but they come with limitations:
No brand control – restricted customization makes it hard to stay on-brand with fonts, colors, and layouts.
Poor format optimization – every format requires unique adjustments, which free tools often can’t handle well.
Platform lock-in – ads made in one tool are limited to that platform, creating duplication and extra work.
No real-time updates – changing ad content quickly is difficult, risking relevancy and performance.
The future of display advertising is smart and adaptable
With millennials turning 40 and Gen Z stepping into the workforce, today’s consumers are predominantly digital-first. A banner ad creator doesn’t just help you produce ads that grab their attention – it future-proofs your ability to stay visible, relevant, and competitive in an evolving media landscape.
Does everyone create content that’s on‑brand, every time?
Find peace of mind with better brand governance.
Does everyone create content that’s on‑brand, every time?
A banner ad creator is a tool that makes it easy for team members to create banner ads that are high-quality and on-brand. It turns approved designs into templates so anyone can create platform-ready digital display ads quickly – without needing design or coding skills.
Why are banner ads still relevant in today’s digital landscape?
Banner ads remain an effective way to reach audiences across news sites, online stores, and niche publications. While ad blockers exist, research shows users are more open to visually appealing, relevant ads – especially when personalized to their interests.
How does a banner ad creator benefit marketers?
It centralizes digital content creation and management, ensuring brand consistency and allowing performance tracking in real time. A banner ad creator can also support personalization and reduce dependency on external agencies.
What are the drawbacks of using free or platform-specific ad tools?
Free tools often limit customization, making it harder to create banner ads that are truly on-brand. They may not optimize for all formats or allow you to update ads in real time.
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
There are many factors that have an impact on your company’s success. Branding is one of them. Your brand is your company’s identity, it’s what separates you from your competitors and helps you stand out from the crowd. That is… If you have managed to establish a strong and memorable brand.
That’s why you need a proper platform to help you out. With Template Studio, you get a self-serviced approach to keep your design on-brand at all times.
The marketing tool that secures brand consistency
Branding is a task the entire company must embrace; every employee and department needs to understand and know how to communicate and use your brand. To simplify it, without uniform brand management you risk incorrect brand communication and brand dilution. And you don’t have to be Einstein to realize that this will damage your brand value.
As a marketer, you probably have a long list of requests in your mailbox for brand asset changes. Whether it is a format change, file type request, translation changes, contact changes, image change or other localization adjustments, it is a task you must respond to.
Unless you have Template Studio. This tool allows marketers to create the perfect creative template suite for the entire company, completely self-serviced and always on-brand.
How Template Studio secures brand consistency
If you have the resources and capacity to respond to all the asset changes on-time you are a star. If you don’t have the time, don’t worry, you’re not the only one. The digital marketing space puts strains on marketing departments all over; being present in a range of different platforms that demands attention and continuous nurturing makes it hard to keep up. In 2020, Martech found 8000 digital tools available. How many of these 8000 do you have to present your brand in: Websites, social media, advertising tools, email communication, sales tools and more?
Template Studio takes it down a notch and allows you to achieve brand consistency through a few simple steps:
You control your brand from one single source and your designs are always professional looking and updated.
The template technology makes sure your designs stay the same regardless of the creator. Responsive technology and content control always keep you in control of your brand image.
The online editor accepts a wide range of templates to be created. This secures a unified brand look across numerous platforms and channels.
Valuable template capabilities you should be aware of:
Template Studio transforms standard Adobe Indesign or Illustrator files into digital brand templates.
The technology is easy to use, and anyone can be a designer without any software know-how or design skills.
Brand assets are always updated and on-brand when digitalized. When you make changes to your designs or have new brand assets, just publish new digital templates to the studio and voila. Or update your existing ones.
The studio provides flexible brand control as you decide what can and can’t be changed. Each template can be modified to suit your company as well as the creator’s needs to ensure your designs are always on-brand.
File output is carefully controlled and allows you to prepare your files for multiple channels and platforms. One template = multiple formats.
Template Studio keeps your brand management balanced
Apart from keeping your brand consistent, Template Studio also provides other benefits. When you establish self-serviced branding templates you no longer need to worry about your mailbox be stuffed with ad-hoc design requests. Neither do you have to worry about frustrated colleagues taking matters into their own hands and designing something without respecting your brand guidelines. Nor do you have to spend money on simple design tasks that require the help of a creative agency.
Instead, you can work peacefully with your strategic and long-term initiatives necessary to establish a strong and reliable brand that keeps your current customers loyal and future customers will desire your brand.
Curious to learn more about our Template Studio? Check out our brochure.
Brand Management
Why marketers need design templates for content creation
Papirfly
3minutes read
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
Consistency isn’t optional – it’s foundational. How your brand looks, sounds, and behaves when it shows up in the world directly shapes how it’s remembered. It’s critical that people encounter the same, recognizable identity across all marketing and advertising materials.
But how do you maintain control when so many different people are creating content across teams, regions, formats and multiple channels?
Digital design templates provide a practical, scalable solution, allowing marketing teams to streamline digital content creation while at the same time protecting brand identity.
Do design templates limit creativity? Debunking the myth
It’s a common concern. Some creatives see templates as restricting their freedom – a “production line” approach that stifles originality. But effective brands already put limitations on designers, through clearly defined guidelines. Templates simply turn those rules into tools, so every asset reflects your identity.
In fact, templates often lead to increased creativity, not less. By freeing designers from repetitive production work, they allow more time for high-impact, strategic projects – where the real original thinking happens.
Key benefits of using digital design templates for marketers
Done right, digital design templates don’t just secure brand consistency – they enable you to deliver content creation services faster and more efficiently than ever before. Here’s how:
Brand protection is built in – Critical elements like logos, fonts, and color palettes are “locked” while features such as images, text and calls to action can all be changed.
Localization is easy – Teams can adapt content to match local languages, formats and cultural norms in minutes rather than days.
Assets can be produced on-demand – Flexible template technology allows users to define asset size and create the file type they need immediately.
In short, it is a marketer’s dream – a world where any colleague can create their own collateral quickly, without any danger of straying off-brand.
