Brand Compliance: How to Protect Your Brand at Scale

Your brand is your promise to customers. It’s the visual identity, tone, and experience that set you apart in a crowded market. But as your organization grows, maintaining brand consistency becomes a challenge. Inconsistent logos, off-tone messaging, or outdated brand assets can erode trust and make your company less recognizable on social media and other channels.

The solution? A centralized brand management portal. Here’s everything you need to know, including how tools like MarcomCentral’s SaaS brand compliance solution can help you scale with confidence. Also, you’ll learn how the real-world example of Dunkin’s rebrand shows how brand control software can make a difference when reinventing a company.

What Is Brand Compliance and Why Does It Matter?

Brand compliance focuses on ensuring marketing teams and third-party stakeholders keep every touchpoint and asset aligned with a company’s visual identity.

You want your assets to be immediately recognizable and elicit positive emotions among your target audience. You can’t achieve that unless every resource in your asset libraries is consistent and on-brand.

Definition and Core Principles

Brand compliance ensures that logos, ads, social posts, packaging, signage, and any other visual assets match your desired tone and visual identity. It’s about creating a unified experience that customers recognize instantly.

The core principles of brand management include:

• Maintain consistency
• Protect customer trust
• Drive recognition

If you follow each of these principles, every asset, campaign, and channel will match your vision.

Risk of Inconsistency

A lack of franchise brand compliance can damage credibility and confuse customers. Over time, it will erode your brand reputation.

Suppose that your company is known for its serious tone and focused, no-nonsense marketing materials. However, you don’t have centralized brand integrity software, which means that regional teams lack direction on messaging.

One team member creates a “funny” social media post that contradicts your established voice. While the post doesn’t get much pushback, it creates a disjointed experience that erodes trust.

Off-brand messaging doesn’t have to be offensive or crude to hurt your reputation. Even inconsistent fonts or outdated logos will negatively impact the customer experience.

Franchises are at the greatest risk for noncompliance. That’s because multiple locations and teams are producing and distributing brand content. Without centralized digital asset management, maintaining consistent messaging becomes nearly impossible.

Case Study: Why Brand Compliance Matters During a Rebrand

Maintaining a consistent brand identity is especially important during a rebrand. It’s also exceptionally challenging because the entire rationale for a rebrand is to adjust a brand’s voice.

Fortunately, there are plenty of great examples of companies that have protected their core values while reshaping their brand image to reflect the preferences of today’s consumers. Let’s look at how Dunkin’ rebranded itself without cutting corners in terms of brand compliance.

The Dunkin’ Rebrand

In 2019, Dunkin’ made headlines by dropping “Donuts” from its name to reflect the company’s broader focus on beverages and food. This rebrand required the company to update thousands of locations, digital assets, menus, packaging, and marketing materials worldwide. Every franchisee, partner, and team needed to adopt the new branding to avoid confusing customers.

MarcomCentral’s centralized solution can house updated assets in a unified hub to ensure every team has access to the right materials. It also enforces compliance by restricting the use of outdated or unapproved content.

Are you preparing to embark on a similar rebrand? MarcomCentral can help you navigate uncharted territory while enforcing brand compliance.

Scaling Brand Changes With Confidence

What is brand management like within a large organization? Whether you are refreshing your logo or undergoing a full rebrand, scaling a change becomes exponentially difficult.

A centralized brand management platform simplifies this by providing a single source of truth for all assets. Teams can access preapproved materials, and corporate can monitor compliance in real time.

The Five Cs of Brand Compliance

To streamline brand management, focus on the Five Cs: clarity, consistency, control, collaboration, and compliance.

Clarity, Consistency, Control, Collaboration, Compliance

Each pillar of the Five Cs supports scalable, distributed marketing execution. Here’s how they fit into your compliance strategy:

• Clarity: Clear brand guidelines ensure everyone understands the rules
• Consistency: Uniform visuals, typography, and messaging make your assets instantly recognizable
• Control: Centralized systems let you manage who can access or edit assets
• Collaboration: Empower teams to work together using brand-compliant assets
• Compliance: Ensure that all assets meet legal and industry-specific requirements

MarcomCentral helps you enforce these pillars at any scale with cloud-based brand compliance technology.

Why Brand Guidelines Alone Fall Short

Why not just distribute a PDF to local teams? While PDFs have their uses, static documents don’t scale well. Additionally, you can’t be sure that your teams are using the latest PDF and marketing resources.

A digital asset management (DAM) solution gives teams tools, not just rules to follow. The result is a consistent brand experience and high-quality campaigns that align with your big-picture marketing goals.

Moving away from brand guidelines in favor of cloud-based brand management software eliminates inconsistent branding at its source. Everyone will have access to the latest resources and can operate within the guardrails that you implement.

The 3-7-27 Rule and Brand Recognition

How many times do consumers need to see your content before the brand becomes recognizable? Here’s a look at the 3-7-27 rule and how you can use it to connect with your audience.

The Role of Repetition and Visual Consistency

The 3-7-27 rule is a marketing principle that highlights the power of repetition in building brand recognition. It suggests that a customer needs to see your brand three times to notice it. They need to see your brand assets about seven times to recognize it, and 27 times to associate it with a specific experience or product. That’s a lot of repetition.

