Managing brand assets effectively is critical for building a recognizable and consistent brand identity, especially for global, distributed brands. It’s no surprise that 90% of CMOs are investing in brand-building this year. But to see a real return on that investment, organizations need the right strategies and tools to create, manage, and optimize their brand assets at scale.
Here are a few ways to make sure your brand assets actually work for you, saving you time, staying consistent, and making your brand stand out wherever it shows up.
What are brand assets?
Brand assets are all the elements you create and use to define your brand identity, build brand awareness and recognition, and create consistency across touchpoints, whether it’s in a physical store or on social media.
Brand assets include not only visual components such as logos, typefaces, icons, and graphics but also non-visual elements like your brand name, brand voice and tone, values, and mission statements. In today’s multi-channel consumer environment, having distinctive and consistent brand assets is more important than ever. Brand consistency ensures that every interaction reflects the same core visuals, brand messaging, and values.
These distinctive brand assets allow your brand to stand out from competitors and forge a unique identity and personality, facilitating instant brand recognition and connection with the audience.
Are all brand elements brand assets?
Brand assets can also be digital assets, but not all digital assets are brand assets. The difference lies in whether the asset is created explicitly to form a connection with your brand. For example, a stock image used in a blog post isn’t a brand asset. It could become a brand asset if it ends up in a branded template for a marketing campaign or social post.
Frontify helps you manage both: You can store raw files like campaign footage alongside brand assets like logos, templates, and tone guidelines, so everything lives in one platform with the right permissions, usage rules, and brand context.
Distinctive brand assets every company should have
Distinctive brand assets are unique visual or core assets that are distinctly recognizable as your brand, whether it’s a logo or a tagline. They set you apart from other brands and help your audience instantly identify and recall your brand.
Here are a few distinctive assets that your company should have if it wants to develop a recognizable brand presence in the market:
- Logos: You should have multiple variations of your logos to ensure you have a version suitable for every use case. Many brands use variations of their logo, including different sizes, configurations, and colors, so they have flexibility on where and how they can use them. For example, you may have a color version of your logo along with a black and white version.
- Color palette: Using consistent brand colors helps people recognize your brand. So your brand’s specific color palette is one of your core assets. According to G2, using “the right color” makes your branding more visually appealing and easy to read, which can improve engagement by 40%. Think of Tiffany & Co.’s iconic robin’s egg blue. The color alone evokes the brand, even if you don’t see a logo or product.
- Typography: Your company may have a specific typeface or font for written content, like on your website or in marketing content. This helps create a cohesive brand identity and makes your brand look more professional. For example, you might use one primary typeface for headings and a secondary font for body text.
- Photos, images, or icons: You likely have images that are an important part of your branding kit — core assets used across multiple channels and documents. For example, product photos, illustrations to represent your core use cases, or even photos of your team. You may even have a mascot as one of your icons. Many companies use animated or digital versions of mascots rather than physical versions. Coca-Cola, for example, uses an animated polar bear as their mascot in advertisements.
- Brand voice and tone: Voice and tone express your brand’s personality, or how your brand sounds rather than how it looks. A recognizable voice helps your brand stand out in written content, from long-form marketing content to push notification micro-copy. Take Apple, for example. Apple’s voice is clear and simple. Whether in ad copy, social posts, or product descriptions, Apple’s voice consistently reflects the brand’s focus on clear and simple language, using short sentences and punchy syntax.
- Brand values: A core set of principles that guide your decision-making and influence your interactions with everyone who comes into contact with your brand — internally and externally. A sustainable clothing brand, for example, might center its values around environmental responsibility, ethical labor, and transparency.
- Mission and vision statements: Big picture, what does your brand stand for? What is its purpose? Your mission statement is your brand’s guiding light and one of its most important assets. Everyone in your organization should know it. Take Google’s mission for example: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
- Slogans, taglines, and/or jingles: These are short, memorable phrases that capture your brand’s essence and leave a lasting impression. Companies use them across ads, packaging, and digital channels to reinforce brand identity. Think of McDonald’s slogan, “I’m Lovin’ It,” or Nike’s “Just Do It.” They’re universally and instantly associated with strong brands.
Common challenges managing brand assets (and how to overcome them)
Your brand assets are essential for ensuring visual and messaging consistency across all departments, projects, and products. But companies often experience several challenges when managing their brand assets.
For example, a Frontify customer, Lufthansa, struggled to centralize 90 different brand guidelines for 14k+ users. They overcame this challenge by consolidating and organizing all their brand assets into one platform. Lufthansa replaced an outdated, inflexible portal with a scalable cloud-based solution that made brand access intuitive and enabled seamless collaboration across teams, partners, and regions.
Providing easy access to brand assets
Sixty-five percent of respondents to our research said more than half of their company needed to create or use branded materials on a weekly basis.
Unfortunately, many companies rely on outdated systems and don’t update sharing permissions, so employees must request access whenever they need a particular asset. Your marketing team is constantly inundated with requests for marketing materials, files, or file access, making it difficult for employees in other departments to develop a sense of connection or ownership with the brand.
A comprehensive brand management system makes it easy to give everyone access to your core brand assets. You can set user permissions and maintain control over what people can (and can’t) change, so people can easily use your brand assets without compromising your brand’s identity.
Ensuring brand consistency across global teams
When you have a lot of brand assets to manage, it’s hard to ensure they’re used correctly. For example, you might have sub-brands or brand variations in different regions or particular assets that should only be used for a specific market.
To address this challenge, you need a comprehensive set of brand guidelines to help everyone understand how to use the different brand assets. The best guidelines show as well as tell — they’re not just pages of instructions; they also show your brand assets in action.