4 steps to successful content creation with design templates
1. Define essential template elements for multi-channel content
The options can be overwhelming at first. Stay focused by considering the elements you need for your template before you even start. It’s usually best to go with the simplest option. You should also make sure your template is flexible enough to work across multiple channels and asset types.
2. Customize design templates to match your brand guidelines
Off-the-shelf options can be a good starting point. But in the long term, you should be customizing your templates in line with your brand guidelines. Your design team have a critical role to play in this process. With their oversight, templates can become more than simple content marketing tools – they can be true brand enablers.
3. Focus on clear messaging and content optimization within templates
Don’t get stuck obsessing over layouts. Use templates as a solid design base, then focus your time on writing strong, clear messaging, testing variations, and making content work harder. Templates take care of the format – you and your team can focus on results.
4. Integrate design templates into your long-term content creation strategy
Templates aren’t a shortcut – they’re a sustainable, scalable system. For small or growing brands, they offer enterprise-level structure at a fraction of the cost. For global brands, they unlock alignment across geographies and teams. And with Papirfly’s Templated Content Creation tools, you can make them an integral part of your brand ecosystem. Not only do you get complete control over how you create, adapt, and manage your design templates – you also empower all your team members to produce high-quality, on-brand collateral every time.
Empower your team with design templates for content creation tools
Discover how Papirfly’s Templated Content Creation solution can help you empower your people while protecting your brand.
How brand consistency positively impacts budgets and ROI
Papirfly
6minutes read
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
In today’s highly competitive landscape, it’s never been more important to maintain brand consistency. In order to stand apart from competitors, clear, distinct and steady branding is vital in building that strong emotional connection with your target audience.
Your brand is your organisation’s identity. It’s the personality that potential customers see and identify with. This means that any semblance of brand confusion – be it an inconsistent brand presentation across your marketing channels or an ill-thought-out campaign jumping on a recent trend – can cause customers to lose trust in your company.
The consequence of poor brand messaging with your target audience has a knock-on effect on your ROI. Whether it’s loss of revenue from customers disillusioned by your unsuccessful branding, or investment wasted on campaigns that aren’t aligned with your unique brand identity, the impact of inconsistent branding can be far-reaching.
So what are the effects of inconsistent branding? What pitfalls should marketers avoid? And what action can you teams take on marketing campaigns to build trust, prevent poor branding, and create a positive customer experience and improve ROI in the long term?
Where brand consistency falls down
First, let’s explore some of the most frequent factors behind inconsistent branding, and how this manifests itself.
Poorly implemented brand guidelines
Your brand guidelines should be at the heart of all past, present and future campaigns. They should highlight to your team members the core of what makes your branding efforts unique – whether they’re established veterans or freshly recruited, and wherever they’re based across the globe.
These range from details like approved colour schemes, brand styles and brand voice, right through to overarching explanations of your company’s values and ambitions. If these are strictly followed and communicated, there should be no threat to brand consistency.
However, would it surprise you to read that Marq (formerly LucidPress) has reported that while 95% of organisations have brand guidelines set up, only a quarter of these are actually observed?
Without a clear understanding of the fundamental aspects of your brand, it’s impossible for teams to deliver brand assets consistently. There is too much room for interpretation and guesswork – both of which are big contributors to brand confusion.
This is why any brand management solution should include a dedicated portal to support educating teams on their brand. It provides a distinct area users can visit to explore their brand guidelines and everything else necessary to deliver successful branding.
You’ve lost sight of your brand vision
Times change, and brands have to adapt with these in order to survive and thrive. However, meeting new trends and keeping up-to-date doesn’t mean losing your brand identity or your brand vision.
Your brand vision is a core component in what drives your company forward and why you approach your work in the way that you do. It informs your branding strategies, making clear what your company stands for and what makes it unique.
Losing sight of this in an effort to stay on top of the latest trends might seem like a way to capture audiences with positive emotions in the short term. Without oversight and vision, however, it quickly undermines your original brand identity and any positive traction you’ve made on building brand equity.
Not keeping in touch with your target audience
Similar to the above, the impact of not having consistent branding can come as a result of not understanding the needs of your target audience, nor the activities that build trust in your brand in the first place.
The “New Coke” campaign is a clear example of this. While Coca-Cola flourishes as one of the world’s premier brands with a consistently maintained image, the company’s reaction to a decade of popularity for “The Pepsi Challenge” launched in 1975, saw the creation of New Coke – which proved to be a disastrous break away from what their audience wanted or expected.
Audiences want to know that the brands they’re loyal to understand them in a way their competitors don’t. If you don’t stay engaged with your audience’s interests, and adapt your messaging as this evolves over time, your branding efforts will eventually become inconsistent with what they associate with your organisation.
However, the best brands learn lessons and make those slip ups work in their favour. In 2019 the company signed an agreement with the Netflix show, Stranger Things, to feature the failed New Coke product in episodes. With the third season of the hit show set in 1985, Coca-Cola was able to bring a narrative of 80s nostalgia while showing its ability to make fun of itself as a brand – a charming and creative way to enhance its resonance with customers.
Miscommunication between global teams
When it comes to defining inconsistencies and where they come from, a common source is miscommunication. This is particularly a problem for businesses that have teams scattered across the globe, or those who work with external agencies to produce and distribute some of their brand assets.
While this can work in theory, it leaves a lot of room for mistakes. If parties miscommunicate, or instructions are misinterpreted by those responsible for creating the asset, then branding efforts can quickly be undermined.
This can result in poor branding, which either needs to be reviewed, briefed again, redone, reviewed again, and so forth, wasting time and resources. It could also be released to your audience, undermining efforts to build trust and damaging your brand identity.
Understanding the impact of inconsistent branding
So, now we’ve presented a few examples of the sources of brand confusion, how does this undermine your efforts to build a strong brand? You need to consider:
The time and resources you are investing into correcting poor branding
The time and resources it will take to gradually build the trust and loyalty of customers who have been disillusioned due to any negative branding
The damage that is being left to your overall reputation as a result of brand confusion
How to avoid brand confusion
If your brand’s messages, visuals and campaigns across your channels are misaligned, you are sending out confusing signals to your audience. Over time this can significantly undermine your customer experience and brand reputation.
