Brand Asset Management: A Guide for Brand Managers

Recognition may be at the heart of brand identity, but what matters most is the ongoing narrative your brand is building with your audience. But creating a narrative that is consistent with your brand identity, effectively incorporating every part of the brand evolution, can be hard. 

Yet, it’s something brand managers are always aware of. Unfortunately, it’s become increasingly difficult to communicate brand identity effectively when you have to ensure consistency across multiple media channels. 

So when it comes to managing your brand journey holistically, brand asset management (BAM) can help you embrace the finer elements of your brand in all your content. BAM is a vital component of DAM functionality, where work in progress optimization goes hand in hand with building a centralized repository of updated brand elements. 

Before we explore the benefits of BAM, let’s take a moment to look at how brand evolution is communicated through this digital platform. 

What is brand asset management (BAM)?

Creating content that shares the central vision at the heart of your brand requires everyone to be on the same wavelength at all times. But with so many individual visions and creative minds behind multiple projects, it can get difficult to reign in assets that stray from a brand’s True North. 

Brand asset management helps teams to work towards that singular brand vision more effectively. 

Utilizing two of the primary features of DAM software, BAM is a centralized repository and collaborative platform where brands maintain a single source of truth for all the elements that go into making a brand. It gives every creative access to the designs, images, fonts, and other visual elements that go into making a brand unique. 

As the brand evolves, updates to brand elements happen in real-time, ensuring brand consistency at all times, down to the smallest detail. 

The benefits of brand asset management for brand managers

Brands come in all shapes and sizes. And each one is built differently. 

While logos, brand colors, type fonts, etc. may form the foundation of a brand, it’s much harder to communicate the nuances and undertones of a brand and ensure consistency with smaller graphic elements. Each creative asset has to communicate a tonal message and capture a mood that can’t always be summarized in a brand guide and CI (Corporate Identity) manual. It’s the brand manager’s responsibility to make sure these underlying brand elements are captured effectively in each asset. 

But as the demand for digital content reaches new heights, the weight of that responsibility grows heavier and heavier. 

Ensuring brand consistency with one small content creation team is no longer the order of the day. Brand managers now have to ensure consistent brand voice across multiple media types (each with its own unique media elements to consider), with multiple teams working on creating a unified brand journey. Keeping track of which elements should be used where can easily spin out of control. 

The last thing that this already strenuous environment needs is chaos. And yet it’s something that easily sneaks in when no one’s paying attention. 

Making brand asset management a part of content creation workflows helps you keep that chaos at bay while enabling you to create a stronger brand presence at the same time. 

The key benefits of BAM that brand managers can expect are: 

Improved clarity and consistency around the use of a brand

BAM software gives brand managers and creatives a panoramic view of the building blocks of a brand, allowing teams to gain a more holistic understanding of a brand’s identity. With access to a repository of elements that are always up to date, creatives get to explore designs and messaging safely within the parameters of a brand’s identity. 

Maintaining brand identity during brand evolution

BAM software’s panoramic view of digital assets lets brand managers see a brand’s identity more clearly. This holistic view of brand elements allows brand managers to ensure brand consistency by updating assets as new brand elements are created and removing outdated elements that no longer communicate the brand identity. 

More remarkable ability to track and manage the use of a brand

Managing brand content in silos can create fractured messaging, especially when departments begin to apply elements in different ways. Through metadata application or folder organization, you get to assign elements according to specific use cases, such as media types, campaigns, or regions. This separation of elements helps brand managers connect the right assets for each project to creative teams to speed up production time. 

Streamlining and boosting cross-functional and third-party communication

When every layer of a brand’s identity is visible through the centralized storage of brand assets, your creative team gains a better understanding of the overall brand journey. But they can also become a part of that journey by collaborating on changes and possible implementations of assets outside of their workflow. Brand managers can also communicate insights gained from third-party client feedback across all brand elements at once, maintaining a unified approach whenever a brand is updated. 

BAM’s role in the greater DAM ecosystem

DAM is the real-time collaborative environment where all a brand’s digital assets and works-in-progress are managed, whereas BAM is the single source of truth of the brand elements that go into those digital assets. BAM serves as a reliable repository where creative teams can access the elements that go into creating the final assets that are stored in the DAM library. 

As such, BAM is a vital part of every DAM system and helps to streamline the creative workflow. 

So while each can be managed from the same software, you need a platform that can be tailored to your production landscape. 

The best brand asset management software

globaledit is a DAM provider that has helped some of the world’s leading brands connect with their audiences with increased efficiency. We’ve been able to do that because we allow brands to build the DAM infrastructure they need for their creative environment, allowing creative teams to embrace more powerful workflows through DAM automation and access a brand’s true identity through brand asset management.

Let us help you communicate your brand’s True North.