How BrandGuard Works With Your Governance Process

Mapping brand governance to software

Brand governance refers to the set of processes, rules, and guidelines established to ensure consistency, coherence, and compliance in the representation of a brand across various channels and touchpoints. If we look at the BrandGuard customer base, we see very little consistency in the brand governance processes of our customers. However, I will attempt to explain how to take a brand governance process and map it to an AI software tool like BrandGuard.

Brand Governance consists of a few stages. Some companies have all of them, some only have a few. The whole idea of brand governance as a workflow is relatively young, so we expect to see more steps added to the processes and workflows over time. Here are the key stages we see:

Brand Definition: This is where companies define a brand. They build brand guidelines, create sample content, and lay out the general rules that all brand assets must follow.

Asset Verification: This can happen at multiple stages in a workflow, depending on how often a company wants to check in on branding issues during the process. Some companies check in at multiple steps along the way, some check in at major handoff points, and others only check-in on final assets.

Partner Asset Verification: I broke this out separately because this use case is often a separate workflow performed by a separate team. The core workflow here is when a partner creates assets that use your brand and must submit them for review to ensure everything follows brand guidelines, even if the mention of the brand is secondary in the asset.

Brand Asset Analysis: Some brand governance teams attempt to collect and analyze aggregate metrics about brand usage. They use this to understand which teams, geographies, and channels might have the best or worst brand consistency.

Brand Asset Audit: Brand governance teams often have an audit process to determine if rules have been historically followed and if brand assets meet requirements in the aggregate, like compliance or DEI rules. These are generally historical-looking and function more as a catalyst for guideline or process improvements than anything else.

BrandGuard is designed to map to each of these stages in different ways. Since no two companies do brand governance the same, we are designed for flexibility and configurability. Here are the key decisions you need to make to map your brand governance process to BrandGuard workflows:

Step 1: Decide where you can most benefit from automation or a double-check on brand guidelines.

Step 2: Decide who can provide feedback to train models on what is and isn’t brand-appropriate.

Step 3: Find and upload your best brand-defining assets to use to fine-tune models for your brand.

Step 4: Map out who needs access to score assets - whether co-workers, partners, agencies, or consultants.

Step 5: Develop a rollout plan. This is particularly important if you need people to upload assets for analytics or audit use cases.

Step 6: Train and update regularly. AI models work best with feedback, like humans. Spending a few minutes a week providing feedback on BrandGuard scores will make sure the models stay in line with your brand thinking.

Brand governance is relatively new as a formal workflow, but more and more companies are creating brand governance teams and looking for solutions. We hope this post highlights how a brand governance process works and the decisions you need to make to implement an AI tool like BrandGuard as part of your process.

For more information on BrandGuard or to sign up for a demo, please email contact@brandguard.ai or visit our website www.brandguard.ai.