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 

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.  

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. 

Author
Kevin Gentle, Managing Partner