Making compliance work to keep brands healthy

Great brands are hard to build, but they can be even harder to maintain. They must be presented consistently, or run the risk of sending mixed messages and sub-par executions that confuse customers and cause them to lose confidence and disengage.

But in today’s world, brands interact with customers through a wide range of digital and offline touchpoints, often across many different geographies and in a multitude of languages. This makes maintaining consistency a growing challenge.

The risks are even greater for those brands that operate in regulated industries such as healthcare, gaming, financial services or alcohol sales, and who face significant penalties for even inadvertent breaches of compliance requirements.

These risks mean it is essential that brands are always presented in a consistent and compliant way.

The keys to making brand compliance work

For brand custodians, brand compliance means ensuring staff can access and follow brand guidelines easily and they have a step-by-step process to ensure creative is approved and reviewed.

Traditional brand compliance has tended to result in the creation of PDF documents that outline all of the brand’s attributes and how they should be used. But the intricacies of brands and their channels can result in these documents becoming quite lengthy, which makes it hard for staff and agencies to find essential information. In the worst-case scenario, brand guidelines in large PDFs are ignored altogether.

To make brand compliance work, organisations should continue to collate all information such as creative content, guidelines, brand approvals and creative briefs in one place, but do so in an interactive way that makes it easier for people to use assets appropriately, and for marketers to ensure campaigns are approved faster, boosting efficiency within marketing processes.

Better access to brand guidelines and streamlined approval processes can ensure content managers are more easily able to remain compliant, which reduces incorrect asset usage and boosts marketing outcomes.

Brand compliance in action

Effective brand compliance starts with the creation of a secure and user-friendly repository that acts as a single source of truth for brand assets, known as a DAM (Digital Asset Management). The establishment of a permission-based DAM with a full audit trail ensures only authorised staff are accessing brand assets and provides certainty that they are working with assets that are current and approved. From the DAM, these assets can be distributed to social media or to websites so there’s a one-to-many relationship between the final approved content and where it’s distributed.

Brand compliance also works best when creative approvals are automated and it’s clear and easy to follow an end-to-end campaign management process. Brand compliance portals eliminate the confusion and bottlenecks that can accompany email-based creative briefs and approval processes. With an online briefing process, marketers can also incorporate options for self-servicing common queries such as identifying marketing risk and determining which disclaimers are to be used on each ad. Adopting a marketing system of record streamlines requests and enables approvals to be tracked accurately with a clear audit trail.

In addition, the use of dynamic creative templates, where end users can create ads on the fly by selecting an image, a headline, copy and even legal ‘fine print’ can further accelerate the creative process. By giving people greater certainty that the executions they are creating are within brand guidelines, it results in getting to market faster and ensuring localised messaging stays on brand.

Finally, implementing a disclaimer engine can provide an automated mechanism to ensure that brand assets are being presented with regulatory-mandated messages, helping the brand remain compliant at all times.

All these capabilities are contained in the brand compliance solutions created by the marketing technology developer IntelligenceBank. Its solutions are used across 55 countries by more than 400 globally recognised brands including ANZ, NAB, Hertz, Medibank, and KFC.

Conclusion

Brands are precious things and take significant time and money to create. But brands only deliver value when they are utilised effectively.

By implementing strong brand compliance systems, brand custodians can ensure the value of their assets are maximised while reducing the risk of inappropriate presentation.

IntelligenceBank gives marketers greater certainty that brands are being presented accurately, which means a more consistent experience for customers and a greater return from marketing investments.

Find out how the world’s most successful brands keep their teams on brand with IntelligenceBank.