Brand compliance is the backbone of your brand that helps a company maintain a consistent brand identity. Without the consistency that branding compliance provides, a carefully crafted brand identity will become muddy and confusing to customers.
Behind brand compliance is processes and stakeholders who ensure that brand content and assets adhere to the voice, tone, and visual style that aligns with the messages a company wants to share with target customers.
We’re here to walk you through the importance of branding compliance and the challenges that make it complicated. Then, we’ll discuss how to build rock-solid processes to achieve online brand compliance and build an unshakable brand identity.
Want to know more about branding? Check out the rest of our series of posts about branding and brand compliance:
What we'll cover
Table of contents
What is brand compliance?
Brand compliance refers to the systems and strategies by which a company ensures creative assets adhere to established brand guidelines, standards, and policies. Brand compliance focuses on ensuring that a brand identity feels the same across all customer touchpoints, from interacting with products in the store to visiting the website.
Brand compliance is complex, and may involve providing training, enforcing compliance as part of developing creative assets, monitoring brand on a global level, and more.
Brand compliance ensures that all branded assets:
- Use consistent messaging.
- Include the correct design elements: colors, fonts, logos, graphics, etc.
- Match the brand’s voice, tone, and personality regardless of format or platform.
- Support the brand’s core values.
- Adhere to regulatory rules and industry standards for marketing, advertising, and creative asset management.
Brand compliance vs. brand management
Brand compliance is a part of brand management. Brand management refers to all activities related to developing, implementing, and enforcing brand identity. Brand compliance specifically refers to the process of ensuring creative assets adhere to brand guidelines.
Brand managers work hard to ensure a company develops a positive brand reputation that aligns with company goals and values. Those involved with brand compliance work closely with the brand guidelines to ensure brand experience is uniform across customer touchpoints.
If brand identity is a garden, then a brand manager is the landscape architect while brand compliance ensures that every flower is planted in the correct place according to the brand manager’s vision.
The importance of maintaining brand compliance
Brand compliance enforces brand recognition and trust by offering a uniform experience to customers across all brand interactions. Brand compliance strengthens and safeguards brand identity and provides clear messaging on market differentiation.
To put it another way, brand compliance ensures when a customer visits a company’s social media profile or sees a billboard, they will instantly recognize that brand and trust the message.
Plus, brand compliance can promote operational efficiency across the company and minimize legal risk. Having established brand guidelines makes it faster to produce assets that adhere to brand identity. Brand guidelines that help prevent legal risk — such as adhering to regulations governing advertising in certain industries — can be enforced through brand compliance.
Ensures brand consistency across all platforms
Recognizable visual identity is one of the most important parts of branding, and something iconic brands focus on.
For example, IKEA has such a strong brand that it’s recognizable internationally. When someone sees those yellow block letters on a blue background, they know they’re looking at IKEA even if the packaging is in a foreign language. That’s a powerful trait that helps your company sell more goods or services.
Brand compliance, by following brand guidelines, ensures that the brand will be the same across all creative assets and campaigns. That means whether a customer is on a website or at the store, they’ll be able to recognize that brand’s products.
Preserves brand equity
“Brand equity” essentially refers to the value of the positive brand image that a company has built up over time. Some even measure it in hard numbers. Brand equity is built over time through a variety of factors, and brand compliance plays a key role.
Going back to the IKEA example: The blue and yellow logo and whimsical Swedish product names have incomparable brand equity because of its strong customer recognition and association with the company. If IKEA decided to completely rebrand its product with a new name and color scheme, the company would be attempting to sell the same furniture but with zero brand equity. Even though it was the exact same product, consumers would be more likely to skip over it and purchase from a brand they recognize.
Brand compliance maintains brand equity by:
- Crafting a consistent brand experience
- Minimizing legal risk
- Enhancing brand recognition
- Increasing customer trust
Without brand compliance, brand equity would be next to impossible to maintain.
Improves brand recognition and brand trust
Brand consistency directly impacts a brand’s bottom line: 67% of customers say they’ll only continue buying products from a brand if they trust the company behind the product. And, when delivering a consistent brand identity, brands can increase revenue by 10–20+%.
That’s because consistency ensures recognizability. How do customers know they’re looking at the same product if the brand isn’t consistent across packaging, platforms, and individual consumer experiences? Plus, inconsistent experiences degrade trust by not delivering what customers expect.
With the right compliance strategy, creative teams can systematically deliver an engaging and predictable brand experience for clients and customers.
