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What Is Brand Governance and How to Implement It

September 06, 2022
Insights
What Is Brand Governance and How to Implement It

Branding is an essential aspect of promoting any company. By creating unique branding, a business can set itself apart from its competition and focus advertisements directly on its target consumers.

The right brand will create a lasting impression and help build a loyal base of customers. So, it is essential for marketing and brand managers to actively shape their brand to fit the current needs of their business. Brand governance is used to make sure this work is done correctly.

What Is Brand Governance?

Brand governance is a system of processes responsible for making sure that companies comply with their brand guidelines and keep their branding messages consistent internally and externally when collaborating with different stakeholders, partners, and sales channels.

Brand governance is a strategy for promoting compliance with stated brand policies and guidelines. This focus enables engagement and reinforces brand recognition. By adopting and enforcing brand compliance, marketing and brand managers can keep their branding on message.

Proper brand governance ensures consistency of internal and external processes while people collaborate across the organization. Brand governance integrates stakeholders, partners, and sales channels into a unified management framework. These strategies guide brand representation over time.

Why Is Brand Governance Important?

Brand and marketing managers who want to create impactful campaigns can use brand governance to improve the consumer experience. Modern brand governance ensures companies can convey the brand’s vision without sacrificing intent. 

By using brand governance, businesses can eliminate risks and improve performance. With a consistent identity and reliable service, these businesses can effectively leverage their marketing channels and evolve to meet the demands of their industry. 

Brand governance offers a much more scalable model for businesses to follow when embarking on marketing campaigns in prioritizing what’s important and delegating control of certain brand aspects to other people.

How Does Brand Governance Work?

Brand governance offers many benefits to business leaders. Distinguishing branded assets from competitors is an excellent way for companies to set themselves apart. Brand governance gives marketing and brand managers a way to refine how the public perceives their organizations.

The personality of a brand, as well as its look and feel, can be attributed to: 

  • Consistent web and application designs
  • Targeted advertising to diverse markets
  • Well-known logos, colors, taglines, or other marketing assets
  • Guidelines for messaging and values

Using designated brand assets to design a marketing strategy is essential for setting your company apart. This work makes recognizing and identifying your organization easier for consumers.

What Does Successful Brand Governance Look Like?

Brand governance is complex, and marketing professionals may be ill-equipped to deal with the ongoing challenges posed when undertaking real-world projects. This possibility makes it essential to clearly understand brand governance and what it brings to the table.

Understanding successful brand governance allows leaders to increase their brand’s impact by redefining how marketing is done and improving the consumer experience.

Setting Standards 

Presenting brand elements correctly requires rules that marketing teams can abide by when working on projects. This rulemaking involves everything from creating brand platforms and guidelines to setting review processes.

Brand governance involves strictly representing a distinct visual or tonal style. Marketing and brand managers should consider what models they have available for their strategies and document everything along the way.

Hiring the Right People 

Successful brand governance requires relinquishing control over teams and allowing them to reach their goals independently. Having the right people in place is essential for harnessing brand assets and ensuring they follow guidelines.

Brand managers have to be aware of the ongoing challenges of governance. This awareness means having a firm grasp of current plans, long-term objectives, and available assets for reaching those objectives.

Training Internal Teams on Brand Compliance 

Mistakes are inevitable within the business environment. Teams require ongoing support to maintain brand compliance even if the right policies and people are in place.

Taking the time to train internal teams on brand compliance properly is essential for eliminating errors and improving processes over time. Tracking brand compliance practices and reinforcing stated policies will effectively teach teams to behave in line with expectations.

Creating an Environment for Brand Enablement 

Without a supportive environment, teams won’t be able to get anything done. Brand enablement involves investing in the needed technologies and services for simplified collaboration on brand materials. 

By creating an environment for brand enablement, decision-makers can expedite the creative process and eliminate common barriers to success. Brand management products such as Marcom Portal improve company communication, regardless of your business size. 

The other ripple effect of creating a supportive environment is faster scaling teams and organizations. When companies implement frameworks or tools that help brand enablement, they realize they can scale the teams using them.

Setting Up a Feedback System for Continuous Improvement

The process of brand governance is never-ending. Brand guidelines need to be constantly revised for maximum impact. Getting employee feedback, doing annual reviews, and considering current best practices simplify making changes to brand guidelines.

Brands need to continuously refresh their identities to stay competitive. This work involves setting up a feedback system for improving existing policies and expectations.

Outlook for Brand Governance: What the Future Holds 

As digital media and technology become more prominent, it’s easier than ever before for brands to promote themselves. This development has led to a transformation in the field of digital marketing.

Consider how social media promotion in the form of influencers has grown over the last few years, with new apps grabbing market share with lightning speed. The pressure for adopting these new channels for high-level marketing managers has never been higher, so having a system or a tool for ensuring brand governance across all channels is a must.

With more brands popping up every year, the markets have become saturated. This reality suggests that brand governance will only be more important in the future.

MarcomCentral Understands Brand Governance

As more companies begin to see the power of brand governance, the number of brand elements that become important to consumers only increases. More diverse markets are opening up all the time. This growth makes it crucial for companies to leverage their unique identities to effectively communicate their strengths to consumers.

Brand governance requires a stated vision and commitment to long-term goals. It’s more important than ever for businesses that want to be competitive to have a partner that understands the ins and outs of brand asset management. 

MarcomCentral provides brand management to companies that want to create a personalized brand experience for consumers. With access to dynamic templating, usage tracking, and real-time updates, you’ll be able to effectively organize your brand assets and maximize your return on branding investments. If you want unlimited support features from a globally renowned company, then MarcomCentral is your partner. 

Transform your brand asset management strategy with MarcomCentral. Get a quote today to discuss your pricing options.