Have you got a style guide issue?

Written on the 16 April 2015 by Danielle MacInnis

We are wasting a lot of time looking for the right image, logo etc. According to Brandtoolbox up to 30% of our time not to mention the cost of getting the branding wrong or inconsistent on documentation like tenders or proposals. It is not surprising then that many growing organisations are looking for a central online repository enabling clients, business managers,brand custodians, marketing staff, employees and vendors to manage an organisation's brand guidelines, collateral assets and marketing material 24/7.

My recommendations

• 1. Create a style guide first so you have a consistent brand identity and library. This may contain images, logos icons, staff photos etc
• 2. Create a brand owner - one person to be responsible for managing the brand assetsPlatium Health Care
• 3. Create a relationship with a graphic artistic that can create marketing materials or templates, pro-formas  for you.
• 4. Buy some design software like Adobe's inDesign to be able to create some in-house marketing materials.
• 5. Software Management.

The are a lot of brand management systems out there and a great report on the top ones by Capterra on Top Brand Management software but here are the key functionality you want.

Check WishList: marketing projects

• Alerts (notification to brand manager or marketer, suppliers, business heads of version changes or new assets alerts, leave comments)
• Approval Process Control for downloads before using certain assets (project sheets, images of personnel)
• Asset Management (guidelines, uploads for typography, colour, logos, imagery, icons, watermarks, certification logos)
• Version Control (uploads, version history, favourites folder)
• Web Statistics (metrics for use, downloads, views)
• Multi-Format Output (jpeg, eps, pdf, ppt, word)
• Project Workflow (submit brief, email to approval, green light, reject, re-submission)
• Search Functionality ( by tags, description, content)
• User Defined Permissions (download approvals)manage-files-v21

If you have a large company over a number of sites or countries then brand toolbox.com.au or intelligencebank.com is worth looking at. For smaller companies I would try:

smartimage.com or your share point with setting some restrictions over users. You could also set something up on your website with some forms for submitting artwork for workflows. Redbooth.com is the resource tool I use.

Learn more about our branding process.