If you are concerned that your efforts are not ensuring brand consistency, consider the following steps:
Make your brand guidelines visible and accessible
Your brand guidelines are your strongest line of defence against brand inconsistency. Make sure they are stored in an accessible location for those responsible for your marketing channels worldwide, and provide prompt guidance if these are updated at any point.
Bring your team on board
As well as placing a more prominent focus on your brand guidelines, it’s important to ensure your team understands it. Ideally this should be done directly, either in the form of a branding masterclass meeting or group workshop, ensuring that everyone involved in executing brand strategies does so consistently.
Establish powerful approval workflows
To reduce any wasted resources on proofing, revising and reviewing assets, set approval workflows to lockdown on any inconsistencies immediately. These parameters keep your marketers and graphic designers in check, reducing the risk of anything being released that doesn’t accurately reflect your brand identity.
Build trust by asking customers for feedback
If you are worried that your brand message might be diverging with the interests and values of your customers, ask them for their feedback via email marketing, social media or other channels. This will help shape your understanding of what customers want from your brand and if you are delivering on these expectations.
The importance of brand consistency
Always remember that brand consistency is a mark of quality. It emphasises to your customers that you are a professional organisation that offers them stability, reliability and attention to detail.
Any deviation from this can hurt the trust you’ve spent a long time building up among your various target audiences. This will leave an unflattering mark on your budget, and the return on investment you can expect from your campaigns.
Take marketing in-house
At Papirfly, we are leading the way on brand consistency. Through our dedicated software, our clients are ensuring seamless integration across their marketing channels. This empowers their teams worldwide with the tools to develop their own brand assets – all while observing brand guidelines and being monitored by key personnel.
Our brand management platform unlocks the potential to bring your branding in-house like never before. By providing your global teams with a platform to create studio-standard brand assets for your campaigns, you can reduce your reliance on external agencies and minimise the inconsistencies this can cause for your marketing. Mastering brand consistency is possible, with the right strategy and the most innovative brand management software.
Staying consistent in every channel, on every platform, anywhere and anytime… Yikes! You can feel the stress, right? Unfortunately, the importance of proper and consistent branding is growing simultaneously with the evolving Martech stack. And if you don’t have the proper tools to manage your brand going forward, you’ll soon be in brand trouble.
So, how do you enforce brand consistency? There is no magic recipe as brand management is extensive and there is no single tool that can fix everything. However, if there is one tool you should take a closer look at, it is online layout design templates.
This marketing tool is a must-have for marketers and brands. It simplifies how you manage and protect your brand identity and it streamlines company operations. Let’s take a look.
3 reasons how online design templates protects your brand
Strong brands outperform weak brands by 20%. It’s safe to say that all brands are aiming for brand consistency and with online layout design templates at hand, this job becomes a whole lot easier:
You’ll have one source of truth
One of the biggest challenges with maintaining brand consistency is the issues with asset distribution and storage. With assets spread all over the place, it is difficult knowing what file is valid and which is not, and the risk of brand inconsistency is huge. By collecting all assets in one place, this challenge becomes redundant.
You’ll get brand control and brand development happens from one single place
Not only do you get to control your brand output with online templates, but you also get to keep your brand alive and keep it up to date matching current market needs. Whatever design update or additional format options, you can easily update your brand in real-time.
Staying brand relevant is easy
Market demands, and consumer behaviour is changing fast, and timing becomes a crucial factor for marketers and their brand. With online design templates you don’t have to worry that your brand will fall behind its competitors. Anyone can create brand assets in seconds without involving anyone else.
How to get started with online design layout templates
Map up what brand assets are frequently used
There is probably no need to digitalize every brand asset your company has. Focus on assets that are repeatedly asked for and which need adjustments before use. E.g. posters, in-store promotions, menu’s, business cards, social media assets, ads and similar.
Map up what adjustments your colleagues ask for
You decide what can and can’t be changed, but you also need to make sure your template is matching the user’s need. Are they frequently asking for image changes, then you should allow images to be replaced or changed? Or how about the logo? Do you need to allow for different logo placements or even different logo colors? Regardless, with templates, you stay in complete control.
Digitalize your brand asset templates:
Transform your assets and make them available online. This tool allows anyone to create their own brand assets without risking brand disruption.
Make sure your brand asset templates are available
No tool alone secure usage. It’s crucial that everyone can access your templates 24/7. If not, it won’t take long before they give up and create something on their own.
Monitor usage and asset needs:
Your brand identity evolves, make sure your templates keep up with the development. But here’s the beauty with online templates, you can make changes and update your brand online, your colleagues will have access to the latest updates in real-time.
What kind of brand assets can be digitalized?
In marketing there is more to brand assets than static images and documents. Although this blog mainly mentions assets based on Adobe Indesign you need to know that with the right tool at hand, you can also create templates for video marketing and banner advertising. With a full range template suite at hand, your marketing efforts will never be the same again.
Grow your brand, grow your business
Branding and business growth are closely connected. Not only is proper brand building and the ability to secure consistency important for your brand awareness and company growth, but a solid brand identity also attracts potential investors. According to a study done by Reuters, 82% see brand strength as an important factor for investors.
In other words, proper brand building is mandatory if you want to attract customers and establish brand credibility that keep you market relevant for the long-run. And online layout design templates is one tool that will make this job a whole lot easier.
Retail Marketing
How PIM and ERP integration unlocks retail marketing performance
Papirfly
5minutes read
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
Retailers today are managing more systems, data, and demands than ever before. From inventory and pricing to customer data and campaign assets, the complexity behind daily operations continues to grow. And when systems are unconnected and out of control, it’s your customer experience that suffers.
That’s where Product Information Management (PIM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) integrations come in. By uniting data sources and business processes, these systems deliver operational efficiency, fuel faster campaigns, and help you achieve brand consistency at scale.
Here’s how PIM and ERP work – and why integrating them with Digital Asset Management and Templated Content Creation tools creates a game-changing foundation for retail brands.
What is PIM?
Product Information Management (PIM) systems enable retailers to manage every detail of their products in one place. This includes:
Descriptions, SKUs, barcodes, and specs
Images, videos, and supporting media
Reviews, prices, certifications, and warranties
SEO elements and marketing metadata
Whether you’re selling through ecommerce, via marketplaces, or in-store, a PIM makes sure everyone has access to accurate, up-to-date product information – from content creators to ecommerce teams.