Consistent branding accelerates this process by making every touchpoint count. When color palettes, tone of voice, and style are consistent across every asset, you can reinforce your messaging and gain consumers’ trust. For example, a customer might see your logo on a billboard, a social media ad, and a menu. If the color scheme and other elements are consistent, it will boost recall.

Tools and Systems That Enable Brand Compliance

Maintaining brand compliance at scale can feel impossible without the right tools. With that in mind, here are some tips to help your marketing department keep track of every asset and promote consistency.

Use a Centralized Brand Management Platform

MarcomCentral’s brand management portal is a cloud-based solution that enables you to scale your brand management processes. It organizes every asset, including logos, templates, and ads, in a single accessible hub. Teams can find what they need instantly, reducing delays and errors.

MarcomCentral also makes it easy to customize or create standardized templates to ensure that every piece of content, from emails to posters, adheres to brand guidelines. Additionally, MarcomCentral allows you to grant limited access to external partners. For instance, you can create user profiles for franchisees or outside marketing agencies.

Automate Review and Approval Processes

Manual approvals slow down campaigns and increase the risk of errors. MarcomCentral’s automated workflows streamline the process by setting clear approval paths of user permissions. For example, a franchisee can submit a customized ad for review, and corporate can approve or reject it in real time.

Simplifying the approval process ensures compliance without bottlenecking creativity. The goal is to encourage teams to explore their creative side and think outside of the box without eroding brand equity.

Workflow Strategies for Enforcing Brand Standards

Adopting the right technology is the first step to enforcing brand standards at scale. Once you have a centralized platform, you’ll need to implement practical strategies that protect your brand’s standards and reputation. Customizable templates and role-based permissions are two of the most important tools for streamlining workflows.

Templates With Locked Brand Elements

Customizable templates allow your team members to optimize pre-approved assets for local or regional needs. You control what elements can be edited and which attributes are locked.

Templates solve the problem of serving regional markets. They make customizing documents easy for regional teams, as they don’t have to worry about which elements they are allowed to edit. When creating a template, start by locking elements like logos, fonts, and legal disclaimers. You can also restrict access to other attributes, such as titles or pricing.

You can’t use a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing, but you can’t compromise when it comes to brand compliance, either. By creating templates within compliance tools like MarcomCentral, you help local teams adapt to the unique needs and preferences of their target demographics.

The key to success involves creating enough templates for each marketing medium and strategy. For instance, you should build templates for social media, web pages, emails, SMS messages, and flyers.

Role-Based Permissions for Internal and External Teams

Not everyone needs the same level of access. Corporate teams might have full control, while franchisees can only customize preapproved templates. You can also share specific assets with external partners without compromising security or your brand voice.

Role-based permissions promote brand compliance at scale and give your team members clear boundaries within which to operate. When searching for compliance software, verify that it includes comprehensive role-based access management tools. MarcomCentral’s role-based permissions let you control who can create, edit, approve, or distribute assets.

Maximize Brand Value With Scalable Compliance

The larger and more complex your organization becomes, the harder it is to achieve compliance. How do you make your compliance strategy scalable? You’ll need enthusiastic buy-in from all stakeholders and a cloud-based platform that evolves with your business.

Think of your scalable compliance plan as a mechanism for promoting better brand value. You want a strategy that will adapt to each market so you can connect with target demographics and address their unique needs. Achieving that requires a focus on alignment and analytics.

Align Freelancers, Field Teams, and Partners

A single source of truth gets a diverse team on the same page. Whether you are working with freelancers to design social posts or customizing restaurant menu offers for regional locations, MarcomCentral ensures everyone uses the same approved assets. This eliminates rogue designs and maintains brand integrity across every touchpoint and location.

Step one involves identifying the different categories of stakeholders who are involved. A few examples include third-party marketing agencies, freelancers, corporate staff, and local team members.

Next, decide what level of access each person needs to be most effective without compromising brand value. Finally, create standardized polices for editing assets, requesting approval, and distributing content.

Track Usage and Adoption With Asset Analytics

MarcomCentral helps you guide your marketing strategy with real-time data. The platform’s analytics function tracks which assets are used, by whom, and where. If a franchise isn’t using the latest campaign materials, you’ll know. Similarly, if a specific asset series isn’t performing as expected, it will be evident by a drop in usage.

Use these insights to solicit targeted feedback from your team and explore ways to make assets more engaging. You can also discuss underutilization trends with local or regional teams.

If you provide a ton of marketing resources, underuse can happen simply because some of your assets were overlooked. Reminding team members that assets are available can encourage them to build more holistic marketing plans.

Make Brand Compliance a Strategic Advantage

Brand compliance isn’t just about avoiding mistakes. When you can effectively protect your brand’s reputation at scale, you deliver better customer experiences and expand your reach. A cloud-based brand compliance platform like MarcomCentral empowers your teams and simplifies content management workflows at scale.

Additionally, MarcomCentral is highly customizable. You can create custom roles and access-based permissions for every stakeholder. Implement templates so that employees know what elements they can change and which ones are locked. Templates and role-based access encourage creativity without compromising your brand image.

Are you ready to protect your brand and boost efficiency? Request a demo today and see how easy brand compliance can be with MarcomCentral.