Blog

Every business has a brand: whether you’re a global, universally recognised corporate or small enterprise, your brand is what defines you.

Household name or SME, you will be fiercely protective of your brand – which, as every marketer knows, goes way beyond your visual identity.

But maintaining its integrity can be a challenge. Managing your brand assets can feel like an ongoing battle – but it’s one of the basics of brand management that you must get right.

The good news? – there are ways to overcome these challenges and ensure your brand is protected.

Here, we explore the biggest threats to your brand identity and brand assets, and unearth the most effective strategies to tackle them.

What are brand assets?

Before we dig into the challenges to your brand assets, it’s worth reviewing what exactly those assets are.

What do we mean when we talk about brand assets?

They are the foundational elements of your branding: the elements that make up your look and feel, the way you describe yourself, and what you stand for.

Every brand should include:

• Your logo may be the first thing you think of when you consider branding. You should ideally have a number of versions, in different colours and sizes, to ensure it can be used in a variety of situations.
• Having a defined font ensures consistency and helps to define your ethos, so should be considered one of your brand assets.
• Approved colour palette. You should define the colours permitted for your logo and in other documents, to build a consistent look and feel.
• Editorial standards: how does your organisation write and speak? What is your tone of voice; formal or more colloquial? Your editorial standards set clear guardrails around your brand’s tone and personality.
• Photo library. What photos do you use in your marketing collateral: are they portraits or abstract images? Are there rules around their use?
• Standard documents. You may have core documents that are used time and again; your company boilerplate; signature presentations; regulated statements if you are a regulated business. These help to define your business and should be considered core brand assets.

So – those are your brand assets.

Might sound fairly simple to keep them under lock and key; to prevent them being misused and your brand being corrupted, right?

But…they don’t exist in isolation, and therein lies the biggest challenge. Your logo, for example, is added to webpages, sales collateral, social media tiles. There’s every chance it will be stretched…miscoloured…used in the wrong place on the page.

How do you ensure your brand assets are created and used in a way that doesn’t jeopardise your brand?

The 9 challenges in managing brand assets and how to overcome them

1. Ensuring consistency

Brand consistency is the holy grail of brand management – but it can feel inevitable that, when numerous people are involved in creating materials using your brand assets, consistency is compromised.

This can be avoided, though, if you share your assets in a way that locks them down sufficiently, while enabling them to be used creatively. Make your brand guidelines and editorial standards easy to find so colleagues have no excuse not to follow them. You might even want to provide examples showing your brand in practice, and make it easy for people to see what they’re aiming for.

There are online brand platforms that allow content to be tailored while protecting your branding, enabling you to maintain a cohesive brand image. Consider whether using a platform like this could help manage your brand assets.

2. Version control

Version control can be a huge bugbear in marketing, and ensuring your brand assets retain their integrity is a central aspect of this. When different teams make edits to content and materials, branding can be the first casualty – and if you don’t know where off-brand elements crept in, it can be difficult to fix them.

Best practice version control is vital if you want to prevent this. Adopting a few simple best practices can make all the difference when it comes to keeping control of your marketing collateral and the branding within it. Use our bespoke version control checklist to make sure you’re on the right track.

3. Reinventing the wheel

If people can’t find the brand assets or materials they’re looking for, they will likely go off-piste to create their own versions – with potentially disastrous results!

Building a library of brand assets and on-brand templates makes it easy for colleagues to access approved versions – and storing them in a platform that dictates which elements can and can’t be edited means you can breathe a sigh of relief on branding. Colleagues can change the elements they need to, while the essential brand aspects are locked down, making their life easier while avoiding branding disasters.

4. Governance and compliance

Governance of brand assets is essential for all the reasons we’ve talked about – and if you’re a regulated business, there’s the additional layer of regulatory compliance on top of that. Deviating from your branding can be more than just a marketing niggle; if assets like your boilerplate or regulated statement are tweaked, you could be risking a compliance breach.

Again, permissions and access are vital here. Find a system to host your brand assets that allows you to determine who can access and edit your brand assets, as well as the content that features them. Lock down elements that shouldn’t be changed, while giving your teams and agencies creative licence to edit the rest of the document.

5. Balancing agility with control.

The world is constantly changing, and the way your brand will be used within it has to keep up. Your brand may need to adapt to – for instance – new social media channels. How can you ensure it’s adaptable enough to be used in new contexts without being jeopardised?

Storing brand assets at your fingertips means your team and creative partners can be nimble and able to pivot as new opportunities arise. Ensure they can only be used correctly, by limiting the elements that can be tweaked.

6. Collaboration and teamwork

Today, even your in-house teams are likely to be spread across locations, in and out of the office. Add external agencies into the mix and collaborating on marketing projects can get complicated – which can be a barrier to consistent branding.

Brand assets and collateral shared by email risk slowing down your content production process, as well as inviting the version control, consistency and governance issues we’ve covered above.

Hosting your brand assets in one central, easily accessible (by the people you choose!) place, negates the need to share by email and speeds the process of getting materials to market. It also means everyone is working from the ‘single source of truth’ – so you have no worries that any rogue variations of your logo, artwork or other assets are creeping in.

7. Security

The mention of email brings us onto another brand asset challenge: security. When you’re using your assets to create corporate-confidential documents, like new business pitches or new product collateral, the last thing you need is for them to fall into the wrong hands. In 2023, 16% of data security breaches resulted from someone sending an email to the wrong address.

Sharing brand assets and sensitive company information via email isn’t ideal. Storing them on a secure platform, where you manage access and permissions, on the other hand, provides reassurance that the only people who can see your materials are those you’ve approved.

8. Cost of maintaining brand rigour

If brand assets are used incorrectly, the cost of rectifying it can be significant, either in terms of your own teams’ time, or external agencies’ fees. Plus, if only external agencies are able to create your content, you incur hefty costs every time you want to update a designed document or edit a piece of collateral.

On the other hand, if you use a brand platform that gives permission-based access to your own teams to create collateral, using on-brand templates and brand assets that are locked down – you empower your people to use brand assets compliantly themselves, saving you time and money.

9. An out-of-control asset library

It can be tempting to grow your library of brand assets constantly, but resist the urge. Having a huge array of assets and templates can do more harm than good; it’s hard to get your arms around and ensure that all assets remain current.

Audit what you have periodically, and be ruthless in culling anything that is out of date, or isn’t used. Using a brand management platform that gives you data on asset usage helps hugely here, as you can see which assets are most valuable and streamline accordingly.

The benefits of digital asset management for brand assets

The challenges of brand asset management are manifold – but can be tackled by taking a rigorous and technology-enabled approach.

Using a brand asset management platform like Perivan’s  delivers the perfect balance of control and creativity.

Storing brand assets in a way that allows even non-design or copywriting stakeholders to effortlessly create or personalise templates, while maintaining brand integrity, saves time and reduces cost – while acting as a gatekeeper for your brand.

Find out more about BrandEnable and the ways it can help you overcome your brand asset management challenges here.