PIM-less retailers could see a greater margin for error with:
What is ERP?
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems centralize the essential processes that keep your business running – everything from order management to HR to logistics. In retail, they’re often used to manage:
Inventory levels and product availability
Shipping, payment, and fulfilment
CRM data and customer journeys
Campaign planning and budget trackingd warranties
SEO elements and marketing metadata
An ERP brings clarity and coordination across departments. It ensures real-time data flows between functions and creates a single operational source of truth.
When connected to your marketing tools, that means fewer gaps, less duplication, and more reliable performance across campaigns.
ERP takes care of:
Why PIM and ERP integration together matters for marketers
In a world where delivering a united omnichannel experience for customers grows increasingly important, the strength of your retail marketing depends on the accuracy and availability of your data. Without integration between systems, marketers risk:
Publishing outdated or conflicting product information
Slower time-to-market for seasonal or promotional campaigns
Increased compliance and brand risk due to manual errors
By integrating PIM and ERP systems, you ensure:
Consistent product content across every campaign, landing page, and sales channel
Real-time inventory and pricing reflected in marketing collateral
Streamlined workflows between planning, production, and performance tracking
Localized, personalized experiences based on unified customer and product data
PIM
Collects core data such as names, SKUs, UPCs etc.
Stores product specifications such as weights, sizes, ingredients and warranties
Track sales information such as prices and customer reviews
Digitally feeds data into martketing assets
ERP
Tracks inventory
Monitor and utilises CRM for customer behaviours and nurture journeys
Centralizes customer data
Identifies bottlenecks with billing and payments
Papirfly: the missing link between data and brand
While PIM and ERP systems manage the what and how of your business, Digital Asset Management (DAM) powers the why. It connects your data up with a powerful brand portal, ensuring every asset, template, and campaign reflects who you are and what you stand for.
Access enriched product data directly within campaign templates
Automatically sync stock and pricing across marketing materials
Build local, seasonal campaigns with brand-compliant content at speed
Whether you’re managing new product launches, regional promotions, or always-on campaigns, an integrated Digital Asset Management system unlocks faster execution with zero compromise on quality or accuracy.
Creating an effective retail brand ecosystem
Retailers without integrated systems rely on spreadsheets, manual updates, and disjointed approvals. Result? Wasted time, rising costs, and brand inconsistencies. But for retailers with an integrated PIM, ERP, and DAM solution, the opposite is true. They are able to:
Reduce production delays and errors
Empower teams to create content fast without going off-brand
Keep messaging aligned with availability, pricing, and strategy
Deliver the omnichannel experiences modern customers expect
Ready to get connected?
A single campaign can involve dozens of people, hundreds of assets, and thousands of data points. When those are disconnected, delays and inconsistencies are inevitable.
By integrating your PIM, ERP, and DAM software, you streamline the entire content supply chain. That means more agility, less risk, and a brand experience that consistently delivers.
Unlock scalable, on-brand retail marketing
Discover how Papirfly seamlessly integrates with your PIM and ERP, helping you achieve brand consistent outcomes, fast.
Unlock scalable, on-brand retail marketing
Discover how Papirfly seamlessly integrates with your PIM and ERP, helping you achieve brand consistent outcomes, fast.
What is the difference between PIM and ERP systems?
PIM centralizes product-related data — like descriptions, images, and specs — while ERP manages business operations such as inventory, logistics, and finance. Together, they create a complete data ecosystem for marketing and sales.
Why does retail marketing benefit from integrating PIM and ERP?
Integration ensures your marketing reflects real-time product availability and pricing. It also eliminates manual errors, shortens campaign timelines, and enables localized content creation.
How does DAM fit into a PIM and ERP setup?
Digital Asset Management acts as the connective tissue. It links product and operational data with brand-approved assets and templates, allowing teams to deliver consistent, on-brand campaigns at speed.
What are the risks of not integrating these systems?
Without integration, brands risk publishing outdated information, duplicating work across teams, and creating inconsistent customer experiences — all of which hurt trust and performance.
Can Papirfly integrate with my existing PIM or ERP?
Yes. Papirfly is designed to integrate seamlessly with leading PIM and ERP platforms, enabling dynamic data syncing and automated content updates across your retail marketing ecosystem.
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
Social media has had its fair share of bad press in recent years, with many claiming it’s turned an entire generation into tech zombies. Whether or not you agree with this, one thing we can say for certain is that social media has become completely embedded into 21st-century culture – it’s as habitual as reading the morning newspaper (albeit several times a day) and its impact on the way we communicate has changed the world forever.
Whether it’s sharing a viral video of a llama on a skateboard or promoting a campaign on the must-have shirts of the season, social media marketing remains one of the most effective, targeted ways to get your brand’s message out there.
What is social media marketing?
The landscape of social media marketing is incredibly broad, with new platforms emerging all the time. The only thing you can ever really guarantee to stay constant in the world of social media is its sheer unpredictability. That said, there are some basic fundamentals that help to shape the way brands communicate with their audiences online.
Depending on your strategy, you will use several channels to communicate with your audiences. It’s a way for you to distribute multiple messages on a regular basis with existing or new prospects.
This can be achieved usually one of two ways:
Organically – a free method to grow, engage with and retain a following using shareable and interesting content.
Paid – Paid social media marketing, which can help support customer acquisition, remarketing and reaching a more specific type of audience.
Organic marketing through social media
Building an organic following is no easy feat, and unless you have unlimited time and resources to dedicate to it, it’s incredibly difficult to deliver on your own and make an impact. Snatching at your content here and there won’t be enough to keep people coming back. And with audience expectations of organic social media marketing becoming more sophisticated (or unsophisticated, depending on how you look at it), brands are now expected to produce gifs, memes, videos, polls, topical content and more.
And the hardest part? Avoiding an approach that’s too self-promotional. Nobody wants to be sold to the entire time. And if you ARE going to ‘sell’ something, it should be done in a way that provides value to your followers.
Do something that’s going to entertain, engage or inform. Surprise, delight or shock them. As long as it falls in line with your strategy and your overall identity as a brand, you can dedicate the time to understand your audience, and what it is they relate to. Not only will it increase your share-ability and the prospect of new people discovering you, but it will also give your existing followers a reason to stay.
