The 5 Key Applications Of Brand Governance

How to think about enforcing and analyzing brand rules and guidelines

“We recently created a brand governance team.”

That is a phrase we have heard a lot in the past year. When someone reaches out looking for brand governance software, it’s often because they have started a new team and realize that enforcing brand governance with human-driven processes is a nightmare.

This post, though, is for those of you who aren’t there yet. If you aren’t on the brand governance train and wonder if you should be, I’m going to share the 5 key use cases we hear time and time again from customers. These are the key brand governance workflows they’ve established and how BrandGuard fits into them.

1 - The Creative Process

The creative process is typically the process that is most loose with the brand guidelines. Creatives want to explore and push boundaries but not go too far. In these situations, we often see BrandGuard used as a gut check in the native tool they are working with. Our Chrome plugin works with Adobe, Figma, and Canva and can provide a quick analysis at any time on whether or not the current creative direction is on brand.

2 - The Production Process

Production teams care about brand governance because they are taking the base creative assets and resizing, retouching and proofing new assets for many different uses. They want to make sure the assets they get are on brand and meet everything in the style guide and also that the assets they create as derivatives don’t end up inadvertently using the wrong fonts, colors, old logos, etc. Checking assets before they go live is a best practice of brand governance. BrandGuard can make this quick and automated.

3 - Licensing, Alliances, and Partnerships

Some companies have brand assets that are used by partners. This could be because they are formally licensed, the companies have a relationship that requires it (auto manufacturer - dealer, for example), or they have a co-marketing alliance. In these cases, the party in control of the brand IP wants to ensure it is used correctly.

If I’m going to license the Boston Celtics logo to put on t-shirts and also on digital ads for my t-shirts, the Celtics care that I use it in accordance with their brand guidelines. In situations like this, brands can create a BrandGuard page that channel partners, licensees, or co-marketers use to get automated asset approval before the assets are published.

4 - Compliance

Some brands operate in areas where there are complicated rules around marketing. Examples of these areas are consumer finance, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, products that target children, and much more. Some brands also have their own internal compliance requirements around DEI, for example. In these areas, BrandGuard contributes to the brand governance process by fine-tuning AI models that perform automated checks to ensure these compliance goals are met.

5 - Analytics and Audit

The final area of brand governance is the one we didn’t initially consider - analytics and audit. Some of the brand governance teams we’ve spoken to are interested in understanding how brand compliance looks across the company. Of all the assets produced and published by region, by channel, by product, etc. - where are the brand guidelines most often broken? Is it accidental or intentional? Are some partners less compliant than others? We haven’t yet built this dashboard into BrandGuard, but it makes sense that any good brand governance program should be reporting on these metrics.

We know brand governance is a new concept for many large companies, so we wanted to share some of the commonalities and best practices we’ve heard from the customers who have a brand governance team, structure, or workflows in place. BrandGuard is a tool built to facilitate brand governance at scale. The human-centered workflows of today take enough time as is, and they will only accelerate and consume more resources as companies move to generative AI and personalization.

If you are considering a brand governance function and want some advice or a tool that can help, please reach out. We’d love to discuss it with you.