How Bosch uses Frontify to create one consistent brand experience across all touchpoints
With over 429k employees worldwide, the Bosch Group is a leading global supplier of technology and services. It’s made up of roughly 470 subsidiaries and regional companies in 60 countries, but its global manufacturing, engineering, and sales network covers nearly every country around the world. But there was no centralization of brand materials or guidelines, which made collaboration a challenge. That’s where Frontify came in.
A global challenge
As an international, multi-brand organization, the Bosch Group had a huge quantity of brand materials to manage. Its brand guidelines were documented in a 3,600-page PDF brand book, which was difficult for employees to reference and near-impossible to keep updated.
To try and make these guidelines more accessible, 17 separate sets of brand guidelines were in use across the organization. This led to lots of creative inconsistencies. For example, 60 variations of the home icon were used across all teams and touchpoints. Brand consistency was a big challenge globally.
Brand assets were stored on local servers rather than in a central location. As a result, brand and marketing teams had to manage thousands of individual email requests for core assets like logos or icons.
Overall, there was a general lack of collaboration between brands and teams in the Bosch Group, and levels of interaction and engagement with the main corporate brand were low.
A central solution
The Bosch Group started using Frontify in 2019. Its first priority was to document its brand guidelines in a central, online location to improve brand consistency across the organization. At the same time, they also focused on building out an Icon Library in the Frontify DAM to standardize icon use across the organization.
In the next stage of its roll-out, the Bosch Group documented its design system in the Frontify platform. This is tailored for designers, developers and product managers, and helps create a consistent user experience across brands and products.
Since 2019, the Bosch Group has expanded Frontify access to other subsidiaries and regional brands. In 2023, it built an online marketing toolbox in Frontify that houses all the marketing assets and templates for Bosch Professional and its ecommerce retailer brands.
This gradual roll-out has helped increase engagement across the organization, both with the main corporate brand and regional variations.
Gregor Schilling
Head of Corporate Design at Robert Bosch GmbH
The result: A strong visual identity
Robert Bosch once famously said: “This brand is not an accessory, it is the main point.” Bosch’s broad range of expertise has been its invaluable asset, and its brand has been a beacon for innovation for over a century. Adopting Frontify has been the latest step in its brand journey.
Since 2019, the Bosch Group has experienced a significant rise in brand engagement and efficiency across the 25+ brands managed centrally in the Frontify platform:
- More than 2 million page views of the Bosch brand portal per year
- Over 170k brand assets stored in the Frontify DAM, including 3,200 icons
- More than 15k monthly active users — and growing
The strive for efficiency has been the biggest benefit. Today, only 4 people manage the entire Bosch brand design space for over 100k users and customers worldwide. The Frontify platform has given the Bosch Group some incredible time savings that can be reinvested in other higher-value work.
Jörg Heidrich
Manager Digital Brand and User Experience at Robert Bosch GmbH
Bosch’s corporate design contributes to making its brand strong and distinctive. By involving all stakeholders in its development, it’s made everyone a part of its brand mission. And corporate design has been the visual representation of its position as a leading provider of solutions for a connected life, showcasing a lively, diverse, and agile brand.
The result: One global brand. One consistent brand experience across all touchpoints.
