Search for content of interest

  • About
  • ServiceS
    • Branding
    • Innovation
    • Naming
    • Strategy
    • Research
    • Design
  • Work
  • Insights
  • News
  • LOCATIONS
    • Shanghai
    • Paris
    • New York
    • Singapore
    • Malaysia

CN FR
  • About
  • ServiceS
    • Branding
    • Innovation
    • Naming
    • Strategy
    • Research
    • Design
  • Work
  • Insights
  • News
  • LOCATIONS
    • Shanghai
    • Paris
    • New York
    • Singapore
    • Malaysia
CONTACT

EN

  • CN
  • FR

Home Insights Our Thinking Detail
Contact Us

What Is Brand Governance?

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.

Labbrand brand governance

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

  • SHARE
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
BACK

Sign up for our newsletter to get the latest insights, tips, and trends in branding, naming and innovation.

Related Article




Malaysia Truly Asia? Examining Malaysia’s Positioning in SEA 

The "Malaysia Truly Asia" campaign has been a cornerstone of Malaysia's tourism branding since its inception in 1999. The campaign aimed to portray Malaysia as a microcos…

A New Generation of Chinese Tourists: What Should Hospitality Brands Know?

In the global travel and hospitality industry, Chinese tourists have solidified their position as a formidable force. The sheer magnitude of outbound tourists from major …

Name Analysis: Chinese Indigenous Brands with Foreign Names

In recent years, a discernible shift has emerged in the consciousness of Chinese companies, indicating a heightened awareness and understanding of the paramount significa…

Brand color – Minion Yellow: Energizing Colors for Digital Media

Bold, bright, vibrant, and ‘uplifting’ are the words used to describe Minion Yellow, the Pantone Color Institute’s latest addition to the Pantone Color Library. In a stat…

Game Naming: 7 Ways to Name Your Game

The following article is part of our ‘Naming for Gaming’ series, where we uncover English and Chinese naming trends that lead to successful gaming enterprises. Enhance Yo…

Tourism Brand Name: Branding the Dubious Tourist Routes of Southeast Asia

Amidst the allure of Southeast Asia for Chinese travelers, a new option may be on the horizon. After years of promoting the traditional “新馬泰” (Singapore, Malaysia, and Th…

Name Analysis: Chinese Names of Online Shopping Companies

Over the past couple of years, the popularity and profitability of online shopping websites in China has grown exponentially. As the number of internet users as well as t…

Brand Potential: Is there a Brand Canada?

With the celebration of Canada’s 143rd birthday last week and the upcoming G8/G20 summits in Toronto later this month, Canada has recently received a lot of attention in …

Ready to take your brand to new heights?

Let's start a conversation.
  • NEWSLETTER
  • CAREERS
  • PRIVACY POLICY
  • Labbrand Group
  • Labbrand
  • Madjor
  • SpringPillar

* Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy

A Labbrand Group Company © 2005-2025 Labbrand All rights reserved

沪ICP备17001253号-3
  • Follow us:
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 

Contact us to get the latest insights, tips, and trends in branding, naming, and innovation.

* Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy

Cookie Notice

To improve your experience, we use cookies to provide social media features, offer you content that targets your particular interests, and analyse the performance of our advertising campaigns. By clicking on “Accept” you consent to all cookies. You also have the option to click “Reject” to limit the use of certain types of cookies. Please be aware that rejecting cookies may affect your website browsing experience and limit the use of some personalised features.

Accept Reject