Per Erséus
Wouldn’t it be ideal if more people in your organisation could create their own material, publish it and communicate independently? We know this is a common challenge. Many experience an increased risk of the brand becoming inconsistent. How do you know which font or colour is correct? The result is rarely greater freedom – more often it leads to more guidelines and more proofreading.
So how can you do it better?
The issue is rarely a lack of willingness to protect the brand. The challenge is knowing how to ensure that everyone does the right thing. Many associate brand control with review and correction. But checking everything afterwards and fixing mistakes takes time and creates queues, uncertainty and frustration.
Brand owners easily become gatekeepers. Everything has to pass through the same person or a small group responsible for the whole. And when that becomes a bottleneck, content is created anyway – just not as intended. The more control you try to enforce through manual review, the harder it becomes to prevent incorrect logos, colours and fonts.
A more sustainable approach is to define and present clear frameworks that enable correct content creation from the start – with less need for review.
For those creating content, freedom rarely means doing anything they want. It means feeling confident enough to act without fear of making mistakes.
Freedom means:
Clear conditions make work faster and quality more consistent. That benefits both the organisation and the brand.
Organisations that successfully combine freedom with brand control have often changed the way they work. They move from person-dependent control to easy-to-use tools and templates. They create a place where employees can easily find up-to-date logos, colours and imagery. They develop templates that make it easier to do the right thing than the wrong one – without feeling restrictive. Success also depends on ensuring that everyone uses shared resources rather than local copies.
In a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, you gather your organisation’s assets in one place and ensure that file versions are always up to date and easily accessible to those who need them.
In Brand Portal, you build a website where all brand assets are conveniently available. You can publish practical examples that clearly demonstrate how to create brand-compliant material.
Combined with layouted Design templates and access to files via Media Portal, you give your organisation the right conditions to do things correctly from the start.
When brand owners no longer need to review everything manually:
And above all, you build a strong and consistent brand that can appear confidently across more channels.
Would you like to read how organisations have created this balance in practice? Explore our customer stories and ways of working.
Many organisations manage images, video and brand as separate disciplines. Images are stored in one place, video is published in another, and brand guidelines live as documents on the side. Each area has its own workflows, logic and tools. It works – up to a point.
Like many organisations, you’ve probably invested time in choosing the right tool for managing images and video, and now it’s time to start using it. Yet even with the right features in place, a well-thought-out structure and clear permissions, only a few people use the system consistently. Others use it sporadically – or not at all. So how do you get everyone who needs it to actually use the platform?
When new users are introduced to a system, several challenges arise. On the one hand, you want them to become self-sufficient quickly. On the other, time for onboarding is limited, and the people who know the system already have full workloads. But onboarding doesn’t have to be a burden.