What is brand asset management?

Creating and growing a brand means having a consistent presence across every touchpoint and channel imaginable. It means not just a company logo, but imagery, straplines and bios sized and tweaked for every print, digital and social space in which you’re active. Break it down further and it means fonts, colours, artwork, copy blocks and any number of other creative assets – all of which you might need to call on to represent the brand, or to create new branded materials.

There’s no limit to the number of assets a brand might generate, but you’ll quickly hit the limits of any manual management system. File folders fill up, and with multiple contributors and users it’s hard to enforce a consistent storage and naming system within them. Without proper version control and compliance management, you risk the cost and embarrassment of unfinished, unapproved or legacy material being published. And when you or your partners operate globally, ad-hoc sharing arrangements put your valuable IP at risk.

Improvised arrangements don’t just risk confusion. It’s far too easy for crucial files to go missing, leading to the costs and delay of recreating them. And when marketing teams need to demonstrate agility and efficiency, rummaging around for assets costs valuable time.

Brand asset management exists to take the hassle out of storing, iterating and sharing the digital materials that define your brand. It’s closely related to marketing asset management, but BAM focuses more tightly on identity assets, rather than all marketing materials. Much like marketing asset platforms, BAM platforms eliminate the confusion of multiple, untracked file versions, and the guesswork. Tellingly, if branding consistency has the potential to increase revenue by 33%, almost half of company employees don’t believe they have the necessary BAM tools to implement it.

A brand asset management platform is designed to address all the headaches of maintaining coherent digital assets for your brand. Fundamentally, a BAM offers a centralised and authoritative repository for all of your brand materials. Within this most important role, the BAM also ensures that all brand assets are stored securely, retrieved easily, and managed to avoid duplication and confusion.

Delivering on this promise means integrating multiple file and version management technologies. Assets are defined with the help of searchable data, for example tags like ‘Facebook’ and ‘header’, or ‘CEO’ and ‘bio’, along with standard metadata such as creation and upload dates. Coupled with powerful and intuitive search features, this means stakeholders can quickly retrieve the exact assets they’re looking for. Importantly, they’ll get the right version, too.

Modern cloud-based solutions go one better, easily managing the sharing and distribution of assets between multiple contributors, stakeholders and partners. With a cloud-hosted repository, it’s simple to provide secure access to regional teams or to home working colleagues, ensuring that everyone in the business has the assets they need.

BAM platforms with distribution features can readily extend this access outside the business. For example, with a fully featured cloud-based DAM you might create a branded resource portal, useful for providing journalists with press packs, or any interested party with the brand content they need.

A brand asset management platform is the ideal way for any marketing team to take greater control over the digital assets that define their brand. While useful to organisations of any size, the benefits multiply with the scale of the business. The more brands you manage, partners you work with, rules you have to follow – and the more often you tend to redesign – the greater the time and cost savings will prove.

Brand asset management helps marketing and CX professionals manage customer expectation and experience of the brand. By serving up consistent visual and written content, BAMs help extend the brand feel beyond high-touch properties like the web, into individual touchpoints and experiences. From consistent email signatures through to templated chat responses, BAMs help even the largest operations to act with a coherent personality.

BAMs are also a vital tool for anyone charged with managing corporate identity. Here, their central, managed repository is vital to consistently representing the business. Again, versioning and easy search features make BAMs the ideal platform for corporate identity management.

But asset management platforms aren’t just valuable in-house. Creative, marketing and public relations agencies can all benefit from a BAM’s ability to ingest, store and serve up the valuable IP of multiple clients. For creative agencies, they can help reduce friction and failures in approval and feedback processes. For marketers and comms teams, they can provide a controlled way to link your clients’ assets with the customers and journalists they’re trying to reach.

Whether your focus is growing brands, or ensuring consistency in messaging and CX, you need to look seriously at the difference brand asset management could make. By eliminating errors, and streamlining the creation, approval and retrieval of brand assets, a BAM platform improves your agility and efficiency, and makes your budget go further.

Getting your assets under control also raises the standards of what you deliver. You’ll save time through quick asset retrieval. The money you save on needless duplication can be invested in more polish or a greater push.

Categorically, brand asset management will strengthen the identity of your brand. It will improve the consistency of the way your brand looks, feels and behaves with customers. And by improving the way you track, understand and share revisions, it’ll ensure you never again release materials that haven’t been cleared, localised or approved.