However, no tool stack is complete without Brand Asset Management. With Brand Asset Management, you can store all of your brand assets – like images, designs and core messaging – in one place, where they can be easily accessed and used to create digital assets.

Brand Asset Management (BAM) offers a lot more than just centralized storage space and a streamlined workflow, though. In fact, it plays a major role in your business growth, as well.

So, let’s dive in and discuss the ins-and-outs of Brand Asset Management, and see how it looks stacked up against its competitors.

What Is Brand Asset Management?

Boiled down, Brand Asset Management is a modern fusion of two different legacy solutions: Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Brand Management. It combines the best of both systems to provide businesses with a space where their teams can collaborate on brand related projects and store their assets. As a result, it offers an extensive list of benefits that both impact business growth and move organizations closer to their goals.

For Starters: How Does Digital Asset Management Benefit Businesses?

Before we can get into Brand Asset Management, it’s important to look at one of its foundational pieces more closely.

Digital Asset Management provides the basis for BAM’s core storage functionality, as it allows you to store, organize and access digital assets easily. Being a robust solution for creating asset libraries, there are a few key things that DAM’s do for businesses.

Organize Your Assets

The most valuable feature of DAM is its ability to house thousands of digital assets and keep them organized. This includes everything from social media images and email campaigns to blog posts and video content – regardless of size, file type, or quality.

Keeping all of these assets organized helps businesses keep track of content, designs, and images, minimizing the risk that they’ll be lost in the shuffle or used incorrectly. DAM systems also have powerful search features that allow you to find these assets in minutes, without having to dig through folder after folder. Together, these functionalities eliminate the need for employees to recreate or repeatedly download content, when it’s needed for new projects.

This means your teams can complete projects quicker, and you can share campaigns and content with customers, faster.

Provide Better Security

One of the biggest concerns businesses have about their assets is how to protect them. As employees create, use and share more and more content, files are kept in a wide variety of storage systems. This puts valuable assets at risk of being lost, stolen or mishandled in some way.

DAM solves this problem, by providing a single, secure space to store all digital assets. In addition, it keeps access limited to employees and allows sharing only within the organization and with specified third party vendors. This ensures that nothing is misplaced or sent to the wrong people, which keeps everything – from new projects to core digital assets - safe and secure.

But What’s Missing?

While it’s incredibly useful to have a place to store and organize your digital assets – like videos, content, and visuals – there is an area where DAM falls short: brand management.

Although DAM makes it easier to access digital assets, it doesn’t offer guidelines for creating or using those assets. As a result, many businesses turn to Brand Management solutions to inform asset creation, use and sharing.

Brand Management enables businesses to use digital assets to maintain a positive, impactful brand identity. It does this by providing teams with brand guidelines to inform digital asset creation, making brand assets (like high resolution logos, UI patterns, and icons) easily available for use, and providing space for teams to work on projects.

Done right, Brand Management has the ability to positively impact businesses by influencing:

• Brand recognition
• Pricing power
• Customer loyalty

Combining Brand Management & Digital Asset Management

While there are obvious benefits to both Digital Asset Management solutions and Brand Management software, trying to bring the two together can be really difficult. This is especially true when you have a lot of people creating, using and storing assets in both places. On top of that, using multiple solutions can quickly become very expensive.

That doesn’t mean you have to cobble together a process to keep all of your digital assets on brand and stored properly, though. By incorporating a blended solution, you can have the best of both worlds.

Brand Asset Management (BAM) combines the capabilities of DAM and Brand Management solutions. Like DAM, BAM offers cloud-based storage to help you organize, access, and share digital assets. However, beyond that functionality, BAM also mimics Brand Management in helping you use your brand assets (like logos, images, and icons) to create on-brand digital assets.

What Are the Benefits to Using BAM?

You might think that there are no added benefits to using BAM over DAM and Brand Management solutions. However, by combining the functionalities of both tools into a single platform, BAM both enhances and adds benefits to their standard lists.

Increased Brand Equity

Like Brand Management, BAM is designed to help you focus on the overall perception of your brand and work toward improving it. It does this, by making your brand guidelines and assets readily available to everyone in your organization, and by providing an online workspace where employees can collaborate on projects and cross-check digital assets against brand guidelines.

This, in turn, gives you greater control over your brand image and enables you to mold customer perceptions more effectively – leading to more sales and more revenue.

A Boost to Productivity

Another benefit BAM enhances is productivity. With BAM, you can keep both your digital assets and brand assets organized in a centralized location. This minimizes time going back and forth between DAM and Brand Management tools. It also decreases the likelihood that assets will get lost or recreated, as everything is stored on a single platform.

Beyond that, BAM eliminates the need to recreate or scrap projects for not being on-brand, by making brand guidelines and assets available to everyone, on-demand.

Better Collaboration

With BAM, it’s easier to collaborate on both digital assets and brand assets, because teams can come together to work on a single project, prototype or set of guidelines in a shared workspace. BAM also has the functionality to update projects as they’re revised, making it easy to see what the most recent version of something is.

This means, you can start and finish projects – that often require multiple tools – in a single space. And people can work, communicate, annotate, modify, approve, and share everything easily.

Sharper Oversight

Whether you’re dealing with projects that impact your brand equity directly, or you simply want to keep track of work as it’s being done, BAM makes it a lot simpler. Teams can loop brand managers into projects to get their sign-off on deliverables, team leads can give detailed feedback, and employees can make changes to the project, all in the platform itself.

As a result, everything gets a stamp of approval before it’s rolled out, and nothing falls through the cracks.

Conclusion:

While there are loads of benefits to both DAM and Brand Management, there are also quite a few drawbacks to using multiple solutions. But, by managing both your brand and your assets in one centralized BAM space, you’ll not only increase your brand quality, but you’ll also make all of your guidelines and resources easy to find for anyone, anywhere, at any time.