What Is Brand Compliance?
Brand compliance refers to the process of maintaining consistent messaging that aligns with your brand’s core values and guidelines. The visual look and feel of your content, your brand’s unique personality and tone of voice, and messaging for online platforms and marketing materials should remain consistent across all touchpoints and tie back to your brand's purpose and mission.
Benefits of Brand Compliance
Ultimately, brand compliance benefits your company by building trust with your customers. Some additional benefits of brand compliance include:
- Consistency: Brand compliance helps maintain consistency. Graphics and images, colors and fonts, copy tone and voice, your target audience, CTAs, and marketing materials should all be easily recognizable and adhere to the same standards.
- Quality: Adhering to your brand’s standards will be more likely to produce consistent, high-quality work across all mediums.
- Recognition: Consistent messaging and marketing communication will make it easier for customers to recognize your brand. They’ll know exactly what to expect when browsing your website or reading email campaigns, which makes for a memorable customer experience.
- ROI: Poor brand image can lead to decreased sales; however, maintaining brand compliance can lead to repeat business, strengthening your customer relationship, and increasing your ROI.
Why Is Brand Compliance Important?
Now that we know what brand compliance is and how it can benefit your organization, let’s dive into its importance. The bottom line is that brand compliance is important because it sets the standard for your organization's brand image and identity.
When you stick to your brand's core values and have consistent messaging, everything else falls into place. Processes become more streamlined, customer loyalty strengthens, and your brand is shielded from legal risks.
Here are a few reasons why brand compliance matters:
Internal Due Diligence
Effective brand compliance demonstrates your company’s understanding of proper internal due diligence. This process helps you identify and correct any issues relating to your brand standards, ensuring your brand is properly represented both internally and externally.
Internal due diligence typically involves processes like:
- Evaluating assets to ensure they adhere to your brand's messaging, tone, and image
- Ensuring internal practices align with your brand's guidelines and standards
- Training employees to ensure they’re aware of your brand standards and compliance requirements
- Identifying any potential risks that could lead to noncompliance, and addressing them before there’s a problem
When brand compliance is met, it shows your company’s internal due diligence, deeming your brand as trustworthy and credible.
Expert Takeaway:
“To ensure brand compliance across all our projects, we've developed specific guidelines for each brand or product we manage. Before any content or campaign is released, it goes through a hands-on review process involving multiple team members, ensuring that everything aligns seamlessly with the established brand guidelines.” — Marshal Davis, President of Ascendly Marketing
Brand Trust and Loyalty
Brand compliance is a foundational element for establishing trust and loyalty, which contributes to client retention. When customers trust your brand and consistently have positive experiences, they are more likely to remain loyal and keep coming back. This starts with building foundational brand standards and guidelines that define how you want your brand to be portrayed.
If you think of your favorite brands, they probably share at least one common denominator: they provide a consistent experience. You keep returning to their product because you’re happy with what they deliver and can always expect the same experience every time.
When standards are set, it creates a consistent and reliable brand image and ensures every customer has the same experience.
Expert Takeaway:
“Nielsen data shows that even at under two seconds, a video impression leads to 38 percent brand recall and 23 percent brand awareness. So if your brand assets (logos, brand colors, typefaces, images, etc.) are consistent and memorable, you can be making your brand more familiar and trustworthy with your target audience. However, if you fail to use consistent branding, you won't enjoy those results.” — Scott Lieberman, Founder of Touchdown Money
Fraud Defenses
False claims — intentional or not — can have a major impact on your organization, harming your reputation and brand integrity. These claims typically involve misleading statements that stray from your brand standards. False or inconsistent messaging can occur when compliance standards aren’t understood company-wide.
For example, a brand may exaggerate the effectiveness of its product or service, or make false claims about what it can deliver, in descriptions on its website or through advertisements.
Brand compliance guidelines help streamline internal communications relating to brand messaging so that all team members are aligned and their companies can avoid these mistakes. You should always be transparent and truthful throughout your messaging to ensure all claims are valid and align with your brand.
Legal Protections
Brand compliance doesn’t only mean following your organization's internal guidelines and standards, but also observing the relevant laws and regulations in your industry. Issues like trademark infringement and outdated licensing can lead to costly legal problems.
Brand compliance guidelines can help teams ensure their assets and branding meet licensing requirements, all content adheres to social media guidelines or other online policies, and content usage is properly approved and monitored. Adhering to your organization’s brand compliance guidelines can protect it from legal consequences.
