If you’re playing football, the rules are clear: don’t touch the ball with your hands. But sometimes, players do. Which is why the referee is so important. The rules don’t mean much in isolation; you need to enforce them so everyone follows the same guidelines.
Much like a football team, getting everyone in your company to comply with your brand guidelines is no easy task. To create a team culture committed to brand consistency and growth, you first need to understand what brand compliance is, and why it’s so important.
What is brand compliance?
Brand compliance is the process by which companies ensure all their brand’s elements, assets, and content are used consistently and align with the company values and visual identity.
This includes:
- Using the correct brand elements, including logos, fonts, and colors
- Using consistent messaging and tone of voice in written content
- Using approved brand visuals, for example, stock images or graphics in a consistent visual style
- Using visual elements in line with regulatory requirements such as copyright and trademark laws.
Why brand compliance is so important
Brand compliance offers several long-term benefits that help you attract and retain customers.
Maintain brand consistency
Brand compliance helps companies present a consistent brand identity by ensuring all the content the company publishes looks and sounds on-brand. A study by Marketing Week found that when it comes to branding, consistency = strength. The top 20% of consistent brands are “more likely to generate awareness, differentiation, fame and attitude change.”
In contrast, inconsistent branding damages your brand reputation. Deviation from your core brand elements means your brand image is diluted between touchpoints. Too much deviation can even cause customer confusion, as they may not recognize your brand across different channels.
Nebojsa Savicic, co-founder of Plainly, explained, “If you lack brand consistency, you can leave an impression of being a ‘wannabe’ company that doesn’t know what it’s doing.” He added, “That’s the biggest benefit of brand compliance for an organization — it reflects how well the company positions itself in the market.”
Improve brand trust
Brand trust is essential for attracting and retaining customers. If people trust your brand, they’re more likely to buy from you, recommend you to friends, and become repeat purchasers. A study by Morning Consult found that trust “power[s] brand reputation, which underpins brand growth, and in turn business growth.”
Brand trust is built on repeated, consistent interactions. Compliance with your brand’s core messaging and visual identity ensures you’re providing those consistent customer experiences.
But the opposite is also true — non-compliance introduces inconsistencies that erode customer trust in your brand. For example, if your marketing materials make one claim, your sales team says something different, and your product does something different again, customers lose trust and are less likely to buy from you again.
Strengthen your brand identity
Your brand identity is the spirit of your company, communicated through the visual elements of your brand, like logo design, color palette, fonts, and icons, as well as messaging and brand voice.
This is important for building brand recognition and positioning your brand within the market, which helps attract and retain customers — especially in a tough economic climate. Our research found that “88% of CMOs say that investing in brand-building is key to building a resilient brand during economic uncertainty.”
Brand compliance helps you develop a stronger, more recognizable brand identity. It provides teams with a framework for ensuring brand consistency by:
- Giving everyone in the organization access to the same brand assets and elements to use in their work
- Giving users access to clear, central brand guidelines to ensure new materials adhere to documented brand standards
- Giving creatives an established feedback and approvals process to follow when producing new designs and materials, such as from the brand or marketing team or from company leaders.
This framework protects your brand identity from being “watered down” over time, either as a result of subtle deviations from your core messaging, or from trying to balance different inputs from key stakeholders across the business.
Improve internal efficiencies
Brand teams often dedicate hours every week to reviewing content created by other teams, correcting inconsistent designs, and rewriting off-brand content. Additionally, they lose even more productive time responding to requests for various brand assets or materials.
Having a central source of truth for everything brand related makes it easier to achieve brand compliance and help teams work more efficiently. This eliminates repetitive tasks like repeatedly clarifying guidelines or correcting errors in marketing materials.
Lufthansa is one company that has improved efficiency and brand compliance by working with Frontify. “We increased the quality of communication through a higher brand consistency, we strengthened individual work due to better access to information and measured a considerable cost reduction,” explained Ronald Wild, Chief Designer at Lufthansa.
Protect your brand and reduce legal risks
Creating content online is easier than ever, so anyone on your team can do it. But only some have a good understanding of copyright, trademark, and fair usage policies around images and other content. Without guidelines and education about how to use materials properly, team members could inadvertently create risks for the company.
Brand compliance helps protect against these risks by providing guidelines around creating assets and representing the brand. If employees use brand-approved materials or create their own from existing templates, they’re less likely to run into challenges from using copyrighted materials, or trademark infringement.
Enhance the customer experience
Brand compliance creates a cohesive experience across all customer touchpoints, as different teams use the same core messaging and visuals in customer-facing content. This consistent brand experience helps customers build a strong relationship and positive association with the brand.
For example, Kansas City Chiefs use Frontify to organize brand materials for their 20+ social media channels, stadium jumbotron, player channels, and dozens of other use cases. They excel at delivering a consistent, on-brand experience their fans, stakeholders, and partners love.
How to achieve brand compliance in your organization
Brand compliance needs to be a whole-company effort. While it may be led (or championed) by the leadership team, everyone needs to recognize its importance and understand how their roles contribute to the brand’s reputation. These steps will help improve brand compliance within your company.
Review your existing brand assets
Reviewing your existing content will help you identify areas where your teams are particularly strong or weak at complying with your brand. Take inventory of all your current brand assets, such as logos, imagery, taglines, and templates to identify problems when complying with brand guidelines.
