In today’s fast-paced, highly competitive business landscape, maintaining a consistent brand presence is necessary for success. With the ever-increasing number of digital assets and the need for effective collaboration, organizations turn to brand asset management (BAM) systems for help. In this blog, we’ll explain how a brand asset management system helps your company succeed, and why you should invest in one.
What Is Brand Asset Management?
The purpose of brand asset management (BAM) is to make storing, managing, and sharing digital brand materials easy.
Imagine your co-worker is asking you to share a brand asset from last year’s 4th of July campaign. Instead of spending time looking through endless folders and files, you can quickly find the asset with a brand asset management tool.
Brand asset management makes it easy for you to:
- Find and use old images
- Quickly share assets
- Search for specific images using keywords
- Never run out of storage space
- Control who can access assets
The term “brand asset management” also refers to “brand management software (BMS),” which gives you a complete place for all your brand assets by working as a single solution.
What Are Brand Assets?
Your brand identity is formed by numerous individual pieces of artwork, including files, images, documents, videos, and more. These assets collectively contribute to your brand, and ensuring their consistency and currency is a primary responsibility of brand asset management.
Brand assets can include the following elements:
- Brand name
- Logos (usually in multiple variations)
- Artwork
- Graphics
- Color palette
- Packaging
- Slogans or taglines
- Songs or sounds
- Videos
- Brand guidelines
- Mascots
- Typography
- Design elements
- Voice and tone
- Smells
- Flavors
- Celebrity endorsers and/or influencers
- Marketing material (business cards, letterhead, and collateral)
- Templates (webinars, sales videos, press releases, and other content)
As we can see, a brand is made up of various elements that are closely linked to your company. However, branding assets can be defined as anything that is distinctive to your company and is widely recognized and associated with it.
Every business has brand assets that shape how people view and engage with the brand. These assets strengthen the brand’s image and value, establish consistency, and align with customer expectations.
Examples of Brand Assets
When explaining brand assets, it can be helpful to see how other businesses stand out from the crowd. Examples of successful digital brand assets are everywhere and surround us in our daily lives. Incredibly organized and thoughtful brand assets catch the consumer’s attention and make it very difficult to ignore or resist engaging with the brand.
Here are three examples of brands that got it right:
1. Mailchimp
Freddie, the mascot and logo of Mailchimp, embodies the brand’s quirky humor and casual communication style. Mailchimp showcases its significant brand assets on its website, alongside a comprehensive content style guide. This guide serves as a valuable resource for those seeking a deeper understanding of the brand’s unique voice and core values.
2. Amazon
When you receive an Amazon package, it is instantly recognizable and distinguishable from other brands. The presence of a smiling logo on the side of the box, along with special promotional details on the sealing tape, is a distinctive characteristic. If a passerby is walking down the street and notices a delivered Amazon package by the front door, they are immediately able to recognize it’s from Amazon.
3. Microsoft
The color scheme used by Microsoft is truly distinctive, as it combines four colors – orange, green, yellow, and blue. The colors used in the Microsoft logo are not only specific shades but also arranged in a particular order, making them exclusive to Microsoft. This unique arrangement of colors serves as an asset because when people see these four colors together, they immediately associate them with Microsoft and its products, particularly Windows.
What Are Brand Asset Management Systems?
A brand asset management system helps you stay in control of all the different parts that come together to create a brand. It also helps make sure that everyone involved in building the brand uses resources wisely and efficiently.
As part of its important function, brand asset management systems ensure the secure storage, easy retrieval, and organized management of all brand assets, preventing duplication and disorder in handling these assets.
In addition to the fundamental features, BMS provides additional functionalities such as editable templates, customizable brand guidelines, advanced tools like a Logo Finder, and more. These extended capabilities consolidate all the necessary resources for effective brand management in one centralized platform.
DAM vs. BAM
People often confuse brand asset management (BAM) with digital asset management (DAM), but they are not exactly the same. BAM is a part of DAM that focuses specifically on assets used by brand and marketing teams for marketing purposes. DAM, on the other hand, includes all files used by an organization.
Brand asset management can be viewed as a smaller part of digital asset management because it specifically deals with digital assets related to a brand. While BAM focuses on maintaining brand consistency, DAM aims to enhance efficiency and team collaboration in managing various types of digital files.
Unlike DAM systems that generally store many assets in different forms and phases of completion, BAM is typically used to store carefully curated collections of finalized assets. For instance, a DAM system may store every version of a company’s brand logo from its beginning, while a BAM system would only keep the latest version of the logo.
Brand asset management systems are designed to organize digital assets by product or brand, making them ideal for retail or eCommerce industries. A project-based DAM is designed to store and organize digital assets by project or property, making it the top option for architecture, engineering, construction (AEC), and real estate firms. They help AEC firms find their assets more quickly and help them create better proposals, faster.
Ultimately, a BAM system is at the core of brand workflows and is specifically designed to handle brand management tasks. On the other hand, a DAM system caters to a broader range of needs and functionalities.
How Are Brand Asset Management Systems Helpful?
With the rise of the digital era, achieving brand consistency has become challenging. Organizations without a centralized and reliable source of truth in the cloud find it difficult to keep up. And as more and more businesses move away from traditional media and towards digital channels, it’s important to invest in managing your digital brand assets.
A brand asset management platform is created to tackle the challenges of managing consistent digital assets for your brand, getting rid of any associated difficulties and frustrations. By getting rid of mistakes and making the creation, approval, and retrieval of brand assets more efficient, a BAM platform helps you work faster and better. It also helps you make the most of your budget, ensuring that you can do more with less.
