Logos, fonts, colour pallets, artworks - what call can you stuff under the brand identity umbrella - probably all of it. In this digital world where businesses face global competition, the importance of a robust branding strategy cannot be overstated.

In an infinite digital ecosystem, there’s no cap on the number of assets a brand create or needs, but the number of resources managing it are always finite, right? Among the most crucial building blocks for the success of a brand, is its approach toward brand asset management.

So let’s take a deep dive into how your business can reap the benefits in the journey of establishing a successful brand.

So, what is Brand Asset Management (BAM)?

Imagine you’re heading for a meeting, and your CMO asks you to pull up that asset from last year’s new year campaign. The creative was a hit on social media and nearly went viral.

What do you do? It’s not like you save year-old artwork on your desktop screen.

Setting processes are imperative with constantly evolving modes of reaching out to external stakeholders like customers, vendors, investors, and partners of your business. The need to establish a unified, consistent, and coherent blueprint to ensure that all the elements exposing you as a business, be it logos, typography, and sounds (the list can go on and on), all work together in unison is critical.

This is where brand asset management comes into the picture - pull up old images, share with a click, search with a keyword, never run out of space to store, and even extend or restrict access as needed. A brand asset management platform ensures control over all the ever-evolving elements that combine to form a brand ultimately. These platforms also ensure optimal consumption of resources by varying stakeholders in the entire value chain of brand development.

What constitutes brand assets?

Honestly, the list goes on and on. The best way to think about what qualifies as a brand asset is to think about the last time you ever directly associated an interaction with a given company to its brand.

This list can range from simple graphical elements like logos, typography, color palettes, packaging, etc., to more subtle sensory elements like audio effects. Any digital asset that makes people think of your brand and the values your organization stands for can be considered a brand asset.

Here’s a laundry list to give you a glimpse:

  • Brand typography
  • Brand’s colour pallet
  • Brand’s logo
  • Brand’s name
  • Brand’s punch line, or slogan
  • Brand’s design guidelines
  • Brand’s mascot, or avatar
  • Brand’s audio content
  • Brand’s visual content

Want to know more about brand assets? Read our detailed blog.

Who uses brand asset management and why?

Marketing. Sales, Product. Engineering. Human resource. Is there any team left that wouldn’t use brand asset management? We doubt it. Due to the expansive scope of the composition of brand assets, numerous teams will need to access these brand assets throughout their day-to-day work.

From the obvious use cases of marketers & sales teams working with numerous stakeholders for assets like pictures and videos to the designers creating such assets, the use cases draw out further to teams like finance or HR, where they may need the right guidelines for presentations, fonts, and typography.

Further, developers need to continuously access these assets and account for brand guidelines while developing products that will ultimately stand as the face of the brand. Think of brand asset management as the ultimate destination for all things assets - it’s the digital repository that penetrates across teams, stores data, and provides easy access.

For all the above and numerous use cases, control in access management and asset organization is a must, and that is where Brand Asset Management platforms shine.

A unified service ensures that everyone across teams is on board the latest brand guidelines, has the right level of access to various brand paraphernalia, and all stakeholders can coordinate seamlessly wrt the right usage of brand assets.

Why is BAM critical & daunting?

We are creatures of the digital era, and organizations are in a race to maximize digital branding avenues more than ever, all these with ever-increasing financial constraints.

Top up this with the advent of a remote-first world - the sales team sits out of the US, developers are based in Bangalore, and marketing is in London - in this context, brand asset management becomes extremely challenging and yet all the more pivotal due the following reasons:

  • Countless and ever-increasing distribution channels

From widescreen desktops to tiny smartwatches, the touch points for customer interaction are only increasing every day. This skyrockets the complexity in brand assets due to numerous possible asset variation permutations, like sizes, resolutions, etc., and hence substantiates the need for version control

  • Maximum reliance on digital mediums

There is a paradigm shift wherein more and more work is getting done digitally. Accordingly, the inherent nature of brand assets is changing.

  • Siloed tools (Cloud storage, CMS, CRM, Email automation, etc.)

Organizations rely on numerous tools that are often not interconnected, often leading to high lead times and inconsistent brand assets. A platform that integrates both internal and external systems is a must.

  • Reduced budgets

With financial constraints hitting marketing budgets the hardest, it is of utmost importance to maximize the utilization of brand assets and avoid all forms of duplication and rework; a centralized brand asset management system can justify its cost many times over in such scenarios

What benefits does cloud-based brand asset management deliver?


A cloud-based brand asset management system can deliver plenty of benefits such as some listed below:

  • User access management: Ever struggled for a peer to extend you access of a drive when he was out of office? Do you remember waiting hours for it? A cloud-based platform enables extension and limitation of access at an account level.  A one-time process that sorts access challenges at a company level.
  • Easy file sharing: Ever struggled with finding the right files over endless scrolling of emails or countless sub-folders? Well, a brand asset management solution provides enhanced file-sharing methods like URL-based sharing that can be further used to embed content directly across various platforms. This way, you further keep control of outdated content being refreshed automatically.
  • Advanced file search: With search criteria like tags and metadata, finding assets is smooth sailing with the right cloud-based BAM tool. Think about the productivity gains in the time lost by your team while trying various file name permutations just to get to that Christmas-themed brand logo and numerous such scenarios.
  • Third-party software integrations: Earlier, we spoke about how we rely on a continuously increasing number of tools and software daily, and most of these operate fairly siloed manner. a cloud-based BAM platform extends advanced capabilities to integrate with numerous such software and tools so that everyone from Jake in HR to Jenna in Marketing access the right brand assets.
  • Version control: Keeping up with the right versions has been a hassle we have faced. BAM tools make this sophisticated task super easy by creating clean and easily accessible, and well-documented version history so that the end users can make informed decisions and your brand never display an outdated banner.
  • Standard use of brand assets: An amalgamated outcome of the above value propositions is a high degree of standardization of brand asset usage across teams.
  • Asset usage analytics: This is probably the final nail in the coffin regarding increasing the ROI and productivity of resources. With exact insights around asset consumption and usage of different functionalities, teams can analyze what adds the most value and concentrate efforts accordingly.

    Furthermore, details around features adoption are also available, so you can make conscious decisions about what modules to opt for, maximizing your ROI.

How can your business use brand asset management?

Now that we know all the advantages of onboarding a BAM software let us go through how your business can use a BMS practically:

Consolidate a vast library of brand assets

With a BMS, you can create a comprehensive library of all your brand assets under the same hood. This serves as the most elemental building block toward robust brand asset management.

Adherence to brand guidelines and design consistency

Working with external stakeholders like agencies and consultants often adds to the complexity and effort required to adhere to brand guidelines.

Furthermore, design consistency is paramount for brands with a global presence, separating the premium brands from the rest. A cloud-based BAM platform provides seamless internal communication across teams and geographies to achieve this just right.

Automate workflows

Skyrocket the productivity of your resources by designing and implementing automated workflows that can be customized to your specific recurring use cases. This way, not only do you save time by avoiding duplicate work but also enhance employee productivity by letting them concentrate primarily on the creative aspects of brand building.

Brand templates

BMS provides various editable templates and multiple advanced tools like customizable brand guidelines and a plethora of various other functionalities needed for effective brand building.

Closing in...

Brand building can be an elaborate process, requiring careful consideration and intricate tools. A best-in-class BAM cloud-based platform like ImageKit can act as a catalyst to streamline your brand-building efforts through its various functionalities covering all the considerations discussed above. With the trust of 500+ global brands, ImageKit has established itself among the BMS solutions leaders. Not convinced yet?

Take a free trial. We are free till you are ready to upgrade.