Paid marketing through social media
It goes without saying that each social media platform operates very differently. Despite this, algorithms are often analysed and scrutinised by many marketing professionals, with conclusions and advice often drawn that can help loosely guide your individual channel strategies.
We say loosely because, in reality, determining the exact way to get organic content showing more frequently in news feeds is not very straightforward at all.
Why?
Because social media marketing is a business. A very lucrative one at that (with social media advertising revenue forecast at $51.3 billion USD for 2018 alone). If we all knew how to hack the system, social media simply wouldn’t work or exist for that matter. Platforms WANT you to pay to get in front of your audience. And in exchange, many of them give highly detailed, targeted demographics – from the more generic ones such as age, gender and location, through to buying habits and interests.
Targeting is one of many reasons why a brand may choose paid social media marketing platforms over more traditional methods. New customer acquisition, increasing web traffic and raising brand awareness are all key objectives for many businesses. And remarketing on these channels can help you reach people already engaged with your brand, to further prompt them into taking action.
How to develop a social media strategy
Whether you work for an in-house team, a marketing agency, or you’re simply trying to set up something for your own business, it’s important you don’t start doing it until you understand why you’re doing it. Your strategy is the what, how, why and when of your social media marketing. It’s your plan of action, a blueprint to success and a guide to make sure you keep focused.
Define your goals
What do you hope to get out of your social media marketing?
Would you like to build a following?
Generate leads?
Increase conversions?
Give your brand a stronger presence?
Or even just provide a platform for customer service?
Be realistic about what you’re going to use social media marketing tools for. And, depending on budget, what can be achieved within your timeframe. Are you using a combination of paid and organic? What are the short-term and long-term goals? Can you break these down into quarterly, more manageable chunks?
Think about your audience<
Who are they? How old are they?
Where do they spend their time online and offline?
Which platforms are they likely to use?
What are their pain points?
Decide on content
How can you use your audience’s pain points to create useful social media content? Can these pain points be split into overarching themes and topics?
Are there any awareness days you should incorporate?
How will your paid advertising support your organic content?
Get to planning
Once you have your broader topics in place for your social media marketing, you can start putting together top line calendars and schedules for your team to execute. You’ll need to think about content, design and any scheduling tools you may need.
Determine your process for execution
Give your teams their schedule, their briefs and ensure they have all the right sizes for the different social media channels. And that they understand the nuance of social advertising on individual platforms (for example, the 20% text rule on Facebook ads).
Publishing
Once the content and assets have sign-off from all stakeholders, you can begin publishing. Depending on how many posts you need to schedule, you should consider using a publishing tool so you can automate what time they are released to remove some of the manual tasks
Listening and engagement
Once your posts are out, it’s important to monitor your channels on a daily basis. Multiple times a day if your team has capacity. Being able to listen and engage with your followers is important. Plus if anything negative should be said, you can respond to it quickly before anyone has the chance to form the wrong opinion
Analytics and reporting
Most good publishing tools allow you to automate report generation, so make sure you find the right platform for you. Manually checking each channel can be incredibly time-consuming – particularly if you’re tracking multiple brands.
Advertising
While smaller brands can manage their paid advertising in-house, an expert in paid advertising is always beneficial. Having a specialist to support you helps ensure your campaigns are optimised for the right audiences and your strategy is updated in line with any new insights.
Social media as a marketing tool – B2C
How social media marketing techniques are implemented very much depends on the nature of your business. With business-to-consumer brands, there’s often a lot more scope to be visual. If you have a physical product or a personal service, you know you’re talking to an individual about their specific pain points. Things you yourself should be able to relate to on some level.
While any brand will want to retain a certain level of professionalism, you can really push the boundaries with your brand’s personality. Using humour or trending topics and relating them back to your business can be a sure-fire way to capture the attention of social media users – not just your audience but also those beyond it.
Social media as a marketing tool – B2B
Business to business marketing techniques traditionally tend to be more information-led. They’re trying to solve problems for business owners and high-level decision-makers. This does strip back the number of channels that can be used effectively for the B2B market, as professional networks greatly differ from accounts for personal use.
LinkedIn is usually the go-to for B2B social media marketing, either elevating individuals through their personal profiles, LinkedIn advertising or making their company page a source of insight for people’s feeds. That being said, some of the other channels still hold their place for B2B marketers when used in the right way.
Social media marketing on Facebook
Facebook is one of the most widely used platforms in the world. Brands can build organic followings, become content publishers and create highly tailored advertising in the form of videos, static advertising, carousels, slideshows and even Messenger, to name a few.
Social media marketing on Instagram
Owned by Facebook, Instagram is often used by brands to build a loyal following. A great feature of Instagram is the hashtag function, which makes it much easier to build organic engagement – although the ‘following’ earned is often too broad to be relevant. Brands can also explore Instagram advertising in the form of ads, with the ability to now shop ‘in-app’ by tagging products to your post.
Social media marketing on LinkedIn
LinkedIn has had somewhat of a revival recently, with a wider cross-spectrum of people using the online network to promote their skills or brand. Some of the most effective ways to reach business decision-makers can be found through LinkedIn: the option to create thought leaders via individual profiles, build valuable connections and relationships, create a company page that’s the go-to for industry insight or through the targeted, but sometimes expensive, advertising route.
Social media marketing on Twitter
While Twitter’s use may have decreased for teens, 80% of its users are considered ‘affluent millennials’, and 75% of businesses can be found on the platform – two incredible opportunities for marketers. Twitter is also a very popular platform for providing personalised customer service, and for many consumers it’s the first port of call when they have a complaint or query about a missing parcel.
But a lot of Twitter’s appeal lies in how current it is; news breaks here, people share their stories first-hand and live events effectively come with a running commentary when televised. In fact, advertising on the platform is considered 11% more effective than TV ads during live events.
Social media influencer marketing
Another strand of social media marketing that can prove successful for brands with particular products, events or services can be the use of social media influencers. This could be in the form of huge celebrity endorsements with millions on the counter or micro-influencers with just 1,000 to 100,000 followers, but with a deeper connection with an audience interested in your niche.
