Most modern-day brand managers will tell you their job has become infinitely more complex in the last few decades. 

As organisations look to reach an increasingly global audience, navigate more marketing channels than ever, and work to stay consistent amid growing consumer expectations, controlling brand identity has become an ongoing battle.

In this battle, technology is your great equaliser. That’s why more and more brand marketing teams have enlisted the help of a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system to bring their sprawling collection of digital assets under one roof.

The right DAM solution ensures marketing teams know exactly where approved brand assets are, and can locate relevant content in seconds. Combined with the right user permissions, tagging systems and approval workflows, your DAM becomes a single source of truth for your organisation.

Sounds like the perfect solution, right? Well, not quite.

Don’t get us wrong, we know how valuable a great DAM system is – our own DAM is ranked one of the best worldwide according to Forrester. But this also means we understand its limitations and that, alone, it can’t deliver the end-to-end brand governance today’s marketers need.

DAM gives you control over your marketing collateral; a brand portal offers you control over your brand identity.

What is a brand portal?

A brand portal, also often referred to as a brand hub, is a dedicated cloud-based platform that brings together everything that defines your brand culture. A true “home” for your brand.

In its optimal form, this central hub provides a one-stop shop for anyone – from your executive marketing team to your ground-level employees – to understand your branding style and what your organisation represents. This includes:

• Clearly defined brand guidelines and style guides
• Your company vision and mission statements
• Actionable on-brand templates for all types of marketing materials
• Tutorials, handbooks and FAQs on brand application
• Resources for employees to use your branding for their teams’ purposes

Essentially, a quality brand portal ensures brand consistency, educates users and empowers your marketing teams. It showcases the blueprint of your brand in a presentable, digestible way, so you can keep your identity locked down on every channel.

3 limitations of a standalone DAM that a brand portal fixes

You may be wondering: “Can’t DAM software offer this same level of brand management?”

DAM systems are great at what they do, which is manage your digital assets. But their potential as to manage every aspect of managing, creating and scaling on-brand content for all campaigns falls short in several key areas:

1. Supports user adoption

Firstly, a DAM system is only valuable if people use it. Many DAM implementations never deliver a return on investment because employees don’t universally adopt it, meaning parts of their workforce retain the same cumbersome, inefficient approach to digital asset management.

There are many potential reasons for this lack of adoption: minimal training and onboarding, failure to inform employees, a set-and-forget mentality, etc. But in our experience, one of the major roadblocks is education. Put simply, users don’t know how to access the DAM system itself, let alone the brand assets within it.

A brand portal addresses this issue. Establishing an assigned “home” for your brand that your people know about and is immediately accessible on any work device can act as the gateway for your DAM system.

This helps your team understand that your DAM solution is part of your overall brand management ecosystem, enabling them to recognise its purpose and improve its adoption rate.

2. Educate, not dictate

Next, while a standalone DAM system brings together all approved brand assets – something that can effectively illustrate how future assets should look – it is not the same as someone truly understanding your brand.

This approach leaves room for misinterpretation and inconsistency. A user may create a brand asset based on one they saw on your DAM, only for it to be ill-fitting for that particular marketing channel, target audience or application.

A DAM is not brand management in the same way a centralised brand portal can be. By ensuring this incorporates guidelines, handbooks, tutorials and more alongside exemplary brand assets, you can properly educate your users on how to apply your brand correctly on every channel towards every audience.

3. Communicates evolution

Finally, a standalone DAM system is a snapshot of the current stage of your brand’s journey. If you undergo a rebrand, are considering a brand refresh, how can your DAM communicate this to your users instead of them gradually seeing old assets being replaced by new ones? Or if you have accepted your people have not articulated the brand in the way you intended? A brand portal may have been missing in any of these cases.

A brand portal can represent your brand’s evolution deliberately and transparently to your global workforce. Designing and moulding this central hub around your brand’s visual identity allows you to instantly communicate your updated identity after a rebrand or refresh.

No mixed messages. No opportunities for old assets to resurface. Immediately people know your new identity and have this reinforced with up-to-date guidelines and examples, making a brand portal a valuable ally as your company develops and scales over time.

Plus, for design agencies guiding a company through a rebrand, a brand portal is a perfect tool to visualise this change both succinctly and distinctly.

Remember – a brand portal complements a DAM

We are not advocating for a brand portal to replace a DAM system. Instead, a good brand portal acts as its perfect partner, encouraging company-wide adoption and providing much-needed context to the brand assets within your DAM.

4 more ways brand portals deliver true brand management

So, we’ve identified 3 examples of how a brand portal builds upon a DAM in the brand management landscape. But the benefits of a high-quality brand hub extend even further:

1. Absolute brand consistency

Fundamentally, your brand portal is the key to a consistent presence on all marketing platforms. By bringing everything that underpins your branding in one place, you can ensure a harmonious message to your potential customers, which goes a long way to building trust, raising awareness and improving user experiences.

2. Increased marketing efficiency

If your people are only a click away from the guidelines that steer your content creation, they can produce collateral faster. 

Combined with intelligent custom templates, this can mean less strain on your marketing team and graphic designers to produce around the clock. In turn, local teams are empowered to create for their own campaign needs, leading to a more efficient process.

3. Security over your brand culture

Allowing the right people access to your brand guidelines, style guides and wider resources preserves your brand’s equity. This can alleviate the burden on you and your brand management team, reducing your need to review and approve every asset created, so you can concentrate on more pressing matters.

4. Company-wide collaboration

Finally, having a cloud-based portal at the heart of your brand, shared across your entire workforce, can serve as a means for stronger collaboration workflows. Especially for teams with users spread worldwide, this single point of reference can help you keep everyone on the same page at all times.

What features should I look for in a quality brand portal?

Now you understand how a quality brand portal opens the door for comprehensive brand management, what does a good brand portal look like? 