A brand management platform can house brand guidelines and assets so everything’s in one place. Additionally, it will have rigorous, customizable user permission settings, so you can easily set up sub-brands for each region and control who can use those region-specific assets.
Bosch, an engineering and tech company, used Frontify to streamline its global brand management, making over 8 million brand asset downloads possible through a centralized platform. This level of access and structure helped ensure consistency across teams and partners worldwide while significantly improving efficiency and workflow.
Adapting to evolving market trends
It’s difficult for companies to adapt their brand in response to ever-changing market trends without compromising on their brand’s essence. This could be driven by emerging technology trends and tools, or by changes in consumer tastes and preferences.
Companies may find they’re making subtle changes to their brand. For example, adapting their brand voice for new social media channels. If these are changes you make regularly, it’s important to document them in your brand guidelines. Alternatively, you may need to replace outdated brand assets altogether.
With a centralized brand management system, replacing outdated assets is easy. You replace the asset in your system, and it automatically syncs across all employee accounts, so you don’t need to worry about people using outdated assets.
How to identify, manage, and organize your brand assets
Before you can manage your brand assets effectively, you need to identify which ones truly represent your brand in the eyes of your audience. Brand assets are the elements that consistently show up across channels and reflect your company’s identity. Focus on the assets that are most visible, consistently used, and strongly associated with your brand.
A Distinctive Asset Grid is a brand strategy tool to help you identify, evaluate, and organize your brand assets, based on how recognizable and uniquely tied they are to your brand. It can help you distinguish which assets are working, which need development, and which are not worth investing in.
Once you’ve identified your core brand assets, you can store, manage, and organize them effectively. The more brand assets you have, the more important it is to have a system in place.
Several types of tools and platforms make asset management easier:
- Brand guidelines: These provide clear instructions for how to use your brand assets. Instead of static PDFs, platforms like Frontify offer interactive, always-up-to-date online guidelines where users can preview assets in context. Online brand guidelines are centralized, and you can allow users to download your brand assets directly from your guidelines, making asset access easier and quicker for everyone.
- Design systems: A design system defines how to build consistent digital experiences. With Frontify, teams can connect these systems to their broader brand hub, giving developers and designers access to reusable components and approved assets, directly linked to brand guidelines.
- Digital asset management systems (DAM): A DAM helps you store, organize, and distribute assets from one place. These are comprehensive systems and can be used to house all your company’s digital assets. Frontify takes it beyond storage by using AI-powered metadata tagging and granular access controls to keep assets aligned with brand standards. Frontify also has built-in brand analytics to track asset usage, team activity, and performance over time. These insights help you understand what’s being used and by whom.
- Brand portals: A brand portal is a centralized online platform where you store all the information, resources, and assets related to your brand. It houses both brand guidelines and digital asset management systems. Global enterprises often favor brand portals, as you can manage multiple sub-brands within one portal.
Digital asset management tips to improve efficiency and consistency
Your brand’s assets are essential for presenting a consistent and cohesive brand identity. These tips will help you use your assets effectively.
Create detailed brand guidelines to enable creative consistency
Brand guidelines should provide guidance and best practices on how and when to use your various brand assets.
Detailed guidelines will make the difference between people being able to use your assets as intended and using them inconsistently. For example, a regional marketing team creating social ads for a local campaign might use an outdated logo or incorrect color variant if the guidelines aren’t clear. You can turn your brand guidelines into a practical resource for your team by showcasing approved assets in use and enabling users to download assets directly from your brand guidelines.
Enable brand ownership and governance
Without effective brand governance, inconsistencies creep into your branding efforts, diluting your brand identity. Imagine your sales team needs to quickly update a pitch deck for a new client. With centralized access to the latest approved visuals, logos, and templates, they can move fast, without having to email the design team or risk pulling the wrong files from an old folder.
Centralizing your assets into a DAM or brand management system empowers everyone in your organization to find and use your approved brand assets whenever needed. This gives them more ownership over your brand while allowing brand managers to effectively govern the brand by maintaining control of the assets in your system.
Control asset usage across the whole lifecycle
If you have a large volume of brand assets, you need a process for managing their whole lifecycle, from creation to retirement. A DAM gives you control over the full asset lifecycle: you can limit who can add or edit branded assets, or set expiration dates to retire assets at the end of their life.
Think of a seasonal campaign where photos or videos are only usable for a limited time. With asset expiration dates and version control, you can ensure those materials automatically phase out once they’re no longer approved and avoid accidental misuse later on.
A DAM also lets you control who can access your brand assets. You can add or remove user permissions and give people access to individual assets or entire libraries. This means internal and external stakeholders can access brand assets more efficiently, without compromising asset security.
Choose asset management solutions that integrate with other organizational tools
You want to make it as easy as possible for key stakeholders to find and use your brand assets. The simplest way to do that is if they can access them directly from the tools they use every day.
Make asset management easier by choosing a solution that integrates with your most-used tools and technology, to break down the silos within your organization. For instance, if your design team works in Figma or Adobe Creative Cloud and your marketers use a CMS like WordPress, integrated asset access means they can drop in the right image or file without leaving their tools, saving time and reducing errors.
Find out about the full range of tools that Frontify integrates with.
The future of brand assets in the digital era
All the different elements of your brand, like your logo or color palette, can be a real asset for your organization if they’re managed correctly. This will only become more important in the coming years.
With the rise of generative AI tools, it’s easier than ever for people to create their own versions of branded materials. A centralized platform like Frontify ensures your team can access approved assets instantly, while tools like AI-powered search and automated updates safeguard brand consistency across all channels, no matter how quickly things change.
A digital asset management system like Frontify brings all your brand’s assets (plus those crucial guidelines) into one centralized location, giving everyone the access they need, without compromising your brand identity.
Book a demo to see how Frontify can support your growing brand.
