Global Brand Protection: How to Cover Compliance and Stop Brand Dilution

In many ways, your brand is a promise: a statement that encapsulates what it is that customers can expect from your business. To be strong and effective, not only should your visual brand identity be eye catching, but your entire brand strategy should also be an accurate representation of what you stand for.

So what happens when that story travels downstream to all of your markets? Does it remain as coherent and compelling as you intended? Too often, the brand promise becomes watered down. As it passes through the hands of multiple stakeholders, its meaning can shift, and its impact can be reduced. To protect your brand, you should always be alert to the risk of dilution: one of the biggest obstacles to building and maintaining brand strength.

In a survey of 250 brand leaders, most (58%) either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “My brand’s story is getting distorted/diluted by the time it reaches the end buyer”.

Although brand dilution is a risk that all marketers need to be aware of, it’s not inevitable. In fact, with the right processes and technology in place, brand integrity can be maintained, or even enhanced.

In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at the circumstances under which brand protection can be undermined through dilution, and the steps you can take to keep it in check.

Who is responsible for telling your brand story? This goes way beyond your logo designer or the specialist agency responsible for producing your latest billboard display. Every person with direct or indirect contact with your audience is a brand representative. This includes sales and account managers, customer service staff – right down to customer-facing technical and support teams. As a rule, the greater the number of filters your story passes through, the greater the potential for message dilution and an undermining of brand strength.

Extending your product or service offering into new global markets can increase the scope for brand dilution even further. This is especially the case if you are expanding your distribution network to include new retail partnerships, dealerships, channel partners or brokers.

Of course, best practice dictates that you provide these third parties with branding guidelines. But the fact remains that these partners are outside of your direct control. Their primary focus is likely to be on doing what they consider to be the best job in their market, regardless of brand compliance. Quite simply, they are not as invested as you are when it comes to preventing brand dilution. For them, ‘tweaking’ your brand rulebook to secure higher sales is a temptation that’s hard to resist even if this involves diluting the original brand message.

Related: 6 Organization Types that benefit from Distributed Marketing

It takes an average of 6 to 8 marketing touches before a potential customer even becomes aware of your product. Typically, these touch points are spread across an ever-expanding range of channels, from social media (digital), right through to location-specific physical displays (print).

A multi-channel campaign opens up plenty of possibilities to engage with customers. With so much activity happening across multiple media, there is also plenty of scope for going off-message. Even something as simple as your brand color scheme can cause problems in a multichannel context. Colors tend to reproduce differently depending on the medium and material used. So, unless you have the ability to repurpose assets in a way that takes into account these differences, the powerful effect of a unifying color scheme can easily become watered down.

It is common to work with a variety of digital and creative agencies, especially when it comes to specialist technical elements of a campaign. Many global brands also instruct agencies in a variety of locations to create or adapt campaigns for local consumption.

Quite understandably, local agencies can be anxious to impress: to create materials that stand out from the crowd. While this can yield interesting results, there is also the danger of agencies straying too far from the brief and branding guidelines. If this happens, it can easily mean that your central message is diluted rather than strengthened.

Who in your organization possesses the most valuable market knowledge? In all likelihood, it’s the sales and marketing teams on the ground in each of your target markets. These people are closing deals and fielding queries with prospects and customers on a daily basis. They know what’s likely to hit home with your audience – and how to communicate it.

Given all this, it makes sense for salespeople and marketers in the field to be directly involved in the creation of localised marketing materials. Often, this will involve adapting core branded assets to give them a local flavor.

But what if your assets are being adapted in the wrong way? Without adequate controls over content adaptation, there is a risk that the changes made at local level will detract or depart from your central strategy, thereby diluting its effectiveness.

Let’s say that quality and exclusivity are hallmarks of your brand. However, one of your local marketing departments decides to launch a buy-one-get-one-free offer that totally conflicts with this image.

Problems can arise if local teams have free rein over the way in which products are presented, packaged, and offered. If this is misaligned with your central strategy, it can easily dilute the impact of your core message.

Where a company operates in organizational silos it is hard to accurately transfer the brand message between departments, leading to dilution along the way.

One example is where the marketing department operates separately from the sales team. The marketing team may have put substantial time and effort into creating a core message for the overarching campaign. However, the sales team is using its own criteria and assets to create material such as sales brochures and customer handouts, without referring to the marketing team. In essence, the two departments are each following their own independent rulebooks for the creation of material: the resulting inconsistencies don’t just frustrate the marketers, they reflect poorly on the brand as a whole.

Geographical silos can be problematic, too. This occurs often where local marketing teams are creating branded materials independent of each other – and independent of effective central oversight. Customers are exposed to different and conflicting messages from multiple sources, again diluting the effectiveness of your overarching strategy.

If customers are targeted with a watered-down version of your brand promise and message, is this really a business problem? Evidence suggests that it is. Here’s a closer look at how and why brand dilution negatively impacts an organization’s profitability.

InnerView and FocusVision's brand dilution report involved a survey of 250 senior managers from mid and large size companies, each with an annual revenue of at least $250m. When asked to quantify the cost of dilution to their organization, 24% estimated it at $6-10m in lost revenue, while more than a quarter (28%) estimated an annual loss of at least $10m.

By contrast, the estimated average revenue increase attributed to always presenting a brand in a consistent manner is 23%.

The message for global businesses is clear: to maximize revenue, it pays to put measures in place to eliminate brand dilution.