Consequences of ineffective brand compliance processes
Ineffective brand compliance will result in a situation where creatives start to introduce new accent colors here and there, use different fonts for a new take, or even use language that doesn’t correctly align with how the brand describes their products.
If you saw a Coca-Cola bottle that used the wrong font, you might skip it thinking that it could be a counterfeit. Or if Nike came out with a line of dated, ugly shoes, you might not turn to them anymore for the creative, on-trend designs you love them for. The consequences are high for ineffective brand compliance — especially for brands with a lot of equity — including:
- Reduced brand equity and trust
- Diluted brand identity
- Creative and marketing inefficiencies
- Legal and financial risk
Challenges of maintaining brand compliance
There’s a reason not every brand has the brand equity of Coca-Cola: it’s not easy. There are a lot of challenges to maintaining brand compliance, especially as companies scale and start working with thousands of creatives all over the globe.
- Volume of content: Big companies create a lot of content, which can be challenging to review and vet for brand compliance.
- Pace of modern marketing: Contemporary marketing content has a short shelf life, with brands needing constant new content to maintain the interest of customers. Creative assets are often needed fast, making it harder for content to go through the necessary rounds of review.
- High number of channels: There are endless channels to manage, from new social media platforms like threads to legacy channels like television and print media.
- Scaling compliance efforts: A smaller company could have a compliance review process down, only for company growth to make them realize the process wasn’t scalable.
The essential components of brand compliance
Brand compliance is supported by many crucial components across the organization. Maintaining compliance is extremely complex, involving stakeholders managing hundreds of platforms across global markets.
However, the most important components of brand compliance are the core needs for enforcing brand standards in even the most multifaceted organization.
1. Brand definition and brand standards
Brand definition nails down the purpose, values, and personality behind a brand. Once a brand is established, brand standards are a crucial component to implementing that brand.
Brand standards — also called brand guidelines — then demonstrate how to exhibit the defined traits of a brand creatively through assets and messaging. Brand definition and brand standards are the foundation to building a strong brand identity.
Brand guidelines often include:
- Typography
- Brand-compliant tone of voice
- Details on brand messaging
- Logos
- Examples of correct branding
- Examples of what not to do
Anything you can think of that can affect branding will be found in your brand guidelines. An old Coke Zero brand guide from 2009 the company released had over 130 pages addressing that one sub-brand alone.
2. Training and education
Brands, especially those with complex guidelines, should consider how to educate employees. Releasing brand guidelines isn’t always enough — who learns by skimming through 130-page brand guides?
Consider the best way to onboard new creatives by introducing them first to the most important aspects of the brand. Continuously educate and reinforce branding during projects. Have brand experts explain an adjustment, rather than just correcting it. Use creative briefs as an opportunity to share some of the logic behind a brand.
Perhaps most importantly, have a plan to roll out any changes to the brand and communicate them. People who are used to brand guidelines may struggle with a change, but proper communication and guidance will make it easier.
3. Review and approval processes
Perhaps one of the most important lines of defense against eroding brand compliance, structured review processes are essential. Stakeholder reviews placed throughout every creative project act as checkpoints for brand experts to ensure content aligns with the brand guidelines. These processes foster an environment where brand integrity is a top priority.
A sophisticated review and approval process can support:
- Quality control
- Consistency of brand experience
- Risk mitigation
- Accountability for decisions made about brand assets
To ensure consistent reviews, standardized and transparent review processes should be put into place before a project even begins. These processes will define when an asset should be reviewed and by whom.
Software like Ziflow can even help automate these processes, ensuring defined processes, tracking where assets are in the process, tracking changes, comments, and decisions, and eliminating time spent tracking down the appropriate stakeholders.
4. Digital asset management
Digital asset management (DAM) helps brands maintain a centralized location with updated brand asset libraries, voice guidelines, and other brand guidance. DAM makes these vital documents and assets easy to access to ensure consistent use across the organization.
DAM makes it simple to distribute content digitally, and DAM systems are scalable to adapt as an organization’s brand becomes more complex to manage.
DAM systems can also include version control and restrict access to assets based on permissions. Essentially, DAM makes it easy to maintain brand integrity — and the fewer obstacles to brand compliance, the more likely brand compliance will be enforced.
5. Brand monitoring
Regular brand monitoring protects your brand by looking out for how your brand is used across the globe. Not only does this help maintain brand compliance by ensuring consistent brand usage across all channels, but it prevents legal risk.
It can be challenging to track all uses of brand assets, especially for large, global brands. Most brands use a combination of software and a human team. The software helps with immediate detection of off-brand assets used across the internet. Humans can then filter through these mentions and find solutions to non-compliance, helping maintain consistency across marketing channels.
