Brand compliance is becoming increasingly important
Brand compliance has become increasingly important in recent years and companies have discovered the value of enhancing and protecting their brand.
Despite the importance, many companies haven’t yet implemented a brand compliance strategy. In this blog post, we will guide you to how to get one!
In this article
What is brand compliance?
Brand compliance is processes and strategies that ensure your brand aligns with internal and external rules and guidelines. By prioritizing brand compliance, you can enhance the value of your brand and protect it against reputational risk.
Employees have different ways of creating content. Brand managers may spend time on finding the perfect logo placement, while sales reps may just insert it in a random place and move on to other tasks. With the right brand compliance measures put in place, companies can manage their brand and ensure all content is consistent and compliant – no matter who produces the content.
Why is it important to do brand compliance?
Brand compliance is becoming increasingly important due to several factors. Firstly, in a competitive globalized market economy, companies must stand out to get the attention of customers. Having a strong brand is an essential way of doing this.
Secondly, social media and review sites have become the go-to place for consumers to talk about their experience with a brand. These customer stories can go viral – with great positive or negative impact on the brand. By having a brand compliance strategy, companies can mitigate the risk of reputational damage from negative customer stories and use positive customer stories to enhance their brand.
While aforementioned factors are mostly relevant for B2C brands, other factors are important for B2B businesses. With correct brand compliance, B2B companies can ensure their brands are perceived as professional and that documents and other content is compliant with internal and external guidelines.
Risks of not doing brand compliance
Evidently, correct compliance processes are important to protect a brand. So what can happen if a brand doesn’t have a brand compliance strategy in place? Here’s three potential risks:
- Reputational risk
Sending out an inappropriate email, launching an insensitive product, or issuing non-apologies after a PR crisis. These are some examples we have seen in recent years where companies have been getting heavily criticized by the public.
If a brand lacks a compliance strategy, it can suffer reputational damage as a consequence, and this can have a large impact on everything from talent acquisition to stock price. This has made reputational risk a top concern among CEOs of the world’s largest businesses, according to a survey by KPMG. - Loss of trust and revenue
Brand compliance is a central part of building trust. If a brand is outdated, inconsistent, or doesn’t adhere to norms and values, it can lead to the brand being perceived as untrustworthy. According to a 2019 Edelman study, this can have a major impact on revenue as 81% of consumers need to trust a brand to consider buying from it. - Decrease in brand value
The most valuable brand in the world is Apple, and the company is a great example of a brand that is consistent in every touchpoint with its customers. Customers and other stakeholders need to see a brand portrayed in a consistent manner to trust it, and if not, this can lead to a decrease in brand value.
How Lyft ended up in legal trouble over a typo
On February 13 2024, Lyft announced their 2023 earnings. The big news was that profit margins for bookings had increased by 5%. As a result of the news, the stock skyrocketed more than 60%. However, a typo had snuck into the earnings report, so in reality, the profit margin had only increased by 0.5%.
Luckily, Lyft had a brand compliance and reputation management strategy in place, so the CEO David Rusher quickly apologized and took full responsibility. Despite the apology, the typo put Lyft in legal trouble as they’re now faced with a class-action suit.
The incident demonstrates how important it is that all communication sent out by a company is verified and compliant with internal and external guidelines. While a typo can happen to everyone, it could have been discovered before being sent out had Lyft implemented brand compliance procedures.
How to do online brand compliance
According to the World Metrics Report 2024, digital marketing accounts for 52% of an organization’s total marketing budget. With the majority of companies’ external communication happening online and as workers are spending an average of 20 hours a week using digital communication tools, it is safe to say that brands should have the digital world as a top priority.
So how can companies effectively do online brand compliance? Here’s a few pieces of advice:
1. Establish clear branding guidelines
The first thing any company should do when beginning on their brand compliance journey is establishing clear branding guidelines. These guidelines will be the backbone of your brand compliance strategy. Whether you are manually ensuring brand compliance or are using software solutions to assist you in making your brand compliant, these are the guidelines that will be enforced.