Instagram is the most effective channel for brands looking to promote via those with a big social following. Giving your brand an ambassador in the form of someone your audience can relate to and admire can prove lucrative.
The future of social media marketing…
Even as the world becomes more critical of the role social media plays in shaping minds, opinions, and the way we show off our day-to-day lives, its evolution is one that marketers will be keen to keep up with. Technology is set to become more sophisticated, targeting will get even more precise and brands will continue to raise the bar when it comes to creating quality content.
There’s no way of knowing where social media marketing will be in 10 years, or even 10 months from now. In an age of instant gratification, and readily available information on quite literally anything you could imagine, social media will continue to play a critical role in B2C and B2B communications. Of course, as the amount of brands entering the same space continues to grow, it’s going to take a remarkable strategy and team to be able to shout above the noise.
Papirfly offers Brand Activation Management software that enables companies to create professionally designed printed and digital assets – in-house in under 30 minutes. Social media posts are often hard to keep up with, which is why empowering any employee to effortlessly create social media assets is a client favourite feature. You can also store & share assets in a dedicated Digital Asset Management platform, educate teams on brand guidelines and manage your campaigns from one central login.
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
In a digital-first world, the volume of content created by organizations is staggering. Marketing teams, regional offices, agencies, and partners all produce campaigns, documents, and assets at speed. But not every digital file qualifies as a brand asset. The difference between a simple piece of content and an official brand asset is critical—and it defines how your brand is perceived in the market.
Brand Asset Management (BAM) software provides the framework to protect brand identity, ensure brand consistency, and scale digital content creation without compromise. It is more than a storage solution; it is the infrastructure that connects governance with creativity, enabling brands to grow equity while accelerating campaigns.
What is Brand Asset Management?
A Brand Asset Management system is a centralized hub that organizes, controls, and distributes materials tied directly to brand identity.
While traditional Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems are designed to handle a wide variety of content, Brand Asset Management is a subset of a DAM’s capabilities which focuses specifically on the creative assets that carry your identity into the market.
Branding teams, or departments responsible for brand consistency, must deliver logos, color palettes, typography, photography, tone of voice examples, and approved templates which live at the heart of these systems. Every output—from localized social media posts to video content marketing campaigns—remains on-brand, reinforcing strategy and messaging consistency.
By combining storage, approval workflows, and brand guidelines into one ecosystem, these systems transform how organizations safeguard reputation while supporting agile content creation.
When do digital assets become brand assets?
Not every piece of content created within an organization starts as a brand asset. A digital file only becomes one when it represents the brand officially, reflects identity, and is governed for compliance.
Think of a stock photo: on its own, it is a generic asset. Once placed into an approved campaign template, it becomes a brand asset. A datasheet drafted in plain text is just content. When it is formatted using the official template and validated for sales use, it transforms into a brand asset.
The transition happens when:
Core identity elements such as logos, typography, or color palettes are applied
Approval workflows confirm the file as an official representation
The asset is designed for repeated use across campaigns or channels
Governance is applied to ensure consistent branding and protect equity
Because these materials directly influence brand reputation, they demand stricter version control, access management, and workflow automation than ordinary content.
Key features of Brand Asset Management software
A strong Brand Asset Management system brings together several components that work in harmony to protect brand identity and accelerate content creation. Each plays a distinct role in supporting governance, consistency, and scale.
Brand portals are the front-end gateways to a well organised DAM, to extend role-based access to internal and external stakeholders—agencies, vendors, journalists, and franchisees—through curated environments.
Digital asset library featurescreate a secure, searchable home for approved brand assets, ensuring teams can always find the right file quickly. Brand guidelines embed rules and standards directly into the system, showing users not just what to use but how to use it correctly.
Brand compliance toolsenforces standards automatically, with approval workflows, audit trails, and expiration management to protect reputation at scale.
The following sections explore these features in more depth, showing how they come together to form a complete ecosystem for managing brand assets across industries and channels.
How brand portals distribute assets and guidelines
A brand portal makes approved materials accessible to external stakeholders. Specific pages can be customized for particular teams, regions or stakeholders to see the information in the context they need to see it.
Alternatively, role-based permissions can give access to certain pages. Either way, employees, marketing teams, agencies, vendors, journalists, and franchisees interact with a curated environment that provides only what they need. For example:
Agencies can access campaign kits with usage guidelines embedded.
Vendors download print-ready files with specifications, minimizing errors and revision cycles.
Journalists receive press packs containing current, approved assets to ensure accurate coverage.
Franchisees gain access to parent brand elements alongside localized content for seasonal campaigns.
By providing simplified, role-specific access, portals empower external partners while protecting identity.
Digital asset library software for brand assets
A digital asset library is the secure, cloud-based home for your approved brand assets – and essentially the result of an effective Digital Asset Management system. Unlike simple file storage, it is structured to support governance, brand ecosystems, and messaging consistency.
AI metadata tagging and AI-driven search make retrieval simple, reducing wasted time. Analytics and reporting reveal how assets are used and where content optimization is needed. The system also accommodates complexity—managing portfolios, sub-brands, regional variations, or co-branding scenarios.
Also GDPR or other data protection laws must be followed with consent management ensuring that the library of digital assets is in full compliance.
By aligning library structure with brand strategy and compliance, organizations ensure that every creative asset supports both governance and content creation.
Brand guidelines software features
Brand guidelines software takes standards beyond static PDFs, and into your brand portal.
Within the system, guidelines are embedded contextually and interactively. When downloading a logo, users see spacing rules, prohibited uses, and approved backgrounds. Photography assets are accompanied by composition and styling instructions.
This contextual delivery prevents misinterpretation and reduces errors. Advanced systems enforce brand compliance through approval workflows, restrict downloads in incorrect formats, and notify managers when high-risk assets are accessed.
The result is clear stakeholder alignment: everyone understands not just what assets exist, but how to use them correctly.
Brand compliance software: maintaining standards at scale
Compliance is one of the most pressing challenges in brand management. Modern systems embed compliance features into every workflow, protecting both legal standing and brand equity.
Usage rights management ensures licensed assets are used within agreed terms. Automated guideline enforcement detects violations, such as incorrect logo placement or unauthorized color combinations. Audit trails track every change and access, providing accountability.