Monitoring your brand offers an opportunity to correct misunderstandings about using your brand and shut down illegal use of brand assets. You can also notify and train internal teams who have made branding mistakes. Plus, brand monitoring tools can even help analyze brand performance.
6. Brand enforcement
Brand enforcement is what you do after you find an example of infringement on your brand. It can involve reaching out to the offending party and even legal action if necessary.
To protect your brand, you should have a brand enforcement team in place with an established process for approaching different cases of infringement.
7. Technology and tools
Digital platforms play an indispensable role in brand compliance, streamlining your processes in every component of brand work. The previously mentioned DAM and compliance monitoring tools are key for brand and asset management, enforcement, and monitoring. Integrated marketing platforms combine several functionalities that allow brands to create and release creative assets while monitoring their performance.
Collaborative proofing tools like Ziflow are vital for asset management and brand enforcement. Ziflow exemplifies how collaborative proofing tools aid in maintaining brand compliance by enhancing communication and workflow between creators, reviewers, and approvers.
These tools provide a unified platform where team members can annotate, comment, and approve materials in real time. This ensures that all content aligns with brand standards before publication, speeding up the review process and significantly improving accuracy and efficiency.
The integration of these technologies into a brand’s operational framework supports a more agile, accurate, and reliable compliance process. In a fast-paced market, technology is crucial to maintaining and enforcing brand integrity.
Best practices and strategies for improving brand compliance
Use technology to review and approve brand assets
To review content at scale in a remote work world, you need software that allows all stakeholders to review assets in a centralized place. While there are many cloud solutions for storing files, the best solution is a collaborative proofing tool designed specifically for reviewing and offering feedback on assets.
Ziflow, for example, is designed with a variety of proofing and annotating tools, sophisticated version tracking, automated workflows, and high security to protect confidential assets.
Create a brand compliance toolkit
Companies often have a variety of creative and marketing teams, both internal and external, who work on their brand, such as outside agencies and freelancers. That makes it necessary to have a way to communicate important brand guidelines in an easily digestible way.
To do so, it’s best practice to prep brand toolkits to share with creatives. The toolkit will contain updated assets and logos, color guides, and examples of both correct and incorrect brand use.
Set up a compliant and secure content repository
Creative production is a collaborative effort by nature. However, to adhere to regulatory standards, creative teams need to demonstrate that their file management meets security standards.
Look for a digital asset management solution that stores all of the feedback associated with those assets and allows you to collaborate from a single location. It should have an audit feature that allows you to pull up a full audit trail of what was created, how, and when, and who had access to those assets. You should also look for a high level of encryption and best-in-class multi-factor authentication features.
Keep track of changes, versions, and approval decisions
Sophisticated real-time tracking of versions and approvals is key for a collaborative proofing tool that supports brand compliance.
Tracking versions also plays a critical role in compliance and security for a few key reasons. It allows admins to lock previous asset versions to prevent teams from commenting on, sharing, or working on them. It also enables users to verify that teams completed all requested changes and maintains a record of every version of every asset, which can be useful for review or auditing purposes.
Apply electronic signatures at approval stages
Some regulators — such as the Food and Drug Administration’s CFR Part 11 standard — require companies to prove that their digital records (including marketing and brand assets) are just as trustworthy, reliable, and equivalent to paper records and physical handwritten signatures.
A secure electronic signature feature can meet that requirement. It enables teams to skip the paperwork and put a formal stamp of approval on digital assets directly within the creative production and creative review process. Stakeholders can not only mark assets as approved, but also apply their signature to the asset. Creative teams can then easily pull up a full list of signed assets for easy, automated auditing.
Manage access to brand assets throughout the creative process
Creative projects often require a long list of stakeholder sign-offs on critical milestones before teams can move forward with a project. The order in which your internal team members (and external stakeholders) access, review, and approve content matters when it comes to brand compliance.
Keeping assets in a centralized place and using automatic approval workflows allows creative teams to control the entire asset creation and distribution process from start to finish. You can bake in a list of stakeholder sign-offs on critical milestones before teams can move forward with a project, and control who can access different versions at different stages of the production process.
Streamline the brand compliance process with Ziflow
Brand compliance is vital for managing your brand’s identity, equity, and trust. To get it right, you’ll need clearly defined guidelines, clear processes for asset approval, and the right technology to support your brand standards and brand creation process.
Software like Ziflow makes it easy for brands to follow brand compliance guidelines, streamline the entire review and approval process, and avoid running into the bottlenecks and rework that can slow down creative projects.
