Without proper management of your digital brand assets, it’s only a matter of time before old logos and out-of-date marketing material starts leaking out. Which of our five Creatures of Chaos is mangling your brand and disregarding guidelines? D-fect is your brand manager’s nightmare.
Want to know how to really upset the folks in the marketing team? I mean not just annoy them. If you want to do that, casually send them a link to a million-dollar ad for a shiny consumer product with the unspoken subtext: ‘Why can’t you do something like that?’.
No, I mean if you really want to make them cry – you just need to get your hands on their brands – and do truly awful things with it.
Start by finding an old version of the logo that’s been lying around on your laptop for three years. You could try and find the new logo but it’s buried on SharePoint somewhere – and frankly who wants to plumb to the depths of that abyss. Now, take your antique logo and place it over a nice busy background image so it hurts your eyes to look at. Try and make it touch the edge of the document you’re creating – that recommendation for whitespace around the logo is just a guideline after all. For a final flourish (and this really is nails running down the blackboard for the marketing team), clumsily extend the vertical height of the logo so the aspect ratio is out of whack. Bring all of this together into a really important sales proposal and then send it to everyone in your address book – I mean really go for the biggest audience possible.
Ok, it’s time for the big reveal. To add insult to injury, make sure the marketing team are the last to see your fabulous creation. And Voila! Just watch the blood drain from their faces when they see your handywork. Chortle!
Except surely no one would be so cruel or dumb enough to do anything like that – would they? No, all of your brand woes are actually caused by a mischievous little creature of chaos. Meet D-fect.
D-fect represents a perfect storm of brand chaos. It’s caused when an organisation stores it’s corporate media assets across so many devices, storage locations and software applications. With no structure or organisation, it’s not surprising that the Sales team, ahem – I mean D-fect – just use whatever brand assets are close to hand.
Campaigns and brands don’t stand still. New versions of files are dumped on top of old versions all the time. After a while, it’s impossible to know what should still be in circulation and what should be retired from service. What’s approved and what should never be seen again in a company-wide Town-hall slide deck.
Somewhere in all that mess are approved digital assets for use by the business, but good luck trying to sort the wheat from the chaff.
A mangled brand is a real problem for businesses. A lack of structure and control of your corporate assets causes confusion internally and your colleagues waste time looking for the files they need. It’s not surprising that mistakes are made. But more seriously, consider the impact that poor brand presentation and a lack of consistency will have on the way your company is perceived. What will your clients and stakeholders think of your business if you can’t even get that right?
Imagen Go
But there is a way to defeat D-fect and his brand deviance. Imagen Go gives you one source of brand truth for your organisation. One place to store, access and distribute your approved assets and archive your old ones, so no one can get their hands on them. File status controls enable you to coordinate file access so content in production doesn’t leak out ahead of completion. Simple user management controls ensure that everyone can access the assets they need and nothing more. When a brand asset or campaign is past its sell by date, simply change its status and it will be taken out of circulation.
Time to banish D-fect’s brand chaos. Try Imagen Go today – for free.
Features
- Easy access to all types of media files and related documents
- Version control
- File status control
- Fast, accurate searching and filtering
- Simple user management
- Send links to files
- Smart AI auto-tagging
Benefits
- Save time – less time on administration – more time to be creative
- One platform – fewer headaches keeping track of brand assets on corporate infrastructure
- Increased brand consistency for improved public/consumer perception