Pre-approved templates minimize risks by guiding digital content creation within set parameters. For regulated industries, compliance modules enforce mandatory disclosures. Expiration management prevents outdated or off-brand content from slipping into circulation.
Key benefits of Brand Asset Management
Organizations that implement Brand Asset Management realize measurable benefits. Consistency across platforms strengthens recognition and trust. Teams work more efficiently, spending less time searching for files or recreating content. Campaigns launch faster thanks to workflow automation and approved templates.
Brand equity grows as every touchpoint reinforces strategy and identity. Collaboration improves when internal and external stakeholders align around a single ecosystem. Most importantly, access controls and analytics protect reputation by preventing misuse and ensuring governance.
Use cases across industries
The value of a Brand Asset Management system extends across sectors, providing both governance and agility in equal measure.
In retail and consumer goods, BAM systems organize identity elements alongside approved product photography, ensuring that e-commerce, in-store, and social campaigns all carry a consistent look and feel.
For franchises, centralized control of logos, colors, and signage is paired with customizable templates for local campaigns. Franchisees gain flexibility within defined guardrails, protecting brand equity while enabling market responsiveness.
Healthcare organizations rely on BAM to manage patient education resources and provider communications, ensuring every material distributed meets compliance requirements and regulatory approval.
In Financial Services, strict approval workflows, version control, and audit trails protect both brand integrity and regulatory compliance, while keeping messaging consistent across branches and markets.
See how Rabobank uses Papirfly to grow global market share with localized on-brand content.
Manufacturing and technology companies with multiple product lines use BAM systems to clarify brand hierarchies, manage sub-brands, and align all creative assets with the overarching brand strategy.
See how STIHL Switzerland elevates its dealer marketing across 600 dealers.
Choosing the right Brand Asset Management software
When selecting a system, decision-makers should focus on features that support governance. Can the solution manage brand hierarchies, sub-brands, and co-branding? Does it automate workflows, integrate with marketing operations software, and scale as needs grow?
User experience must also be prioritized. If a system is cumbersome, adoption falters. Analytics and reporting should deliver actionable insights into optimization, while role-based access ensures sensitive materials are safeguarded.
As mentioned, Brand Asset Management is a subset, and indeed the front-end DAM of a Digital Asset Management system. With this in mind, it’s important to ensure your DAM solution sets the right foundation for your teams. Luckily, we can help you with our buyer’s guide.
Implementing a Brand Asset Management system requires both planning and change management.
Begin with a brand audit to catalog assets and identify gaps.
Create a taxonomy supported by metadata that improves searchability.
Define governance policies that outline who uploads, approves, and accesses assets.
Embed guidelines directly alongside files rather than in standalone documents.
Train users not only in how the system works, but why it matters for equity and reputation.
Pilots allow organizations to test workflows before rolling out broadly. Long-term success requires ongoing updates, audits, and refinements.
Integrating with content marketing tools and workflow software ensures asset management connects seamlessly with campaign delivery.
Why Brand Asset Management is essential for the future of your business
As AI capabilities converge with automation and integration, brand asset management systems are becoming the backbone of modern marketing infrastructure. Connections with marketing automation platforms, video content marketing tools, and multichannel distribution software ensure that governance and creativity happen side by side.
The result is a brand ecosystem where brand consistency, compliance, and speed are not manual tasks but built-in safeguards. By transforming scattered files into governed environments, organizations protect identity, maintain trust, and scale digital content creation with confidence.
The foundation of success remains clear: identify which files truly qualify as brand assets, apply governance, and invest in the right technology. With a future shaped by AI and automation, organizations that prioritize brand asset management today will build stronger experiences, protect reputation, and sustain brand equity tomorrow.
How does Papirfly’s Brand Asset Management solution differ from traditional Digital Asset Management?
Traditional Digital Asset Management systems store all kinds of content. Papirfly focuses on brand-critical assets only—logos, templates, guidelines, and campaign materials—ensuring every file reinforces your brand identity. Our platform combines storage with governance, workflows, and brand portals, so teams and partners always work with approved, on-brand materials.
What types of brand assets can Papirfly manage?
Papirfly manages all identity-defining assets, including logos, typography, color palettes, photography, templates, brand guidelines, and campaign-ready creative. Unlike generic storage, our system links assets directly to contextual usage rules—helping teams apply them correctly every time.
How does Papirfly help maintain brand consistency globally?
With Papirfly, brand consistency is built in. Approved templates, automated workflows, and clear governance make it simple for local teams, agencies, and franchisees to create on-brand content for their markets. Every output—from presentations to video content—stays aligned with your global standards.
What compliance and governance features does Papirfly include?
Papirfly enforces brand compliance automatically. Features include approval workflows, version control, expiration management, and audit trails. AI-driven tagging, facial recognition, and GDPR consent management ensure assets are not only on-brand but also legally compliant.
Which industries does Papirfly support best?
Papirfly supports organizations across retail, financial services, healthcare, technology, and franchising—sectors where consistency, compliance, and speed-to-market are critical. Our system adapts to complex brand hierarchies and regional variations, giving every team the right assets at the right time.
How quickly can Papirfly be implemented?
Most organizations see value within weeks. We start with a brand audit to align your core assets and guidelines, then roll out through pilot programs to ensure adoption. With built-in training and support, teams are empowered to create, govern, and distribute brand assets confidently from day one.
Brand association: How to establish your brand in the minds of consumers
Papirfly
7minutes read
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
Why do some brands immediately come to mind when we think of a season, a person, or even a mood? It might feel instinctive, but in most cases, these associations are carefully built over time — through everyday interactions and standout brand marketing moments.
Brand associations are the mental connections people make between your brand identity and specific thoughts, feelings or ideas. These associations are central to building brand equity. They shape buying behavior and help your brand achieve differentiation, even in a market filled with similar products or services.
The psychology behind strong brand associations
The psychology behind brand association goes deep, with one of the most widely accepted explanations rooted in the Hebbian Theory of Donald Hebb, considered the father of neuropsychology. In his 1949 book The Organization of Behavior, Hebb proposed that our brains form stronger and quicker neural pathways the more frequently two concepts are experienced together.
That same principle applies to branding – through repeated interactions and brand messaging, your brand becomes mentally linked to specific ideas.
