Brands have never been more visible. With the increasing ubiquity of media and commerce on every platform, brands have the opportunity to become household names with immediately recognizable visual elements.

In fact, most people expect brands to present a consistent front, with 90% of consumers saying they expect to have a similar experience regardless of platform or device. 

And there’s good reason for companies to meet those expectations: studies have shown that having a consistent brand on all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%. 

But a company’s visibility doesn’t just consist of carefully curated social posts. Every business document created — from presentations to contracts to emails — has branded elements that can either strengthen or weaken your brand’s overall effectiveness. 

As a company scales, so does the challenge of keeping everyone on brand, leading to the dreaded brand police: the workers in charge of monitoring and rejecting work because it doesn’t adhere to guidelines. 

A losing battle: becoming the brand police

Let’s be clear. No one wants to be a brand cop. It’s no fun policing colleagues and forcing them to redo work.

But the fact is, a recent survey* revealed that 94% of respondents say they find mistakes in finalized content. And that can have serious consequences. 

A strong brand is a marker of trust. Customers who are familiar with your brand will understandably be unsettled if it changes suddenly for no reason or if important business documents fail to match accompanying assets. 

And so companies resort to turning their marketing and branding departments into checkpoints, leading to bottlenecks in asset creation and approval. In this system, everyone’s work slows down — and frustrated employees may start circumventing brand checks, exacerbating the original problem. 

No more brand policing: make staying on-brand easier than going off-brand

The best way to avoid the brand police is to make everyone a member of the force. 

While the marketing and branding teams may “own” the brand in terms of developing new guidelines and campaigns, everyone in the company should have equal access to the latest branded materials from logos to fonts to legal disclaimers. 

In our increasingly distributed (but hopefully not disconnected) workforce, that requires a strong system of tools so everyone can find what they are looking for, when they need it. 

To turn employees into brand ambassadors, companies need to invest in three key areas:

1. Simplified access: Making sure everyone has up-to-date, intuitive access to all the latest brand components
2. Assisted assembly: Making it easy to find and use on-brand materials while preparing business content
3. Validation: Making sure reused or repurposed documents are checked for outdated content

This kind of systematic approach eliminates the risk of workers inadvertently using off-brand materials or choosing to go rogue because they can’t find the resources they need. It also speeds up document creation by eliminating those frustrating brand checkpoints.

After all, if no one is breaking the law, then you don’t need police at all.