Managing a brand to ensure quality and consistency of representation across a large, global company can be a major challenge -- even more so when there are multiple sub-brands or brand channels. Employees and external vendors from different global cultures and with various responsibilities may have daily reasons to utilize logos, company photography or other assets, but not know how to access them or use them properly to effectively reinforce hard-earned market strengths and company reputation. Furthermore, groups in far-flung parts of the organization may simultaneously be creating redundant materials without ever knowing it and top-down changes to brand strategy may be difficult or impossible to implement on a local level.

 

BrandWizard’s proprietary Brand Toolkit and Collateral Wizard software help by gathering brand guidelines, logos, images, templates and other assets into a single online location. Administrators can update brand guidelines and assets in real time, keeping users up to date on the latest brand strategy. Users can customize collateral pieces from existing templates and asset libraries through a simple drag and drop interface. Workflow and collaboration tools allow groups to work together on marketing projects and enable brand managers to suggest guidelines or assets for use in specific departments or deliverables. Each Brand Toolkit is custom skinned and prepopulated with content to show best practices for that client’s brand.

 

When I arrived at BrandWizard, the software had just been productized: basic functionality was available as a standardized code base; a new Toolkit, with custom skinning, could be offered in about ten days’ turnaround time. Changes I recommended to the process and templates have allowed us to continually shorten this process down to about three days.  These efficiencies have allowed us -- with only two designers -- to launch nine toolkits in rapid succession, while also pitching new business and completing custom work requests for existing clients.  Along the way, we’ve also cleaned up many longstanding usability issues, implemented a client “sandbox” where potential users can demo the software, and continued to modularize custom features in order to add them to our “off-the-shelf” offerings.