Your brand is your promise, reputation and greatest asset. It needs constant oversight to make sure every element works in lockstep. A brand management system gives you a centralized command center to keep your brand consistent, compliant, and under control across every channel.
Traditionally, brand guidelines have been the go-to tool used by marketers to control their brands. But not only are they often relegated to static PDFs with limited functionality, they are only a part of the brand management solution. Modern brand management brings together all aspects of your branding and uses automation and AI to help maintain a strong, distinctive, consistent brand that you can manage efficiently.
Here, we take a detailed look at what a brand management system is and who should be using one.
What Are Brand Management Systems?
A brand management system is a tool that integrates into your workflow, providing a centralized resource overseeing everything brand-related. This extends to brand strategy, guidelines, access to creative files, templates, approvals, legal and brand compliance and more. Marketers can set up as few or as many of these functions as suits their needs, but ultimately, wrapping ‘all things brand’ up in a single digital solution means teams can instantly access the collateral or guidance they need, regardless of how they communicate, how collaborative their processes are, or where they’re located.
Brand management vs. project management software
While these tools are designed to facilitate consistency, collaboration, and oversight within a business, only one is built specifically to cater to the steps involved with brand management.
Brand management software consists of a number of capabilities, such as DAM, brand portals, creative templates, approval workflows, and compliance, that all work together to organize your branding by storing downloadable logos, iconography, imagery, video and audio files, templates, and approved marketing materials under one roof. Creative and Marketing teams can access brand guidelines and governance for asset production, while compliance teams can monitor content approvals and version controls. They can be customized to integrate with marketing and design tools, like Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva, MS Office, Getty Images and Shopify for a seamless workflow.
A full brand management software solution automates processes, from markups to approvals and compliance with customizable rule-based triggers. It provides reporting and analytics to optimize operations and focus human expertise on high-value, strategic tasks rather than iterative work.
On the other hand, project management software, such as Monday.com and Clickup, are designed to assign tasks and track progression. For instance, when you need to share documents, communicate, manage deadlines and missed milestones, or visualize data. It does not offer controllable access to brand guidelines and creative assets, approval workflows, proofing and markup facilities, creative templates or in-built legal and brand review capabilities.
Why Use a Brand Management System?
Brand leaders manage complex environments that involve multiple teams, processes, and in many cases sub-brands. By aligning brand assets, enforcing standards, and managing creative guidelines in one central hub, a brand management platform empowers you to achieve strategic branding goals and deliver sustained market impact.
It enforces compliance across global markets and is particularly helpful when organizations are going through a rebrand. Further, in a highly regulated or competitive environment, managing design, legal, and regulatory compliance is critical to building brand equity. A brand portal makes it easy to host, manage, share, repurpose, automate, track, and approve brand assets, and even share them with external partners and third-party agencies. Whether you’re a multinational corporation or a nimble startup, this system helps you maintain control over your brand identity.
Here’s what you should expect:
Brand consistency
A purpose-designed brand management platform creates pathways for teams to quickly access, share, and distribute approved assets in your brand portfolio. When every touchpoint reflects your core brand identity, each interaction becomes an opportunity to reinforce your message. This helps keep your brand powerful, unmistakable, and resonant across all channels.
Team collaboration and productivity
A centralized platform makes it easy to showcase brand guidelines to educate broader teams. A self-service portal lets brand leaders and teams access the most recently approved brand guidelines and download multimedia files, such as logos, campaign templates, and icons. This creates a fluidity that naturally leads to stronger inter-functional collaboration and streamlined workflows. That way, you can increase on-brand content production and get more out of your content.
Boost productivity
Brand management software helps lighten workloads. With the ability to streamline requests via a marketing inbox, automate responses to frequently asked questions and self-serve branding guidelines or collateral, a brand management platform reduces repetitive, low-value work. This means Marketing teams have more time to focus on high-value initiatives that genuinely require human input.
Agility with market trends
Today, brands need to be adaptable. A reliable brand management system delivers real-time updates and ensures localized compliance while aligning with global standards. This agility allows you to act fast, adjust brand messaging and assets, and keep pace with emerging trends and consumer demands alike.
Brand compliance
You can empower self-service content creation within strict guidelines on one dedicated platform, with built-in review and approval workflows, and direct communication channels to help ensure that every asset meets regulatory standards. This process minimizes risk and protects your brand from potential protocol breaches.
What Are the Key Features of a Brand Management System?
Integrations
Proofing and markup
Task management
Digital asset management
Analytics and reporting
Compliance
Online brand portals
How Do You Choose a Brand Management System?
Like Goldilocks, you want to find something that feels just right for now, but it must have the ability to grow with you as you scale. As you evaluate vendors, ask yourself the following questions to ensure the tool fits.
Does it fit our needs and size?
First, where are your branding initiatives currently at, and where are they going? If you’re expecting to scale teams or activities, look for something that will deliver in the long term. If the brand management tool is built for big teams — and that’s where you want to go — can it still serve you now?
Is the interface user-friendly?
Even when the interface looks shiny, if the tool is overly complex to use, you’re going to spend time unraveling small and unnecessary challenges. They add up. Take a look at the platform, and if you’re running a test, explore to see how much of it is genuinely intuitive to use. You won’t know everything at first glance, but you should be able to tell if it’s something your team can uptake easily.
Does it integrate with our existing tech stack?
Finding a brand management tool with integration capabilities is essential. The idea is to simplify your processes, governance, and compliance by keeping branding activity in one place. So, if the tool can’t integrate with your design or communication platforms, consider whether its advantages will genuinely outweigh the hassles of a fragmented process.
What is the level of customer support?
Are you expecting a one-and-done training or ongoing technical support and troubleshooting for your team? Ideally, a comprehensive and permanent or semi-permanent customer support system will ensure quicker fixes and smoother migration — but also more confidence in your choice long-term.
How Do You Implement a Brand Management System?
1. Assess challenges
Start by taking a close look at your current brand processes and spotting any inefficiencies that disrupt consistency. Here, you’re laying the groundwork by uncovering what you need, so you can find a system that addresses them.
2. Research
Dig into vendor details, customer reviews, and case studies to gauge each brand management solution’s alignment with your strategic goals. Make sure to check for scalability, integrations, and overall user experience.
3. Compare software
Shortlist the platforms that meet your criteria and see how their features, costs, and support levels stack up. Laying them out side by side will make it clear which one best suits your needs.
4. Trial product
Run a demo to test the system’s performance within your environment. Hands-on experience shines a light on any integration issues and gives an indication of whether the software meets your requirements.
5. Team training
Make sure your team gets thorough training so they can use the new system confidently. When everyone’s up to speed, you’ll get the most out of the platform and keep your brand execution on point.
6. Monitor
Continuously track performance metrics and gather user feedback after implementation. Ongoing monitoring addresses glitches early and ensures the system evolves with your brand’s needs.
Want To Master Brand Management?
A brand management system is the backbone of modern branding. It centralizes your assets, guidelines, and compliance measures on a single, secure platform. Its ability to unify teams and simplify workflows empowers you to maintain brand integrity, even amidst market shifts.
Beyond internal efficiency, a brand management system enables agile responses to global challenges and sparks innovation by giving branding teams the freedom to focus on creative, high-impact initiatives.
If you’re ready to explore a brand management platform that can help scale and simplify your branding initiatives, let’s get started. Reach out and see how IntelligenceBank can transform your brand management.
Contact us to find out more.