Here are 6 of the key features you should prioritise in your hunt for the optimal brand portal:

1. Customisable layouts: It’s crucial your brand portal feels like your own, so the layout and its components should be completely customisable using your visual elements
2. Multiple languages and translations: Your brand portal should allow you to create dedicated versions for users who operate in different territories, written in their language and outlining any unique nuances to your brand in these locations
3. Drag-and-drop functionality: You should be able to reposition content on your brand hub in a couple of clicks for absolute ease of use
4. Simple section builders: Your brand portal should give you the flexibility to design page layouts and grids that maximise the impact of your content
5. WYSIWYG software: A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) format allows you to update and refine your brand portal without any coding expertise
6. Easy integration: Your brand portal should be an extension of your existing marketing technology and be simple to integrate within your existing ecosystem

As well as these key features, the ideal brand portal must also be backed by a reputable, reliable provider. With this in mind, we encourage you to research available options and ask the right questions to locate your perfect match:

Better brand management starts with your brand portal

To stay in control of an overwhelming wave of digital brand assets, a DAM system is your best bet.

From providing the consistency your brand and customers demand, to unlocking efficiencies within your marketing operations, we hope this article has helped you understand exactly why a solid brand portal is so important, and the ways a DAM system falls short on its own.

Similar to how you work alongside your marketing teams, agency partners and wider colleagues to push your brand to new heights, brand management technology is also a team effort.

Pairing up your DAM solution with a compatible brand portal allows you to control, share, and activate your brand as it is meant to be.

Whether your agency is in charge of crafting a complete rebrand for a client’s business, or putting together the design elements for a multichannel marketing campaign, creating content for your partners is a substantial undertaking. One that can occupy your focus for days, weeks or even months. 

With so much time and effort invested into these endeavours, the last thing you want is for clients to misunderstand your vision. Being forced into a complete rethink at this stage could mean lengthy delays, soaring client costs and damage to your agency-client relationship.

To ensure your projects succeed with minimal setbacks, it isn’t just important to deliver high-quality graphic design. Your agency needs to master the art of brand presentation.

Making a deliberate effort to immerse your clients in your ideas is essential if you want your clients to walk away fully comprehending exactly what your proposal entails.

It also gives you a valuable opportunity to fully showcase the design elements you’ve created, explain the rationale behind your creative process, and outline the guidelines your clients can use to successfully roll out their rebrand, brand refresh or new campaign.

But how do you make an illuminating first impression? In this helpful guide, we outline the techniques you can use to inform and excite stakeholders during your brand presentation, and explain how brand portals can help at this important stage.

5 techniques to elevate your brand presentation

Between miscommunication, confusion and a lack of clarity, securing client buy-in for your design project can be an uphill battle. Thankfully, with the right strategies and techniques, ensuring you and your partners are on the same wavelength doesn’t have to be a source of stress. 

1. Establish a mood board

Getting your clients in the right mindset early on in your brand presentation can immediately dictate how likely they are to understand and embrace your new vision, concept or marketing collateral.

To set the scene, mood boards are a useful tool you can use to showcase the influences that contributed to your design project, from images and themes, to colours, tones of voice and other pieces of content.

2. Showcase prototypes

Another way to get your agency’s vision across at this pivotal early stage is by mocking up or prototyping your concepts.

This could mean producing prototype packaging for your client’s final products, or building a set of social media posts to showcase a new logo design in use.

However you choose to approach this, developing these examples gives your clients something tangible to base their opinions on, which can be effective in helping them visualise your branding.

3. Create a style guide

It’s one thing to share your vision for a client’s new brand identity or marketing campaign. But taking the time to define their brand and showcase exactly how it will be applied is often a fast track to superior understanding and trust.

Acting as a playbook for every conceivable visual element, style guides set specific parameters for your clients’ visual identity, so they can see how your content works and what they need to do to present a consistent brand across every touchpoint.

These not only add another layer of explanation for how your brand concept looks and feels – they also reassure your clients that it will be ready to deploy as soon as they give the green light.

4. Weave a compelling story

Strong storytelling has been at the heart of successful branding for decades, with 55% of consumers saying they are more likely to buy from a brand if they love their story.

So, naturally, it can also be a powerful way of presenting your work to clients and winning over their hearts and minds.

Adding context to design choices made throughout the course of your project by laying out a narrative is a great way to convey meaning and get your partners invested from beginning to end. 

To do this, make sure your brand presentation story:

• Aligns with your clients’ core values
• Is clear and concise
• Uses language your clients understand
• Remains genuine and authentic

5. Leverage VR and AR

Finally, to fully immerse your partners in their new brand assets, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are emerging technologies that can place your clients at the heart of your experience.

From showcasing the look of a rebranded store to enabling clients to see how their new marketing materials look up close, taking a more direct approach through technology can bring your ideas to life and inspire an emotional connection towards your client presentation.

The value of a brand portal

As important as the right techniques are, few things trump the importance of medium when it comes to building compelling brand presentations.

What do we mean by medium? Simply put, it’s the method by which you present your ideas to your clients, educate them, and secure their buy-in.

Many design agencies turn to the dependable slideshow to present their brand concepts. And while sometimes you can’t beat a classic, the restrictive, static and non-immersive nature of this medium can be a hurdle to client understanding.

In its place, numerous forward-thinking agencies are turning to smarter technology to better showcase their marketing materials, manage their partners’ brands and secure client buy-in. And among these, brand portals stand out as an ingenious way to help people visualise your ideas.

Demonstrate the full scope of your vision

Digital brand hubs, alongside Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems, are used to store and share on-brand content internally within a company. Being interactive, this technology enables you to store every visual element you have created in a single place.

As well as allowing decision-makers to explore your materials at their own pace, having everything laid out in this dynamic format makes it possible for your clients to see how individual components work together, putting your proposal on the best footing for success.