5 ways brands create an emotional connection:
Attributes
These are the recognizable features of a product or service, including how it looks, feels, and performs. For example, a brand promoting itself as eco-conscious might use recyclable materials and nature-inspired designs to reinforce that perception.
Attitudes
The emotional associations a brand cultivates are also tools for connection. These include feelings associated with joy, nostalgia, luxury, or athleticism. Take this Apple ad from 2024. It’s a great example of how brands find ways to connect with familiar, recognizable elements from their customers’ lives before tying those experiences back to their own company’s story.
Benefits
Many people buy products or services based on the benefits associated with the brand. But these benefits do not always have to be purely experienced by the consumer – they can also be about helping to make the world a better place. A great example is Warby Parker’s pledge to donate a pair of glasses to children and those in need for every pair purchased.
Celebrities
Endorsements from public figures remain a tried-and-tested way to build brand recognition. This works most effectively when the celebrity naturally aligns with the brand identity – like when famous ketchup lover Ed Sheeran collaborated with Heinz.
How do leading brands build brand equity?
For global brands, building and reinforcing positive associations is essential to staying ahead. Here’s how some of the most iconic brands keep themselves top of mind:
There’s a reason you’ll find bright red Coca-Cola branding at holiday resorts and sports events, and tied to beloved characters like Santa Claus. By connecting with these overwhelmingly positive experiences, the brand becomes inextricably linked with people’s happy memories – and has consumers reaching for Coca-Cola products in good times and bad.
Apple hasn’t just gained customers — it’s garnered a following. Their sleek product design, elevated packaging, and hyped launch events all reinforce their premium, innovative brand identity. Collaborations with creative powerhouses like Aardman Animations further connect Apple to groundbreaking talent.
The Nike swoosh has long been associated with the world’s most famous athletes. As well as tapping into people’s athletic aspirations, Nike is connecting itself with the emotions that first draw people into sport, such as competitiveness, teamwork, self-improvement and determination. It’s why everyone these days thinks sport whenever they see Nike (and thinks Nike whenever they see sport).
Besides the iconic mermaid and expansive range of coffees, what’s the one thing everybody associates with Starbucks? That’s right – writing customers’ names on their cups. It doesn’t feel like a big deal on the surface, but this small personal touch helped make Starbucks a standout influencer brand on Instagram, and they continue to connect with millions across the globe this way.
After a run of negative publicity surrounding childhood obesity, McDonald’s made some major changes to their brand marketing strategy. This included:
Revamping menus to include healthier options and provide customers with nutritional information
Projecting a strong eco-friendly message by introducing recyclable packaging and drastically altering their brand colors to green
Reusing their own cooking oils to fuel their bio-diesel range of trucks
Overhauling the design and feel of their restaurants to encourage more people to eat in
3 ways to start building stronger brand associations
If associations aren’t yet part of your brand marketing strategy, here are three steps to build connections that last.
#1 Association mapping
A brand association map like the example below will help you analyse the positive and negative associations that consumers currently have of your brand. It will show you where you stand out from your competitors and what makes your customers choose your products or services.
These insights will help you choose which areas to focus on when it comes to creating connections, generating engagement, and helping teams to shape future content.
#2 Analyzing how people search and ask
The way people discover and connect with brands is no longer just about what they type into Google. The direct questions your audience asks in AI tools, such as ChatGPT or Perplexity, reveal customer behaviour: a need, a question, a curiosity.
By analyzing behaviors in both search engine keywords and LLM prompt phrasing, you have an advantage. You uncover the mental connections people are making between ideas, categories, and brands. This isn’t just about SEO keyword rankings anymore. It’s about visibility in the answers people trust.
Search trends still show which topics matter. But increasingly, language models are shaping brand perception by surfacing examples and recommending solutions. If your brand isn’t showing up in search results, or in the answers given by AI, that’s a gap in your brand association strategy.
Combining traditional keyword analysis with LLM-based prompt intelligence can help you understand:
What ideas your brand is associated with (or not)
Where new associations could be built
How to align content with how people actually think and search today
Social listening remains a powerful companion to this. It gives you real-time insight into the conversations happening around your brand, letting you see what themes are emerging — and how to harness them in content that feels relevant, timely, and resonant.
#3 Avoiding the negatives
Poor brand associations are easy to create — and difficult to undo. Common pitfalls include:
Inconsistency – Gaps in service, product quality or brand messaging can break trust and strengthen negative perceptions.
Contradictions – Brand values must match business practices. If a brand promotes fairness but uses unethical labor, consumers will notice.
Forced connections – It’s not enough simply to raise awareness via a trend. Your brand needs to be part of the solution as well. Any response that feels half-hearted or inauthentic is likely to be called out.
How DAM software helps you build brand association
Building positive associations that reach the hearts and minds of your audience is one of the most powerful marketing techniques at your disposal. But associations don’t form overnight.
Whether your brand has a heritage to preserve, or you’re looking to establish your name deeper into a market and people’s minds, it takes consistent, ongoing content to reinforce what your brand stands for. Without that, the connections you’ve worked hard to build can fade.
Papirfly’s Digital Asset Management and Templated Content Creation suite is designed to help marketing teams generate in-house content faster and more cost-effectively – without ever straying off-brand. It makes building and maintaining connections with an audience easier and more reliable than ever before.
What is brand association, and why does it matter?
Brand associations are the mental connections people make between your brand and specific ideas, emotions, or experiences. Positive brand associations build brand equity, influence customer decisions, and help businesses stand out in crowded markets.
What are the most effective ways to create emotional brand associations?
Brands can build emotional connections through product attributes, consumer benefits, attitudes, celebrity endorsements, and symbolic moments. Each method reinforces a specific brand perception or value linked to the brand.
Can brand association be negative?
Yes. Negative experiences, poor customer service, or bad publicity can create harmful associations that damage brand perception and reduce customer loyalty.
How can you start building brand associations from scratch?
Begin with an association map to understand existing perceptions. Use co-search and social listening to spot real-world connections. Avoid inconsistencies or forced associations that could erode trust or feel inauthentic.
How does Digital Asset Management support brand association?
A DAM system ensures consistent brand marketing by organizing assets and enabling faster content creation. This consistency reinforces the mental links customers form with your brand identity and values.
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