2. Centrally manage content to ensure consistency
The need for brand consistency is crucial on digital platforms. If customers see varying logos, colors, or different tones of voices, it can lead to the brand being perceived as inconsistent. Therefore, ensure consistency across all platforms by managing and distributing content from a central platform.
With tools like Templafy, branding assets can be pre-approved and instantly made available to employees throughout the organization. If documents, signatures, marketing material and other branding assets are clean and consistent across the board, customers will perceive the brand as more trustworthy.
3. Validate content before it’s sent out
Examples like when Lyft added a 0 too much on their 2023 earnings report shows the importance of having thoroughly validated content before it’s published. This may be even more important when distributing content on social media platforms as employees can start viral reputational incidents in the blink of an eye and followers can react to it in an instant.
An example of this comes from the early days of social media. A drunk social media specialist accidentally tweeted about drinking beer from the official American Red Cross Twitter account instead of her personal one. Since it was an accident, the Red Cross and its followers responded with humor, and the incident ended positively.
Other times, however, inappropriate content is shared by employees intentionally and followers do not respond positively – Adidas has a bad case of this in its history. Intentional or not, it is imperative for brands to have measures in place that can discover non-compliant content before it’s sent out into the world with potential damage to the brand’s reputation as a consequence.
4. Implement a brand compliance software tool
For large enterprises, thousands of documents and pieces of content can be produced on a daily basis, making it impossible to manually ensure brand compliance across the organization. That’s why a platform like Templafy that provides brand compliance exists.
Templafy and similar software solutions help companies automate brand compliance by centrally managing company-approved branding assets and doing real-time monitoring of the content employees produce. If the tool discovers any inconsistencies, these are corrected before the document can be sent out.
The best software tools for monitoring brand compliance
UpSlide is another brand compliance software tool that helps companies manage their brand assets and ensure consistency across all corporate documents. The tool embeds automated templates across all Microsoft 365 applications so they comply with brand guidelines.
According to software review site G2, Templafy is the most popular choice when choosing between the two brand compliance software solutions. It is also the go-to choice for many enterprises, among others the Danish engineering company Ramboll. Roos Nederveen, Senior Consultant, Corporate Branding at Ramboll is one of the brand managers who has been thrilled with implementing Templafy.
“Templafy saves our employees a lot of time, and the branding team can be more certain that content coming from Ramboll is in line with our brand guidelines”, she says.
How Templafy ensures brand compliance
Brand compliance tools like Templafy work by providing a central place to manage branding assets and by using monitoring software to analyze content in search of inconsistencies. Let’s look closer at the platform’s brand compliance capabilities:
Visual consistency:
The Templafy Builder makes sure that all brand elements, such as logos, fonts, and colors are used according to your brand’s visual identity. This enhances the brand’s professionalism as recipients of the content always meet a clean, consistent brand identity.
Centralized content management
The Templafy Library is a central hub for all content and brand assets. By managing content centrally, users on the Templafy platform can create, approve and distribute content to specific workers, enabling control over who gets access to what. This can prevent reputational incidents like the ones we saw over at the Red Cross and Adidas.
Automatic brand compliance
Going through documents to manually check whether the right font or logo is used can be tiresome when you have to send out many documents. Templafy’s Validator automates the process so you can focus on core work knowing that every branding asset is used according to company guidelines.
Seamless integration
Templafy integrates with the most widely used office applications, Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. This is a productivity booster for workers who don’t have to switch tabs but can keep working within their favorite applications, now with a powerful tool right at their fingertips.
Instant roll-out
A rebranding, seasonal logo variation, or roll-out of new company-wide branding guidelines can be time-consuming if done manually. You’d have to email all workers and, in some cases, follow up to ensure compliance. Templafy automates this task by instantly making updates available to everyone within the organization.
Make your brand compliant with Templafy
Brand compliance is crucial for any company that wants to protect and enhance their brand. By using Templafy, companies can quickly and easily implement brand compliance processes directly into their preferred office application. Start making your brand compliant – schedule a demo with Templafy today!
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