Completely immerse clients in your work

With the added ability to create and tailor these online brand portals to your clients’ new identity or campaign style, partners can easily immerse themselves in your designs as they explore the compelling marketing materials and strong brand identity you have created.

Compared to the limited interactivity and visual branding of traditional presentation software, these platforms can effortlessly convey what your newly crafted collateral will look and feel like in real life.

Facilitate long-term collaboration

Iteration is an important part of any design process. Not even the world’s best marketing agencies get it all right the first time, so it’s only natural to have some back and forth with your clients on your journey to make the best materials possible.

To ensure you’re getting the highest quality feedback, brand portals give your partners the freedom to examine your brand assets up close.

From how their new brand guidelines are laid out, to the specific design templates they will use, placing your content in your clients’ hands through a brand portal allows for productive input that makes managing their brand more collaborative and less reflexive. 

Streamline content sharing

Lastly, if you’re an agency that relies on emails and content-sharing websites, you know that sending over files can be a time-consuming and cumbersome process. 

Hosting these materials in a single centralised hub means your design teams no longer have to spend hours setting up file transfers or clarifying which brand asset is the latest through lengthy email chains. This paves the way to better productivity and cost efficiency during the design process.

How brand portals empower your clients beyond delivery

As you know, for any rebrand or campaign to truly succeed, you need buy-in from everyone across your client’s organisation, not just top decision-makers.

However, educating all staff within even a small business can be a daunting prospect for your agency. You don’t have time to brief dozens of stakeholders, and sharing your initial presentation company-wide risks watering down the work your team just spent so long crafting.

That’s why a brand portal is valuable not just during the initial brand presentation, but as a tool that your clients can carry over into the day-to-day delivery of their marketing.

When incorporated within or alongside a wider Digital Asset Management and content creation suite, this gives you the capacity to not only help your clients truly understand your vision, but also efficiently execute and manage the assets and campaigns that will bring this project to fruition.

Enter a new era of agency success

For an agency, few things are as important as brand presentations. They’re how you educate your clients, deliver top-notch content creation, and establish a strong working relationship with your partners.

But getting every client on board with your vision takes more than a simple run-through of your concept, project and ideas.

To help you elevate your brand presentation, we hope this article has given you insight into the techniques and technology you need to cement your clients’ understanding, so you can focus on realising concepts that contribute to their long-term success.

By agreeing on what KPIs your team will track before pulling the trigger on your new brand, you can ensure you receive feedback from the start, so you can make improvements depending on what your data is telling you.

A rebrand is a pivotal step in any organisation’s journey – one that can breathe new life into your business when done successfully.

While it can feel daunting from the outset, keep in mind that 74% of S&P 100 companies underwent a rebrand in their first 7 years of existence. Microsoft’s well-known multicoloured window logo is the company’s fifth since its formation in 1975, each change representing a shift in brand strategy and visual identity.

So why do companies do it? A rebrand offers an opportunity to reshape their brand messaging for an up-to-date target audience. To break into new markets, refocus their marketing efforts and enhance their bottom line. For recognisable names like Burberry, Old Spice and Lego, a well-structured rebrand revitalised their image.

However, even when a rebrand is the right call, numerous challenges can cause irreversible damage to your brand equity and harm relationships with your customers. It’s a big leap, and never one to be taken lightly.

If your brand is considering a big change, or if you’re already deep in the rebrand implementation process, this ultimate guide outlines the 7 standout challenges you must overcome and gives you the solutions for smooth, successful brand management:

1. Rebranding for the wrong reasons
2. Securing customer buy-in
3. Mapping out your rebrand’s scale
4. Internally communicating your rebrand
5. Measuring your success
6. Locking down logistics
7. Handling the brand relaunch

Challenge #1: Rebranding for the wrong reasons

Your brand identity goes beyond the design of your logo or your colour palette – it’s the essence of your emotional connection between you and your customers, employees and the wider world. It’s your company vision, it’s your personality, it’s how people understand YOU.

Brand recognition shouldn’t be toyed with – it takes years of effort to build and can disappear in an instant. That’s why the vast majority of successful rebrands overcome the first hurdle: identifying a legitimate need to update their image.

Take Old Spice as an example. When its name had become intrinsically linked to the older gentleman, it restricted their ability to engage with younger audiences and made them appear “uncool”. Their 2010 rebrand with the memorable “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign addressed this stagnation and brought their brand into the modern day.

On the other side, you have American retailer GAP. After a short, sudden decline in sales, they invested an estimated $100 million on rebranding their iconic blue logo into one that was more high-brow. This went against the values of convenience and low prices customers expected from GAP, meaning the change was immediately rejected and abandoned.

These competing examples demonstrate the importance of rebranding for the right reasons:

To make sure a complete rebranding campaign is the right step forward, as opposed to a less comprehensive refresh, engage in objective conversations with your shareholders, employees, customers and beyond. Active stakeholder engagement is essential early on to approach this question with a clear, open mind, enabling you to determine whether a rebrand offers more promise than problems.

Moreover, a comprehensive brand audit can identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current branding, empowering you with insight to either justify the importance of a rebrand or bring you back from the brink of a costly, fruitless endeavour.

Challenge #2: Securing buy-in from customers

One of the biggest challenges for any rebranding strategy is getting customers on board with your new changes.

When it takes between 5 and 7 impressions for a customer to recall a brand from memory, getting them to forget this and embrace new visual elements and communications can be a tall order.

This is where GAP’s rebrand fell apart and why Tropicana lost $30 million after changing the beloved packaging of their orange cartons in 2009. They failed to talk to their customers and prepare them for the transition, meaning their rebrand fell flat, losing face in their target markets.

How you overcome customer perceptions and facilitate this transition to your new brand identity will play a key role in the success of your rebrand. 

Overcoming this challenge starts by conducting thorough market research and surveys to sense how current and prospective customers view your brand. This can provide solid, tangible feedback on what people want to see from a revamped version of your business.