Expert Takeaway:
“In the event of noncompliance, we first clarify our expectations to ensure every team member understands the importance of adhering to brand guidelines and standards. The goal is to ensure everyone’s on the same page regarding their role in upholding the identity of our brands. Secondly, we correct the noncompliance mistakes. This often involves reviewing relevant resources and materials and making necessary changes.” — Logan Nguyen, Co-founder and CMO of the National Coalition on Health Care (NCHC)
9 Strategies To Enforce Brand Compliance
Understanding brand compliance is the first step in developing a consistent brand image, but putting it into practice will ensure your organization stays true to its values and standards.
Below, we’ll cover nine strategies to ensure your organization’s brand compliance, through consistent online and offline messaging across all touchpoints.
1. Create Brand Guidelines
Brand guidelines are the core of brand compliance within an organization. Without set guidelines, your organization has no reference to ensure its messaging is valid, clear, and consistent.
Brand guidelines outline important details about your organization’s purpose, history, positioning, messaging, and visual identity.
These three steps can help you develop your brand guidelines:
1. Determine Format
Whether it's a PDF, Word doc, Google doc, or presentation, you’ll need to decide on a format for your brand guidelines. Whatever format you choose, make sure it’s easily accessible to internal employees, external partners, and any other parties who will need access.
2. Define Scope
Next, define the scope of your guidelines to ensure all touchpoints are covered. What are the most important elements of your brand that are essential for all team members to understand?
Consider the following components before drafting your guidelines:
- Brand Purpose and History: This includes your brand’s mission, story, and values.
- Brand Messaging: This includes your brand’s voice, tone, and messaging pillars. When defining your messaging pillars, include important elements such as your brand’s identity, its purpose, and the perception it’s trying to maintain.
- Value Propositions: This includes your target audience, selling points, and competitive advantages. In other words, what is it about your organization that makes it stand out, and how can you convey that in your messaging?
- Visual Branding: This includes your brand colors, logo, typography, web design, imagery, and other visual elements essential to your organization.
3. Draft Standards
From there, you can start drafting your brand guidelines. You should have already laid out everything you want to cover when defining the scope of your guidelines, so now you'll write all the important information for each section. When drafting your guidelines, make sure every element in each section is clear and easy to digest. Use examples and visual elements to guide users through your standards.
Be sure to touch on both online guidelines (social media, email, newsletters, and blogs) and offline guidelines (packaging, flyers, billboards, and signs).
If a new employee or external partner knew nothing about your brand, would they be able to read your brand guidelines and get a clear understanding of the message you’re trying to convey? Provide as much detail as possible. If someone has a question about your branding, it should be answered within your brand guidelines.
Any supporting assets and files, like your brand logo, fonts, or other branding templates, should all be stored in the same location so they’re easy to access.
Once your brand standards are clearly outlined, it will make the process of creating brand assets easier for your team. They’ll know exactly what guidelines to follow to ensure they’re staying compliant with your brand messaging.
2. Enforce Governance Policies
Establishing and enforcing governance policies can help ensure you stay compliant and adhere to brand standards.
Brand governance refers to an organization’s actions and efforts to guarantee that the brand is being presented correctly — both internally and externally. Your brand guidelines and governance policies go hand in hand.
For example, you may have policies regarding logo usage, access to assets, and trademark and copyright rules. You should also have a detailed plan for how brand governance policies will be enforced and how noncompliance will be handled.
While these should also be outlined in your brand guidelines, establishing governance protects your brand’s reputation and ensures that all team members follow these standards.
Expert Takeaway:
“We treat noncompliance as a learning opportunity rather than a failure. The person responsible has to dissect what went wrong in a team meeting, turning it into a lesson for everyone. This approach ensures that we're always improving and that the same mistake doesn't happen twice.” — Marshal Davis, President of Ascendly Marketing
3. Use Brand Compliance Software
Brand compliance software can help organize and streamline your organization's processes. Brand compliance software is a place for you to house your brand guidelines, and it can also handle approval of assets, workflow automation, user controls, and more. Utilizing brand compliance software will ensure your organization consistently adheres to brand guidelines.
Some benefits of utilizing brand compliance software include:
- Customization: Most software feature customization options to change the look and feel of the dashboard and assets to align with your branding.
