Brand success depends on sustained quality execution.

A large majority of brand building investment is made towards brand definition, identity, and activation, including brand positioning, visual identity and media buying. However, a large proportion of this investment is squandered because of a lack of consistency and quality in brand execution. The solution to this problem lies in brand governance.

What are the Components of Brand Governance? 

Brand governance, sometimes also referred to as brand management, is often narrowly understood as a brand police exercise consisting mostly of the monitoring of basic brand assets usage such as colors or logo. This view however is too narrow. We define brand management as a system of people, processes and tools that work in sync to ensure high-quality, consistent, and impactful brand delivery at scale and over time.

• PEOPLE – refers to the structures, incentives and knowledge that underpin brand execution. This includes the roles of different people, their training and their KPIs
• PROCESSES – refers to the ways of working that govern the planning, design, and execution of brand activations. From the creative ideation for a brand campaign to the validation of final assets and the measurement of effectiveness, every action should have an associated process with clearly laid out participants and work steps
• TOOLS – refers to the assets and platforms that support on-going brand management, including creative assets banks, asset management tool, such as DAM (digital asset management) software and content creation tools, such as AIGC solutions.

Such a definition gives us a full picture of the items that should be included in a brand governance strategy.

What Defines Good Brand Governance?

Brand governance reflects a company’s culture, business model and brand activation channels. As such, no two companies will have the same brand governance model. However, we can define metrics and stages for brand governance maturity.

• PASSIVE BRAND MANAGEMENT (Ad-hoc, Project-based, Dispersed)

There exists no formalized brand management system. Brand management is focussed on ad-hoc review of key assets and reactive management of brand delivery challenges.

• CONTROL BASED BRAND MANAGEMENT (Rule-based, Focussed, Top-down)

There exists a basic brand management system focussed on ensuring conformity of key activations and assets with brand guidelines.

• 360 BRAND MANAGEMENT (Comprehensive, Collaborative, Agile, Evolved)

Brand management is a core function that spread across the entire organization, making agile, high-quality brand execution easy for all brand users.

Our own experience indicates that most brands currently stand at the ‘Control based brand management’ stage of brand management maturity, having in place the right setup to ensure basic consistency and guidelines conformity of brand activations. This model can be sufficient for certain companies. Others, especially in highly innovative B2C industries, face higher demands in terms of brand reactivity, coordinated cross channel execution and agile innovation. For these, a further step up to ‘360 brand management’ is necessary. Proceeding to the ‘360 brand management’ stage requires not just additional resources but a shift in focus from control to collaboration and empowerment.

PEOPLE

• Strong brand management function within top management structure
• Distributed brand management organigram with functional team level brand roles
• Comprehensive, on-going brand culture and brand usage training with a mix of core modules and customized modules for different types of brand stakeholders
• On-going sharing of brand news, brand performance metrics and brand activation best practices across the organization
• Brand-level KPls integrated in performance measurement plan at the team and employee level

PROCESSES

• Brand-level planning process guiding and combining tactical initiatives from different teams
• Formalized processes for activation planning, asset development and asset review covering all brand use cases
• Agile collaboration between different participants, including external partners (Ex-distributors, franchisees)
• Processes are co-created with participants to accommodate the speed and input requirements of different channels
• Activation and asset review is not limited to basic brand guidelines conformity but also considers quality and contextual relevancy
• Structured mechanisms for grassroots brand initiatives, with best practices shared with the full organization
• On-going optimization of brand management system based on internal and external brand performance reviews

TOOLS

• Large, constantly updated library of brand assets to accommodate the needs of different teams and channels (Vl, visuals, video, photo, audio…)
• Large library of editable templates and associated content generation tools
• Open access to all brand assets across the organization and within brand partners eco-system
• Brand asset management is fully integrated with other components of the organization’s technology stack (Ex-CMS, PIM…)

Why is Brand Governance Key to Brand Growth?

As we see, brand governance is what embeds brand strategy within the organization, enabling the on-going coordination of brand activation in accordance with the brand’s vision. Without it, upstream strategy and identity work risks becoming a purely theoretical exercise with no concrete application. Absent brand governance, long term return from tactical brand activation investment, such as content production and media, will also be hampered by lack of consistency in the tone and quality of output.

Kevin Gentle
Managing Partner