Furthermore, carrying over older brand elements into this new vision can ease the transition for customers and maintain familiarity. Especially for strong brands, this staggered approach can help preserve loyalty while you simultaneously target new audiences.

Challenge #3: Mapping the scale of your rebrand

Particularly for globally recognised brands with a presence on multiple marketing channels, the scale of a rebrand can be daunting. Approaching it without a full grasp of what’s required can add innumerable costs and delays to the process.

Moreover, a disorganised approach could mean smaller visual elements, such as letterheads or email signatures, are overlooked. This can lead to outdated graphics, logos or imagery remaining in circulation in your marketing, sowing confusion, raising distrust and harming your brand consistency.

The solution? Granularly map out every facet of your brand and your broadcast channels. Engage your marketing teams to ensure no stone is unturned during this transition, and collate everything identified into one unified, shared document. 

Once your transition plan is complete and executed, utilise a Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform to contain all refreshed brand imagery and collateral. This technology will give everyone in your organisation access to the latest resources, while simultaneously allowing you to lock away any remnants of the old branding so it can never accidentally find its way out.

Challenge #4: Internally communicating your rebrand

While your rebrand might be aimed towards your customers, it’s also necessary that your team members are on board.

After all, the people at the heart of your business are responsible for carrying your new marketing materials, voice and values to your target audiences. If they’re unaware or unsure about the new brand, this could affect how they communicate it. Long-term employees may default to the old regime, confusing your brand alignment.

When you consider that 92% of consumers trust word of mouth over any other form of branded promotion, you see how important it is to get everyone connected to your business speaking the same language when it comes to your rebrand.

For international organisations, this is even more pressing. Without a firm communication strategy across your locations, the implementation of your rebrand can be incredibly slow, convoluted and inconsistent. Your branding on one side of the world could be completely different on the other – in an increasingly connected planet, that will be picked up on quickly.

How do you address this problem? Setting up a dedicated brand hub at the centre of your rebrand can help ensure it’s understood and applied universally. Within this digital resource, any team member can be educated on brand guidelines, exemplar assets and more to give them complete clarity over how your brand should now be presented.

This single source of truth, reinforced by wider brand management solutions, will go a long way in keeping your teams aligned and educated on your current brand identity. Rather than an uncoordinated, haphazard approach, this centralised, structured method can make the adjustment period for your employees much simpler.

Challenge #5: Quantifying the success of your rebrand

While rebrands can help companies appeal to new audiences, reposition their place in the market and address negative brand perceptions – success isn’t a foregone conclusion.

Before breaking ground on your rebrand, you should determine what a successful outcome will look like when you go live. While there’s sure to be plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest whether your rebrand has been well received or not, data is the definitive marker for success.

So, what metrics should you keep in mind once your materials are out in the world? The simple answer is it depends. Different companies will commission a rebrand for different reasons; some might want to reach new audiences, while others aim to accommodate the launch of a new product.

Whatever metrics are most appropriate to track, make sure you’re assessing everything from a financial perspective. These projects eat up a significant chunk of your marketing budget, so higher-ups will want to know whether these adjustments delivered a return on investment.

Challenge #6: Locking down the logistics of your rebrand

It’s easy to get lost in the logistical demands of a rebrand. For instance, if your brand name changes, is this available as a trademark? Have your new designs and visuals been communicated to your packaging partners or external agencies?

These hurdles, be they legal formalities or gaps in your asset creation processes, can do more than delay your rebrand – they can place your organisation at risk of liability breaches and fracture relationships with your partners.

To ensure the logistical side of your rebrand is completed in full, use this checklist to stay on track:

Beyond this, your style guides, website imagery, social media assets, letterheads and more will need to be reworked. Many organisations will outsource this to an external agency, but this can be expensive, potentially resulting in partners failing to treat your branding and assets with the same attention to detail you would.

To take a more cost-conscious, in-house approach, building and using intelligent design templates can make it straightforward to execute your brand refresh. With an effective, intuitive solution, anyone in your team can play an active role in creating studio-quality assets for any channel, so you are fully prepared with collateral for the launch of your new identity.

Challenge #7: The all-important brand relaunch

All that’s left now is to launch your rebrand. But with competition for your customers’ attention and loyalty fiercer than ever, revealing your new identity involves more than just a flick of a switch.

To maximise the chances that your new direction is met with intrigue and excitement instead of concern or confusion, it’s hard to overstate the importance of a well-coordinated rebrand rollout campaign.

Get everything ready for the big day by creating a need-to-know sequence, so your team can roll your rebrand out to each audience in order of importance, from employees and customers right the way through to your suppliers and the media. Facilitating this with campaign execution tools can add a tangible structure that keeps your work on track.

Next, establish a narrative behind your new identity. You want to make it as clear to your audience why you have taken this step, and how it will specifically benefit them.

Then, devote time to forecasting (or hyping up) your new rebrand. Audiences are generally resistant to change at the best of times, and hitting them with a top-to-bottom rebrand out of nowhere is likely to stoke confusion, frustration and negativity. Creating a gradual build-up with teases of the new image allows them to adapt to the change over time.

Finally, create a communication strategy for the initial days, weeks and months after launch to reinforce your new brand in your customers’ minds. This can quickly breed familiarity and eventually distance your audience from your former identity.

Unlock the full potential of your next rebrand

For many companies, rebranding has been the key to their ongoing success. They enable organisations to appeal to new customers, tap into fresh markets, and build recognition among key audiences.

But creating a new identity for your brand is no easy feat. We hope this guide has enabled you to better understand whether rebranding is the right decision for you, and overcome the multitude of challenges that can derail the debut of your new image so you can make this investment a genuine success.

Global brand consistency is the aim of any proficient brand manager – a coherent, harmonious image and identity across all touchpoints that your target audience understands, recognises and resonates with.

