How Frontify’s brand guidelines helps Bayer 04 Leverkusen build one club, one family, one brand

An identity challenge

Bayer 04 Leverkusen is one of the best-loved football clubs in Germany. It’s one of the last remaining “working clubs” with the name of the owner/partner in the club’s name, and a long-standing connection with its roots. In the club’s early days, it was employees of the Bayer Group who wanted to start a football club.

Today, it’s essential that everyone connected with the club is aware of who it is, where it came from, and where it’s going. Internally, it was essential for all employees to understand the brand so everyone can properly represent the club in their work. Football has a high public profile, so it’s essential that everyone can properly communicate the brand.

Brand is much more than just the club colors or logo. Every action contributes to the club’s external brand identity — from steward behavior on a match day to statements made in public by players or other club employees.

Additionally, Bayer has an ever-growing online presence to manage, across dozens of different channels. Each post on each channel is a different touchpoint someone has with the brand.

With such a valuable, fast-growing brand, it became clear that Bayer’s old ways of managing its brand materials weren't up to the challenge. They needed a way to centralize resources, assets, and messaging, to help everyone bring the Bayer Leverkusen brand to life.

A central solution

Switching to Frontify’s brand building platform enabled Bayer Leverkusen to centralize all their brand and corporate design materials into one platform. They started by consolidating all their existing brand assets, such as logos, colors, and templates for common creative materials.

Now, their brand guidelines are detailed and easy to navigate. Text, image examples, downloads, and all other brand elements are presented in a structured way and connected with links to other related topics. This is much easier for everyone to use compared to scrolling through pages of PDF documents or searching for different templates.

Frontify’s digital brand guidelines meant the Bayer team could stop using PDF documents to house their brand guidelines. As a result, they can collaborate more easily with external agency partners around the world.

The biggest benefit of the Frontify platform for Bayer Leverkusen is the ability to add users easily. Thanks to the platform’s intuitive interface, new users can start using the platform quickly, without long onboarding or training times.

A winning result

Frontify’s brand platform has helped Bayer Leverkusen sharpen its brand image with clearer messaging, and given the club more efficient ways to work with its external partners around the world.

Using Frontify has helped Bayer Leverkusen:

• Centralize brand guidelines: Frontify provides a single source of truth for Bayer’s brand identity, covering everything from club logos and colors to core messaging.
• Streamline partner collaboration: Global agency partners can access the guidelines and brand assets needed to localize brand communications for their markets.
• Improve brand ownership: All users can now download the brand materials they need — from merchandising suppliers downloading templates for new fan articles, to materials for mascot Brian the Lion.
• Embrace new, creative brand opportunities: The brand team has been able to explore motion and sound branding, and document those new assets in the Frontify platform quickly and effectively.