How to build the backbone of your brand

Tips from Frontify's Toby Williams on creating a robust brand-building platform

Just as a strong building foundation allows architects to create incredible, long-lasting monuments of engineering, a robust brand foundation is vital to developing and maintaining your corporate design.

Having a brand-building platform from which you can quickly and efficiently access all elements and assets of your brand and use them effectively makes brand governance much easier. It also keeps your corporate design consistent as it grows.

So, what’s the secret to a strong brand-building platform?

1. Creativity under constraint

In many industries, brands face limitations in their marketing endeavors. For example, in many countries, healthcare brands can’t advertise their products directly. These constraints can stymie a brand’s growth unless it can implement the proper brand management to handle such a restriction. 

Without a functional brand portal, it's nearly impossible to disseminate a strong brand experience across such organizations effectively. By recognizing when marketing restrictions make adaptability an imperative and building your brand portal accordingly, your brand will be able to develop brand-faithful work despite those constraints.

Build your toolbox to perform, even under marketing restrictions, and cater to localized teams to maximize your offering.

2. Brand power to the people

The idea that “a brand is built by people” is a staple of corporate design. Every stakeholder who acts as a brand ambassador can strengthen that brand’s identity. But with a robust brand-building platform, that notion of empowerment can really spread its wings. In the same way that seeing a landscape picture of the Grand Canyon cannot compare to experiencing it in person, creating a brand hub where creatives can interact with the brand and all its assets makes for a much more culturally embedded brand understanding. 

Placing this emphasis on an integrated approach to brand building requires a level of open education about your brand so that the teams working on it can understand it fully. An open, accessible brand-building platform enables your teams to deliver a clear vision of how to drive the brand forward and provide the resources to do so.

Create a brand hub where team members can connect fully with your brand and values.

3. Strategize, than realize

Just as “no plan survives contact with the enemy,” so your brand strategy needs to be nimble enough to survive implementation. This is especially relevant when your brand is undergoing a rebranding process to create a new direction and identity. Of course, it is crucial to develop a business plan for your brand’s marketing. But all too frequently, brands deliver a solid strategy only to fail at the first hurdle. This is more often than not due to a lack of brand management from stakeholders and marketers.

When creating your brand foundation, keeping this final execution in mind will allow you to equip your creative teams with the right tools to realize your vision. Focus on building a brand hub that all team members can access and a robust workflow that allows feedback and amendments easily. That way, everyone can share the strategy and be involved in the execution.

Implement a robust creative workflow, and your execution can mirror your brand vision.

4. Shared success

Whether you’re a growing startup or a world leader, your brand-building platform must be created with collaboration in mind. 

Taking ownership of your brand within your own team can be challenging and requires a high level of communication between decision-makers and creatives. Taking ownership of your brand across external groups of globally placed subteams takes the challenge to the next level — especially when each subteam is working to meet local needs.

Placing collaboration at the heart of its brand-building platform allows you to protect the integrity of your brand identity while still giving the necessary freedom to localized teams.

Collaboration, whether local or global, is imperative and more easily achieved with a reliable brand hub.

 5. Build for balance

Creating a core brand identity is crucial for any business; otherwise, your message and strategy will be heavily diluted. However, a common pitfall for companies building their brand is to live and die by this consistent messaging, which can often result in safer, less compelling marketing. The key to a strong brand-building platform lies in finding the perfect harmony between a consistent brand message and pushing the boundaries of creativity in its marketing.

Knowing when to follow the rules and when to push the boundaries is a great skill. You should have a strong idea of which areas require strict adherence to the brand and which areas can be experimented with. Creating a robust foundational brand-building platform allows you to operate with the consistency you need — and, equally importantly, enables your team members to collaborate on those projects that lend themselves to a bit more creative freedom.

With a strong brand-building platform, your brand can have a cohesive foundation while pushing the boundaries creatively. 

6. A rule for each tool

Whether you’re talking about a consistent brand message, room for creativity, or a collaboration of professionals, one thing is crucial when building a brand foundation: a strong, robust, and easy-to-use tool suite.

This might seem like a tautology: You need strong brand-building platform tools to build a strong brand-building platform. But brands that still use traditional methods of brand management (including shared PDFs, cloud folders, and endless document versions) find it much harder to keep up with their brand. Taking the time to ensure that the brand management tools you use are the best possible fit for the job will allow you to apply brand infrastructure principles much more effectively and efficiently.

Build or find a brand hub that meets your brand needs - from asset management to collaboration tools.

A successful brand-building platform moves beyond just digital asset management: It gives everyone the access they need to make your brand work, whether that’s creative tools, collaborative workspaces, or cohesive brand guidelines. A good foundation anchors all your teams’ work to your core brand without the need for email trails, confusing file versions, and far more PDFs than is healthy.

For many modern, forward-thinking brands, traditional brand management methods simply can’t keep up with the demands. Frontify’s integrated, user-friendly DAM and customized brand portals offer a one-stop-shop for all things brand, giving you a single answer to this issue. Having a single source of truth for brand storage and governance eliminates this confusion and lets your teams focus on what's important—implementing your rebranding efforts.

Toby Williams is a copywriter at Frontify, where he helps build the brand that helps brand-builders build their brand. Frontify is the brand-building platform for leading brands. By combining a user-friendly DAM with customized portals, Frontify enables creatives and marketers to design, organize, and collaborate.

Established in 2013, the SaaS company has grown to employ more than 300 people. Frontify is based in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and has additional offices in New York City, USA, and London, UK.