Yet achieving this is easier said than done. With an abundance of marketing channels and multiple teams scattered across the globe, it’s easy for inconsistencies to creep into your communications. When this happens, your audiences lose trust in your brand’s identity, impacting their loyalty and willingness to engage with your organisation.

In this ongoing battle to ensure brand consistency, brand guidelines are one of the biggest weapons in your arsenal. Defining your vision, style, tone and much more, your guidelines are the key to educating the people responsible for creating and promoting your brand, and keeping your brand assets uniform on every channel and in every location.

However, the quality and effectiveness of brand guidelines vary from company to company. Some keep brand image locked down; others simply gather dust in a file cabinet.

In this ultimate guide, we harness our decades of experience in helping brands stay consistent to share our tips for truly unbreakable, actionable brand guidelines.

What are brand guidelines?

Your brand guidelines are the heart and soul of your company’s identity. It’s the manual that dictates your brand usage across all areas. It captures the essence of what your brand represents and its unique personality. It tells the brand story that forges emotional connections with your audiences, both internal and external.

Whether you’d rather refer to this as a brand style guide, brand manual or brand kit, the principle remains the same – your guidelines are the foundation for absolute brand consistency:

• They deliver greater quality control, ensuring all content is produced with your brand’s reputation and identity in mind
• They increase the understanding of your corporate branding across your marketers, graphic designers and wider staff
• They enable better brand recognition by guaranteeing a consistent, coherent visual identity across your collateral

Or at least they should. While over 85% of organisations say they have brand guidelines, only 30% are enforced properly. Problems such as a lack of awareness, poor communication and inaccessibility commonly prevent guidelines from having their desired impact, enabling inconsistencies in visual elements, tone of voice and other critical areas.

When brand design guidelines are ignored or misrepresented, your consistency – and consequently your overall company performance – suffers.

Is brand consistency that important?

Imagine a coworker who is always smartly dressed. Tailored suit, tucked-in shirt, polished shoes – everything neatly aligned. One day they come to work with messy hair, stains on their shirt and worn shoes. You would probably be confused and want to know if something was wrong.

The same logic applies to your brand and your customers. Your branding is the personification of your organisation, what people come to know and love. If that image frequently changes, it becomes impossible for your audiences to build trust as they don’t know where you stand.

This is why consistent, harmonious brands enjoy 33% revenue increases over inconsistent brands. Or why consistent brands are 3-4 times more likely to have excellent visibility in their market.

Consistency breeds confidence from your consumers, fosters loyalty, and builds lasting customer relationships. Your brand guidelines are the lynchpin of realising these benefits.

Cementing your identity before creating your brand guidelines

Before you can write up your brand guidelines, there’s some initial groundwork you and your team must take care of. Whether you’re undertaking a rebranding campaign or establishing guidelines in a long-established company, the first step is to cement your brand identity.

After all, if you aren’t clear about what your brand represents and how it should be portrayed, what exactly are your guidelines protecting? To get your guidelines off on the right foot, here are the formative steps you should know:

Conduct a thorough brand audit

Begin by examining your current brand elements, communications and collateral in a comprehensive brand audit. This should give you a sense of what personality your brand is projecting to your audience: is it coherent on all touchpoints? Is it aligned with what we want our brand to represent?

It’s vital your audit is approached objectively. You must be honest about whether your current messaging represents your brand in the manner you intend. Canvass your stakeholders, customers, employees and more to build this universal view of your brand’s perception.

Your analysis will establish the strengths and weaknesses of your current branding, and what your brand guidelines must include to present your brand correctly.

Understand your target audience

Your brand is designed to foster a connection with your customers, employees and the wider world. So, it’s important your brand guidelines are grounded in what your audience wants and expects from your organisation.

To build your buyer personas, consider the following:

• What are their demographics and characteristics?
• What are their habits?
• What are their concerns and pain points?
• What values do they care about most?
• What are their hobbies and interests?
• Where do they look for information?

Examine your competitors

Competitor analysis is vital when forming your brand identity to establish areas where you can set yourself apart from the crowd. 

Examining their colour schemes, tone of voice, mission statements, social media platforms and beyond can inspire ideas for your own branding, while pinpointing unique characteristics, visuals and offerings that will help you stand out.

Determine your visual identity

As prominent graphic designer Paul Rand once said: design is the silent ambassador of your brand. When you have audited your brand and researched your audience/competitors, you should nail down the visual elements that will encapsulate your brand’s identity.

This takes your brand from conception to reality, forming the bulk of your brand guidelines. You may enlist the services of an external design agency to bring these initial assets to life, which you can later harness for wide-scale asset creation through branded templates.

What should be included in brand guidelines?

This is the fundamental question in your creation of brand identity guidelines. After cementing the essence of your branding and visual presentation, what must you include to ensure this is properly communicated across all your marketing?

Clarity and comprehensiveness are the order of the day here. While you want your guidelines to be digestible and accessible, the more detail you include here, the less room there is for your teams to misinterpret and misrepresent your brand in future.

Brand vision and mission statements

Your brand vision and mission are your brand’s purpose and how it aspires to achieve that goal. They’re the core values that tell your customers, employees and beyond who you are, what you represent and where you’re going.

Consider these as people’s introduction to your brand and the foundation for your relationship with them. That’s why your vision and mission statements should sit at the front of your brand guidelines, so those using the guide can understand this immediately.

Brand logo

The Nike swoosh. McDonald’s’ golden arches. The Starbucks Siren. Your brand logo is the visual face of your brand, and one of the most important tools in building recognition and brand equity among your audiences.

However, your brand guidelines should not simply display and explain the rationale of your logo. It must set parameters for how your logo should be used in all brand assets. How large should it be? Where should it be positioned? Does it look different on a letterhead than a social media post?

In your guidelines, include all approved versions of your logo and include the following:

• Different sizes and layouts of your main logo
• The white space required around your logo
• Approved colour variations beyond your main logo
• Reversed and mono versions of your logo
• Responsive logos for smaller screens (mobiles, tablets, etc.)