When reviewing your existing content, look out for common issues such as:
- Old logo usage
- Incorrect brand colors
- Inconsistent brand terminology (such as product descriptions)
- Wrong fonts in brand documents
- Inconsistent brand messaging that varies across departments.
Develop clear brand guidelines
Brand guidelines share the rules, standards, and instructions for bringing your brand to life. They should cover visual brand elements such as logo usage, typography, color schemes, and imagery. Additionally you should include tone of voice guidance within your brand guidelines to support the production of on-brand written content.
Information in your brand guidelines should be clear and concise, making it as easy as possible for team members and external collaborators like agencies and freelancers to understand your brand.
Many companies initially document their brand guidelines in PDFs. However, as the business grows, employees find it hard to maintain and update the files. Instead, centralized online guidelines make it easier to ensure everyone is working from the latest version.
Centralize your brand assets and materials
One of the biggest blockers to brand compliance is when employees can’t access the brand materials they need. For example, if files are saved on someone’s computer or in a folder they need to request access to every time.
Make things easier for your team by adopting a single source of truth for all brand materials. Store and manage all approved assets in a centralized location like a digital asset management system. This will streamline many time-consuming tasks like helping the marketing department find the right logos or creative templates, or repeatedly emailing the latest social media graphics.
Train employees on brand compliance
Make sure employees have all the information and education they need to comply with brand requirements. Provide training sessions to help them understand why the brand is important, and help them understand how to follow your brand guidelines. Regular training sessions help keep your brand top-of-mind and ensure everyone understands the importance and value of brand compliance.
Consider implementing workflows where your brand team or experienced team members review new content to check they are brand compliant. This will help employees strengthen their knowledge of the brand together.
Additionally, make sure any changes to the brand are communicated clearly and documented in a centralized location such as your brand management software. You should also send an email or other internal communications (like a Slack message) to announce the brand updates and explain who it’s most relevant to.
Regularly review and update brand guidelines
Brands naturally evolve over time as core messaging and company values shift. Brand evolution requires updates to assets and messaging — these could be small tweaks or a large-scale rebranding effort.
Make sure you regularly review and update your brand guidelines to ensure they continue to reflect your current brand identity, as well as meet current legal standards and design practices. For small updates, your brand team can probably handle this themselves, but for bigger changes, gather input from the wider organization (such as leadership, marketing, and sales teams) to ensure the changes accurately reflect your new brand identity.
Software is key to achieving brand consistency
Technology won’t automatically solve brand compliance for you. But the right set of tools can empower your team by giving them access to all the information and resources they need to improve compliance in their work.
A brand management system like Frontify can be an ideal solution for centralizing all your brand resources and documenting brand guidelines so everyone has access, removing some of the common obstacles that make brand compliance so challenging for many organizations. Here’s how different parts of a brand management platform can help companies achieve brand consistency.
Digital asset management system
A digital asset management system (DAM) is a centralized system for storing and managing all your company’s digital assets, from individual brand elements to completed campaign files for the marketing department. You can organize them into asset libraries to make it easy to find and use the correct brand assets.
A DAM helps to improve brand compliance by giving everyone access to your brand assets instead of turning the marketing department into gatekeepers for your brand. But you still retain control over your brand assets. For example, you can control access and sharing permissions, so most team members can only view finalized, approved brand assets. And for assets still in the approval process, you can keep them hidden, only visible to the team members working on or reviewing them.
Creative templates
Creative templates are editable templates used to make common brand assets, such as social media visuals, product packaging, or email newsletter headers. They help team members easily create visually consistent brand assets without spending lots of time in meetings agreeing on things like style, typography, or color palette.
Templates help improve brand compliance and enable people from all departments to create their own brand assets. Your designers can make a template, then set controls for what people can edit and what stays the same. As a result, you maintain control over how the brand is presented, ensuring you have a consistent and recognizable brand style. But at the same time, you empower your team to create branded materials and give them the confidence to get creative without going off-brand.
Brand portal
A brand portal is a central online home for all your brand-related assets and information, including your brand guidelines. Brand portals are dynamic, allowing brand teams to make real-time updates so the portal automatically reflects new guidelines, campaigns, or brand requirements.
Brand portals improve collaboration and compliance by providing a single shared hub for internal teams and external agencies to find and use brand resources. This helps ensure consistency as everyone is working from the same information, following the same guidelines, and using the same brand elements.
Integrations with branding tools
Brand compliance becomes even easier if you can connect creative design and collaboration tools with your brand portal.
That way, designers can access the latest logo files or product photography directly from the tools they work in, rather than constantly jumping between tools or using old images saved on their local drive. These integrations save time and help employees work more efficiently, as well as improving brand compliance.
Build a consistent brand with Frontify
Brand compliance becomes more complex — and vital — as you scale up and your company grows. As you expand into new markets, you need to manage global and regional brand variations and keep more stakeholders aligned.
Brand management software makes it much easier to achieve brand compliance across your whole organization, as well as streamlining work with external partners. See how Frontify’s brand management platform can help large, global brands maintain and scale their brand operations while still achieving brand compliance. Book a demo today.