How exactly does brand dilution cause a business to leak revenue? In short, it’s because it detracts from the customer experience, leading to an inevitable reduction in the likelihood of purchase. In particular, dilution can be a major source of confusion in the marketplace.

Let’s say that your global marketing campaign has caught the attention of a potential customer. To get more information, the customer clicks on the website of one of your retail partners in their locality. If that retail partner has failed to represent your brand in the same way that the initial contact did, there’s a risk that the customer will be confused and, at best, pause to consider before making that purchase.

In terms of trust, this is the type of discrepancy that immediately causes alarm bells to ring. The customer may take the time to make enquiries with the local retailer to clear up the confusion. However, it’s far more likely that they will simply walk away to seek a supplier whose message is presented clearly, without confusion.

As discussed above, it usually takes multiple marketing touches for any brand to achieve recognition in the minds of a customers. Whether in the form of an advertisement, email campaign or kiosk display, each of these touchpoints comes at a cost to your organization. To maximize your ROI, you want each point of contact to have maximum effect – and this means having a strong, unifying message across all channels. If the message is watered down as a consequence of inconsistency or presentation irregularities, the ROI is diminished. Brand dilution means it’s going to take more touchpoints and more expense to achieve your target level of exposure, awareness and engagement.

If your brand message is no longer an accurate representation of what you stand for, it can soon lead to erosion of customer trust. Those customers may come on board expecting one thing but receive another. The consequences of this can include poor reviews, fewer repeat purchases, and damage to your reputation and brand equity.

The bigger your organization’s reach, the more filters your brand has to pass through, and the greater the scope for your brand promise becoming diluted. To combat this, businesses should look to put in place the type of technological support that enables them to stay in control of brand presentation and messaging – even when the company is scaling up globally.

Here are the key areas to focus on:

One very common trigger of dilution is where brand representatives use the incorrect ‘raw materials’ to construct collateral and communicate with customers. Examples include the ad designer using last year’s version of your logo to construct a banner – or the sales rep using an out-of-date product information sheet.

Going global can leave you with very large quantities of digital assets to manage. These may include core brand imagery, photography, video, animation, and audio files – as well as design assets, including templates for commonly produced items such as landing pages, ads, brochures, social posts, and emails.

A digital asset management (DAM) solution provides a central repository of these items. This helps you reduce the risk of brand dilution in two key ways:

Access. The point of DAM is to enable your team members and authorized third parties such as local agencies and dealerships to retrieve exactly the right assets they need to create branded materials. Providing you keep your repository up to date, there is no risk of designers or sales staff accessing the wrong assets.

Control. From the marketing manager’s perspective, DAM offers a valuable element of granular control over how your brand’s assets are accessed. For instance, if encryption protocols are hardwired into your DAM solution along with watermarking for visual items, this reduces the chances of items escaping into the wild and being used by copycats. Read only access can stop unauthorized alterations. Likewise, you should be able to see who has accessed what – and when.

Taken in isolation, digital asset management can go some way in helping you maintain brand strength, but it is not the whole story.

In short, a DAM can help you supply the right ingredients to the right people to help them create your brand story. But it often fails to give you sufficient control over how that story is being told. This is where content adaptation technology can prove invaluable.

Here’s how the right content adaptation platform can help:

Bringing multiple assets together. Often, a single piece of marketing material may require the use of multiple branded assets: logo, strapline, photography, product description, and disclaimer, for instance. A content adaptation platform should enable users to bring all of this together in the correct way – and in accordance with your brand guidelines.

Powerful templating. Traditional templates essentially provide a framework to allow your people to ‘fill in the gaps’ as they see fit. Next generation templating goes a step further, by giving you much greater control over how those gaps are filled. Smart templating technology features baked-in rules, set by you, dictating what can and cannot be added. For every piece of branded material to be created, you can decide what rules are needed to ensure brand protection – and ensure that those rules are adhered to.

Ease of use. Technology can only help you maintain brand strength if it is actually put to work by the people who matter. A fit for purpose content adaptation platform should be capable of being used by all brand representatives: even those with no design skills.

DAM and content adaptation technology reaches its full potential when it is combined with the right processes and workflows. The following areas are worth particular attention:

A brand can only ever be protected if you are clear on what it is you are actually trying to protect. What specific problems are your product or service offering designed to solve? What differentiates you from your competitors? What is your personality and promise? These all need to be pinned down before you can focus on preserving brand integrity.

This becomes especially relevant as you expand into new markets and lots of new brand representatives become involved in the content creation process. The beauty of content adaptation technology is that it can give you granular control over the degree of creativity exercised by partners, agencies, and salespeople in the field. To fully utilize this capability, you should establish which brand elements should always remain intact to prevent dilution – and which should be capable of change.

Rules baked into your templates will prevent your brand representatives going off-piste. At the same time, you should ensure that your people and brand partners are aware of what it is you are trying to protect and why. As such, your branding guidelines should be more than just a list of do’s and don’ts: it should help stakeholders understand your brand’s objectives.

Once you’ve defined your brand promise and pinned down the elements you need to protect, it’s then a matter of equipping your team to tell your story in a way that maintains your brand equity.

This is where Brandgility proves especially valuable. Ideal for growing global companies, it features powerful templating with baked-in adaptation rules and can be easily integrated with your existing asset management solution. This means that all brand representatives can create materials with ease – with no specialist design skills required. To discover more, request a demo today.