Iconography

Icons are important parts of your branding as they can be recognisable across different languages and cultures in a way that written text cannot.

Your brand guidelines should identify aspects like the size of your icons, what they indicate and situations where they are appropriate for use. If you use outlined icons or solid icons, this preference should also be pinpointed here as well.

Colour palette

Colour is arguably the most powerful means for people to recall your brand. In fact, colour is estimated to increase brand recognition by 80%. Therefore, your distinct, unique colour palette must be clearly outlined within your guidelines.

Most brands will typically choose three or four primary colours of different hues for different purposes:

• A lighter colour for backgrounds
• A darker shade for text
• A neutral hue
• A flashy colour that pops off screens

Dutch brewing company Heineken follows this pattern in their own guidelines:

When presenting your colour palette in your brand style guide, precisely indicate your primary and secondary colours, and any distinction between colours used on the web (RGB colours) and in print (CMYK colours). Also ensure you include the following details:

• Their colour match, using their Pantone name and number
• Their CMYK number
• Their RGB colour and HEX code

Typography

Typography is the variety of font styles your brand uses in its copy. This could be a single “family” of fonts, or include a mixture of styles you want to use across your digital and print channels.

Consistency is key here, so it’s not ideal to have numerous wildly different fonts. A good rule of thumb for brand managers is to use a different typography for your logo than your “main” font style. This creates a contrast that stands out more to audiences.

Within your brand guidelines, outline the typography used for different types of text – headings, paragraphs, bullet points, etc. – as well as the preferred alignment of text and spacing between words and paragraphs.

Tone of voice

Your tone of voice describes how your brand communicates with your audiences and influences how they think about you through your messaging.

This is often the segment of brand guidelines most open to misinterpretation. To ensure that doesn’t happen:

• Use a tone of voice scale, including examples of the tone used for greetings, sign-offs and other key CTAs
• Alternatively, a tone of voice table can illustrate your various voice characteristics and when they should be employed
• Provide best practice examples to guide your copywriters on what is acceptable and what isn’t
• Align your tone with your brand personality, connecting it to 3-5 adjectives that underlie your core values

Imagery

The imagery section of your brand guidelines should guide your whole team on what types of photos, illustrations, designs and more are appropriate for your brand.

You can make the distinction between good and bad imagery clear in your guidelines in several ways:

• Best practice – Show examples from your collection of photos, illustrations and other imagery that performed well for your brand, demonstrating to designers which ones fit your range of channels
• Aspiration – Don’t have an internal collection to lean on? The same effect can be achieved by using imagery that you’ve found from brands that inspire your organisation
• Mood board – Collect images and themes that convey the feelings you want to get across in your brand imagery

Signage

Whether the signage is physical posters, banners and billboards, or digital bulletins on retail websites and beyond, these will have specific dimensions and elements that you’ll want to ensure stay consistent across all locations.

Are your signs flat, plastic and vinyl? Are they built up and illuminated? Are they static or animated? All of these elements should be highlighted in your brand guidelines.

Guides for physical and digital marketing channels

Finally, you should dedicate part of your brand guidelines to clarifying your various physical and digital marketing channels. Denoting how your logos, colours, visual elements and more appear on specific channels ensures a coherent, harmonious flow of content on these platforms.

Perhaps dedicate a page or two of your master guidelines to each channel to illustrate nuances or restrictions that differ from your core guidelines. Alternatively, you may want to produce distinct brand management guidelines for each platform, which can be incredibly useful if you have professionals dedicated to different areas of your marketing ecosystem.

Making your brand guidelines accessible and actionable

While nailing the components and structure of your brand guidelines is no doubt essential, equally as crucial – and often overlooked – is the accessibility of your guidelines.

What’s the point of having a thorough, informative, end-to-end guide if no one knows where it lives or follows it? That’s why there is such a discrepancy in the number of organisations that have brand guidelines and the number that use brand guidelines.

In order to achieve the all-encompassing consistency your brand demands and your audiences expect, making your guidelines easy to access and understand is essential. Here’s how you achieve it:

Structure and design your guidelines for ease of use

First, take time to design and lay out your guidelines for maximum engagement and comprehension. There’s a lot of information to be communicated here, but a guide with wall-to-wall text will likely inspire eye rolls and shoulder shrugs.

Remember, this is a resource that a brand-new designer, marketer or agency will use to grasp your brand and produce assets to the standard you expect. If it’s confusing, bland or poorly structured, people won’t follow it closely.

For truly accessible brand guidelines, consider the following:

• Be concise yet informative in each segment, only providing as much information as necessary without going overboard with text
• Use imagery and interactive elements to engage readers more effectively
• Rely on simple, easy-to-digest language so anyone, regardless of their design knowledge, can follow along
• Create checklists alongside your guidelines to offer step-by-step instructions for how to apply and present your branding

Here are 3 great examples of organisations with engaging, digestible brand guidelines:

Ollo

Ollo’s creative, colourful brand guidelines include an interactive game demonstrating how users can manipulate their logo, making this segment more engaging and understandable.

Wolf Circus

Wolf Circus’s guidelines leave no confusion over the colours and imagery at the core of their brand identity. It comprehensively covers everything from the company’s mission statement and logo variants to specific campaign guidelines, while maintaining a minimalist and clear structure.

NJORD

NJORD’s minimalist approach gives readers everything they need in a straightforward, no-nonsense way. It doesn’t skimp out on relevant details, delivering everything someone would need to produce their array of digital and print assets.

Harness the power of video in your guidelines

92.3% of users watch videos every week. It’s the most powerful form of online content and people retain more information from it than something they simply read or hear.

Converting your written brand guidelines into a series of video explainers and tutorials can help users easily understand your brand identity and its usage. Think of it as a “show not tell” approach that can reduce the risk of misinterpretation.