Here are some helpful features you can leverage with a brand asset management system:
- Manage large amounts of media: Store all your brand assets – from videos and images to audio and documents – all in one place.
- Store everything in one place: Have a central location that securely manages your valuable creative assets.
- Keep branding consistent: Recognizable Branding – Customize and control the look and feel of your platform, so your brand is recognizable and looks exactly how you want it to.
- Robust security measures: Keep all your media safe and secure for the long term, accessible only to the people and organizations that you trust.
- Effective collaboration: Share assets freely between multiple teams, whether in-office or remotely. This helps streamline work processes between different teams or agencies and ensures businesses can keep running smoothly.
- Reliable search and retrieval: With comprehensive metadata management and AI tools, tagging images, audio, and any moment within clips is easy and efficient. This means you can effortlessly find the content you need.
In further detail, this is how a BAM can elevate your business:
Stay Consistent and Creative
A top-notch brand asset management system ensures that you don’t have to compromise between consistency and creativity. It serves as a central hub for brand management, allowing you to maintain flexibility while having the peace of mind that the important aspects are taken care of.
Improve ROI
To save money and improve your ROI, it’s important to focus on clear and consistent branding. When you repeatedly use your marketing materials, people become more familiar with your brand. This familiarity is an important part of the customer journey. Successful global brands understand how to connect with their audience and create regular habits among consumers. Consistent brand assets align with consumers’ desire for a consistent, comfortable, and fulfilling lifestyle.
Moreover, BAM systems enhance productivity and allow you to make efficient use of resources, resulting in your company saving money.
Strong Brand Identity
Brand asset management enhances the identity of your brand, ensuring that it looks, feels, and behaves consistently with customers. It strengthens the overall coherence and unity of your brand’s visual and experiential elements.
A strong brand identity is based on clear and specific branding guidelines. These guidelines should include instructions for using brand assets, such as images, and specify when and how each asset should be used. The more detail you can provide related to your brand assets, the more consistent and unified your brand identity will be.
Stay Away From Old Branding
Brand guidelines play a crucial role in preventing any misrepresentation of your brand. They are particularly valuable when you have a large team or multiple stakeholders involved in using and modifying your brand assets. Clear guidelines can streamline the production of content. It’s essential to maintain consistency and keep every design element of your brand assets, such as colors, logo size, and orientation, updated to avoid the use of any old branding.
Streamline Workflows
Research shows that employees spend around 4.2 hours per day searching for relevant information, which equates to over half of an average work day. However, with a brand asset management system, teams save crucial time by bringing together brand-specific information in one central location.
Moreover, BAM systems enhance team collaboration and minimize errors and miscommunication. This ensures every team member has quick access to the most updated versions of the company logo and brand colors.
The result is a more unified creative process, leading to improved outcomes for various branded projects.
How to Organize Brand Assets
Effectively managing your digital assets can become a significant drain on resources. Marketing teams that prioritize the organization of their brand assets recognize its direct impact on success. It’s challenging to achieve success in any creative role without proper brand asset organization.
So, how can you effectively organize your brand assets? Brand asset management is an essential foundation for productivity. It’s the foundation that enables and enhances all your other work. By undertaking the step-by-step process of organizing your brand assets, you will soon begin to benefit from effective brand asset management.
Here are three organizational tips to get more out of your digital asset management system:
1. Choose Your Assets
Start by conducting a comprehensive evaluation of your existing brand assets and choosing the assets you want to store. Take note of what assets you currently possess, their locations, and whether they align with your latest branding guidelines.
Ask yourself the following:
- Are these files necessary for the entire team to have access to?
- Do you use the files regularly?
- Are these files the most up-to-date versions?
2. Start Organizing
After you finish selecting your assets, the following step involves using your BAM system to establish a centralized storage location for all the chosen assets.
This step should include:
- Creating a folder structure: Organizing images and other files into categories will facilitate seamless browsing in the future.
- Applying metadata labels to images: Assign relevant keywords to each image to enhance searchability.
- Building a system for alternates and versions: Establishing links between alternate versions and using metadata to provide context on how each version should be used ensures alignment and minimizes confusion.
- Reducing file numbers through downloading: With a BAM system in place, every asset will appear only once, enabling users to choose the desired download format.
3. Ensure Ongoing Organization
After you organize your files into your brand asset management system, these key functionalities can keep your library organized. Features may include:
- Branded templates
- Guest upload links
- Duplicate file detection
- Review and approval processes for new asset uploads
Having access to these features through a BAM system also helps improve brand consistency and version control by guaranteeing that your users access and use the correct versions of the company’s assets.
How to Manage Your Digital Brand Assets
Investing in a DAM that can provide all the features required for managing brand assets is vital for your firm. And when it comes to brand management for AEC and real estate professionals, OpenAsset provides a high-quality software solution. As the only DAM system designed specifically for AEC, we make it easy to find the digital brand assets you need.
With OpenAsset, it’s easy to find assets by project or person using keywords or file type. Our secure platform also helps you protect your digital assets by keeping them safe from unauthorized access and accidental deletion. You can also easily share files with team members, clients, and partners using controlled access to files.
For more information on brand asset management systems, check out our business use cases and asset management overview article.
To ensure brand consistency and manage your ever-growing number of images, videos, logos, and media in your digital asset library, request a demo with us and learn how OpenAsset can help you manage your digital assets today.