- Accessibility: Brand compliance software gives easy access to your organization's brand guidelines, assets, and compliance information, providing an all-in-one database for all content and brand assets.
- Integration: Brand compliance software can integrate with other systems and tools, which can streamline team workflows.
- Reporting: Reporting features can provide insight into brand compliance performance and metrics so your organization stays on track and can identify areas for improvement.
- Cost: Brand compliance software can reduce costs associated with manual tasks through automation.
- Support: Many brand compliance software solutions offer customer support and training so organizations can effectively implement and use the software.
4. Centralize a Compliant Content Repository
Consolidating all of your digital assets into one location ensures authorized team members have access to everything they need. A digital asset manager (DAM) can centralize your organization’s digital files and create a space to collaborate and provide feedback throughout the entire content lifecycle.
A DAM also makes it easy for users to search for the content they need, since everything is organized and stored according to your organization’s taxonomy. All communication, including feedback and approval, should be made within this platform.
5. Set Up Authorized Access
Once you have your assets centralized in one place, you’ll want to set up user access. User access ensures that assets are only accessible to authorized users. This makes it easy to control who can view, edit, delete, or download assets. You can also set up limited permissions for external users — like clients, freelancers, and shareholders — that allow them to access and approve files if needed.
Setting up authorized access can also protect sensitive assets from getting into the wrong hands. User access typically follows a hierarchical structure, so your DAM administrator can restrict access to sensitive content based on the user roles. To add an extra layer of protection, you can set up password requirements and two-factor authentication to access files.
6. Monitor Asset Changes and Versions
Within your brand compliance software, you should be able to see all of the asset's history — including feedback, edits, approvals, and version history. These records are important for maintaining brand compliance.
Monitoring asset changes can be beneficial for many reasons, including:
- Creating an Audit Trail: Having a record of changes and versions of assets creates an audit trail essential for maintaining compliance. This helps your organization prove you’re adhering to brand standards.
- Reducing Future Errors: Teams can easily track and review changes, reducing the risk of future errors.
- Maintaining Consistency: Tracking changes can help maintain a consistent brand image by ensuring all brand assets follow your organization’s guidelines.
- Managing Versions: A record of asset versions ensures all team members are using the most recent version, reducing the chance of using outdated and incorrect materials. Your team can also refer to old versions if needed.
7. Consider Approval Signatures
An important part of digital asset management is the approval process. Some assets may need approval from higher-ups like CEOs, founders, or managers. This extra layer of approval helps ensure brand guidelines are met and brand compliance is followed.
Allowing electronic signatures within your brand compliance software can make it easy to collect a sign-off without holding up your content production timeline. Because the review process and signature can happen on the same platform, it makes approvals quick and easy.
8. Design Secure Workflows
Content lifecycles involve many review and approval stages before a final draft reaches the finish line. Secure and automated workflows can help streamline the brand compliance process and ensure you’re hitting all your bases at each step of the project. Within your compliance solution, you can set up automated approval tasks for each project phase.
Automated workflows allow you to set rules for who has access to files, and whose approval is required at each stage to keep your process consistent. This consistency plays a huge role in maintaining compliance and ensuring your assets are properly reviewed.
9. Educate Users
Education and training are essential to maintaining brand compliance. This applies to any new and existing employees and partners. Ongoing training can strengthen your team’s understanding of your brand standards so they can effectively implement and maintain brand consistency. Training sessions, learning programs, and educational materials should all provide users with useful information on brand standards.
This can also provide an opportunity for open communication so employees feel comfortable giving their input on your organization’s brand guidelines. You should also prioritize proper training whenever any changes have been made to brand guidelines and standards.
Continuous learning will strengthen your team’s understanding of your brand, reduce the risk of noncompliance, and boost work quality.
Expert Takeaway:
“One of the best strategies we use to stay compliant with our brand guidelines is providing resources employees refer to. This includes templates, prefab asset libraries, brief instructions, and premade layouts. These resources help to streamline the process and make it straightforward. We also give some level of freedom so that the guidelines do not limit our employees.” — Logan Nguyen, Co-founder and CMO of NCHC
Brand Compliance Guidelines Checklist
Download the Brand Compliance Guidelines Checklist
Adhering to brand compliance doesn’t have to be hard. A foundational part of maintaining compliance is building out brand compliance guidelines. Our free downloadable checklist can help you build your brand compliance guidelines to maintain a consistent and credible brand image.
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