Translate your guidelines in relevant languages

For global brands with worldwide locations, ensure there are versions of your brand guidelines written in every relevant language. This removes any jeopardy of people misunderstanding the instructions in your guidelines, and makes these much easier to follow for your teams across the globe.

Establish a digital “home” for your brand guidelines

Where you house your brand guidelines is crucial – it cannot simply be a single printed booklet in your office. While you can produce printed guidelines for all personnel, this is not exactly cost-effective or environmentally friendly. So, we recommend establishing an online brand portal to contain your digital brand guidelines.

Taking this approach ensures:

• Users worldwide can access, read and download guidelines with a couple of clicks
• You can incorporate interactive features and videos within your style guides
• Any adjustments and updates to your guidelines can be applied instantly without any administrative headaches

Create a single source of truth for brand assets

As your brand assets offer the clearest guide to how your branding should be portrayed across all marketing channels, having these contained in one intuitive location helps you lock down consistency.

Investing in a standalone Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, can make it far simpler for your teams to locate exemplar assets to use as a template for future campaigns.

Turn your brand guidelines into brand templates

Speaking of templates, the best way to ensure your guidelines are steadfastly applied throughout your brand assets is by making these the framework for dedicated design templates.

Creating templates for each type of asset you require, constructed under your brand guidelines, makes it impossible for designers to steer beyond these boundaries. This can lock down the size and position of visual elements, typography and much more, meaning people don’t have to study your guidelines meticulously to apply them.

Furthermore, high-quality template software empowers anyone on your team – not just those with a design background – to create content, completely secure in the knowledge that everything produced is 100% brand-consistent.

Control your brand like never before with unbreakable brand guidelines

Now that you know the essence of great brand guidelines, we hope you can use this blog to take your own guidelines to the next level.

Making these as engaging, comprehensive and accessible as possible for your workforce is critical to always communicating the right messages to your audiences, leaving zero room for inconsistencies.

By applying the techniques and tips above, you set your teams up for a future of consistent, coherent marketing campaigns, and build a strong brand that is understood, trusted and beloved by customers, employees and others globally.

Reputation is everything for today’s brands. Your brand’s reputation is how people perceive your organisation, from your day-to-day consumers to your employees and stakeholders.

Fundamentally, the stronger your reputation, the more you’re trusted and respected by those around you. This in turn increases customer loyalty, boosts sales and grows your market share. Those are incredible benefits, but they come with a hefty burden, as just one or two missteps can cause your reputation to tumble, and put you on a long road to recovery.

Maintaining a strong brand reputation demands long-term, end-to-end management, addressing both the positive and the negative. In this guide, we share strategies we’ve learned across our 20+ years of working with global brands to help you stay in good standing with your target audiences.

What is brand reputation management?

Brand reputation management is the steps and strategies you take to monitor, govern and protect your reputation with your audiences.

In this digital age, most of that takes place online. From comments on your social media platforms to dedicated review websites such as Yelp, Trustpilot and Google Reviews, there are many forums for your customers, employees and beyond to share their thoughts about your brand, products and services.

And what they say matters. Around 90% of consumers say they won’t frequent a business with a negative reputation, while nearly 70% of job candidates would reject job offers from a company with a poor reputation – even if they were unemployed!

What does brand reputation management involve?

As much of what dictates a brand’s reputation happens online, managing this will typically include:

• Monitoring brand mentions, comments and messages on social media
• Checking your platform’s online review pages and responding to comments
• Responding to customer enquiries through emails, contact forms and other communication channels
• Developing public relations strategies to handle how your brand is presented in the media and manage crises
• Collaborating with industry experts and influencers with strong reputations
• Creating expert content on your website and wider platforms to demonstrate your thought leadership

However, it’s equally important to manage your brand offline. Communications with customers and appearances in local publications can majorly contribute to how people perceive you.

How do I measure my brand’s reputation?

While there is no clear-cut way to know if your brand has a good or bad reputation, several indicators can help you gauge public opinion:

Tracking these metrics will give you a solid sense of how people view your brand, and whether you must take action to repair any damage.

The importance of a positive brand reputation – and the costs of a negative one

The importance of your brand’s reputation cannot be overstated. As mentioned earlier, it’s one of the biggest influences on trust between your brand and your core audiences. A negative reputation won’t inspire confidence in potential customers or employees – particularly if your competitors have a more positive stature.

But its value goes far beyond trust – a positive brand reputation:

Boosts sales and revenue

When you have many positive reviews from satisfied customers, others will naturally want to experience the same quality. Conversely, an abundance of 1-star reviews will scare potential customers away, costing you revenue.

Builds customer loyalty

A consistent reputation breeds loyalty among your audience, as they understand they can trust you to deliver on their expectations. As you can imagine, having a constant stream of loyal customers coming back time and again contributes significantly to your ongoing success.

Attracts top talent

Modern candidates are increasingly concerned about the reputation, ethics and social responsibility of the brands they work for. The better your reputation, the better your chances of recruiting and retaining the best available talent.

Opens doors to partnerships

Did you know that 69% of consumers trust recommendations from their favourite influencers? These personalities also have reputations to uphold, so a strong brand reputation is crucial to secure these beneficial partnerships.

Increases brand awareness

There’s an old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. However, constant negative feedback results in the wrong type of brand awareness – the type that wards away potential customers. Effective brand management helps you appear in the right places to attract consumers, from search engines to social channels.

Grows brand equity

Greater loyalty and awareness among your target audiences contributes to better brand equity. This helps increase your market share among competitors, and enables you to charge more for your goods and services.

Minimises the impact of a crisis

Every organisation makes mistakes or unpopular decisions from time to time. With a healthy brand reputation, you’re in a better position to navigate troublesome moments and minimise the repercussions. If you have a weak reputation already, these moments may prove the final straw for your audiences.

7 effective brand reputation management strategies to protect your stature

Now you understand the value of a strong brand reputation, what can you do to establish and preserve this?

