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.