Of course, the core of any good brand reputation is offering quality products and services. Nothing will redeem you long-term if you fail to meet this benchmark. But from this foundation, there are numerous steps you can take to reinforce your status:

1. Encourage authentic reviews and ratings from your customers

First, regularly encourage feedback from your customers, both positive and negative. When they buy your product or use your services, ask them to share a review either in person, via email or attached to your invoices. 65% of people will leave a review if prompted by an organisation.

Ideally, your overall review rating should be between 4 and 4.7 stars. 57% of consumers won’t use a business with a rating below 4 stars, but the likelihood of purchases also dips the closer you get to the full 5 stars, as many customers consider this inauthentic or inflated.

Authenticity is essential. Whether people love or loathe your products or services, potential customers want an honest assessment to make their judgements. Fake positive reviews don’t benefit you or your reputation.

2. Respond promptly to any customer concerns

From a critical email to a negative review, you must proactively respond to customer issues with your brand. 89% of consumers say they are likelier to frequent businesses that respond to all reviews, positive or negative.

Brand sentiment analysis and social listening tools can help you here, spotlighting any negative online comments or reviews so you can promptly respond. With your responses, remember to:

• Provide a solution to their issue where possible, or reassure the person that you are actively working on one
• Demonstrate empathy for their frustration or dissatisfaction
• Maintain communication while their issue is being resolved
• Follow up with the person once their problem is solved, and potentially encourage them to rescind or update their review

For more efficient responses, you may establish template answers for frequently asked queries or problems you have identified. However, you should use these only as a base and tailor your specific responses to the customer’s direct concerns.

And remember, negative feedback can be the springboard to positive improvements for your organisation, so always welcome these with open arms!

3. Maintain consistency across your brand assets

Your reputation is judged by more than your online reviews. Most customers expect consistent messaging across every engagement they have with your brand. Any break in your tone, visual identity, brand colours and more can make your brand appear disorganised and unprofessional, harming your overall reputation.

It’s essential your branding and marketing stay consistent on every channel. To achieve this:

• Establish clear brand guidelines that tie down your brand’s identity
• Develop branded design templates to keep your assets aligned across all platforms
• Ensure your teams have a single library of approved assets with a Digital Asset Management (DAM) software solution that can adapt to your unique needs
• Recycle existing brand assets in different formats to maintain the same look and feel
• Monitor your marketing campaigns to identify any instances of inconsistency at the earliest opportunity

For more advice on this topic, check out our ultimate brand consistency guide.

4. Create brand reputation guidelines and a communications strategy

In a similar vein, it’s beneficial to establish specific brand reputation guidelines to define how you communicate your brand and respond to feedback. These guidelines could include:

• Your brand values and mission statements
• Your brand’s visual identity, including logos, colour palettes, typography and imagery
• Your tone of voice, ensuring messages reflect your brand’s personality
• A framework for crafting messages, comments and responses in line with your brand identity
• Crisis communication protocols to manage negative publicity quickly
• Clear guidelines on the regulations around regulatory compliance that affect your industry – automotive, energy, pharma, banking, retail, or any other.
• Social media guidelines that dictate how you engage with followers on your social profiles
• Customer service standards that set expectations for all customer interactions
• Partnership and sponsorship criteria that ensure you select partners and sponsors that align with your brand’s values

With a solid communications strategy in place somewhere readily accessible to your marketing, PR and branding teams across the globe, you help ensure a consistent approach and reputation at all times.

5. Invest in online listening tools

It’s impossible to stay abreast of everything people say about your brand manually – at least not without a considerable investment of time and resources. 

Online listening tools can monitor and track references to your brand on social media, Google, review sites and beyond. This allows you to instantly see, digest and respond to any negative sentiment, as well as measure the performance of branded hashtags and specific marketing campaigns.

Some online listening tools will cost you nothing to set up. Google Alerts is a great example, one every brand should pay attention to, sending you daily email notifications for particular keywords and phrases you want to track online.

Other noteworthy online listening tools include:

• Brandwatch
• Mention
• Hootsuite
• Talkwalker
• Awario

6. Focus on enhancing your SEO

68% of all online experiences begin with a search engine, and they are among the most trustworthy sources of information for consumers. Therefore, the higher your website ranks on search engines, the more reputable your brand appears.

Devoting time to your SEO strategy helps your brand get noticed on these essential destinations, and establishes you as a thought leader in your industry. To ramp up your SEO efforts, consider:

• Creating engaging, relevant content that addresses your audience’s questions and needs
• Keeping your content up-to-date to maintain its relevance and freshness
• Optimising your content, titles, images and more with the correct keywords to generate search traffic
• Improving the structure of your website through internal linking and a consistent URL layout
• Acquiring high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites in your industry
• Ensuring your business information is consistent across online directories and listings
• Enhancing user experience (UX) by making your website easy to navigate and visually appealing

7. Harness user-generated content and brand advocates

Lastly, we noted earlier how consumers are more inclined to trust individuals than brands. This is nothing ground-breaking, but it does make user-generated content (UGC), testimonials and similar assets incredibly effective at raising your brand reputation.

By showcasing customers using your products or services in videos, or sharing employee experiences on review websites such as Glassdoor, this presents an authentic impression of the quality of your organisation.

The more third-party advocates and influencers you have promoting the benefits of your brand, the more trustworthy and reputable you appear to your target audiences.

Build your reputation by creating an on-brand culture

With your brand’s reputation fundamental to your long-term revenue, recognition and success, we hope this guide gives you the foundation to control this across all platforms.

Of course, a strong brand reputation is based on a robust on-brand culture. An environment where all your teams understand your values and identity, and have the tools to communicate these across your marketing operations.

Identifying an effective Digital Asset Management and Content Creation solution gives your teams the foundation to maintain this consistent presentation. With this structure, your customers, employees and beyond are encouraged to gain trust in your organisation, keeping your reputation solid and stable for years to come.