What Is Brand Identity And How To Maintain It With DAM Software

Many believe building a brand identity is only about designing attractive logos and selecting a captivating color palette. Yes, these design elements matter, no doubt. After all, we still associate Netflix with its bold, red "N" logo and its black and red color palette that signifies passion, energy, and excitement

But Netflix or any other great brand did a lot more to strengthen their brand identity. They maintained a consistent brand image across different channels. Whether you visit their website, check out their social media handle, or see a random advertisement on the road, their brand voice, messaging, and visual language are uniform, cohesive, and clear. So how do you achieve this?

In this article, we discuss the intricacies of a robust brand identity, the advantages of cohesive branding, and the role of digital asset management in ensuring a strong brand presence. Read along!

What is Brand Identity, and Why is it Important?

Just like you have a photo, a phone number, and a home address that sets you apart from the rest, your brand needs to have a set of unique elements that differentiates it from other brands. These elements (visual, verbal, and emotional) that convey the essence of your brand to consumers, employees, and other stakeholders constitute your brand identity.

For instance, the brand identity of Coca-Cola is determined by its unique cursive script logo and dynamic red and white color scheme. Similarly, Airbnb is readily recognized by its world famous “Belo logo” and Uber is often recognized by its stylized "U" logo and the black and white color palette.

Brands like these have not only created memorable visual elements but also maintained a consistent brand identity across channels. This helps them enjoy a variety of benefits, which we will understand in the next section.

Benefits of building a strong brand identity

Here are the top three benefits of having a strong brand identity:

Built credibility and trust

A strong brand identity not only serves as a communicator of your brand’s personality but also shapes your customers' perceptions of your commitment to high-quality service and excellent customer experience. This automatically builds credibility and trust in their mind, which plays a pivotal role in attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.

Promote brand recognition and attract customers

A strong brand identity is also distinct and easily recognizable. When you employ consistent visuals and messaging across all your channels, it contributes to the development of a unified and easily identifiable appearance of your brand for your target audience. Whenever a need arises for a consumer in the future, your brand will stand out in their minds.

Offer better ROI and impression on advertising campaigns

A strong brand identity reinforces the effectiveness of your message in advertising campaigns. This can result in a stronger impact, leading to better engagement and, ultimately, improved returns on your advertising investment. Also, a strong brand identity contributes to the perceived value of your services, making the users more curious about your offerings. Ultimately, it will lead them to check out your brand and products, resulting in improved impressions.

Role of Brand Assets in Managing Brand Identity

A strong brand identity is dependent on the cohesiveness of your messaging and how well brand elements (also known as brand assets) like logos, images, and videos resonate with your audience. These assets play a key role in communicating your:

Brand values
Brand positioning
Brand story
Brand personality

All of which contribute to your brand's identity.

For instance, Apple's iconic logo design, shown as a half-bitten apple, is one of the most recognizable logos globally. The simplicity and elegance of the brand logo are symbolic of Apple’s identity and its commitment to design excellence and innovation.

However, managing brand assets poses several challenges, hampering your ability to manage brand identity effectively. For starters, brand assets are usually scattered across local drives, servers, or individual computers, making it difficult to locate specific files when needed. Secondly, brand assets may be misused or used without proper authorization, leading to inconsistent brand identity.

This is where a Digital Asset Management system comes into play.

4 Ways DAM Software Can Help in Managing Brand Identity

A DAM system ensures that most of the challenges associated with managing brand assets are eliminated thanks to its advanced capabilities and rich features. This makes DAM a must-have for managing your brand identity. It helps in this regard by:

Ensuring brand consistency

When asset retrieval and search are complex, your team members might end up using any random version of the asset because it is more easily accessible than the actual version they need. This will result in brand inconsistency and ultimately weaken your identity.

DAM systems, like ImageKit, act as a centralized repository for all your brand assets, ensuring that only the latest and approved versions of images, graphics, videos, and other brand materials are accessible to users. ImageKit also offers unobstructed access to these assets and ensures quick and easy retrieval with features like meta-data tagging and advanced search.

Long story short, when you use ImageKit, the chances of your team using outdated or unauthorized assets are slim, resulting in improved brand consistency and, ultimately, stronger brand identity.

Streamlines creative collaboration and workflow

Building a strong brand identity requires everyone from the design team to the branding team to work in sync. The importance of effective collaboration in strengthening brand identity can be better understood with an example.

Think of a brand working on refreshing its brand identity. During the project:

The design team is diligently creating fresh visuals and product designs. They have created multiple versions of the assets and stored them in different folders.
The branding team is focused on ensuring alignment of the created assets and marketing materials with the brand's style guide. They are the approvers of the designs.
The IT team is feeding data to the website
The marketing team is strategizing associated campaigns with the launch

Now, without effective collaboration and proper asset management workflows, it will be utter chaos. Imagine a scenario where the marketing team ends up using an old logo on an important LinkedIn post targeting high-profile clients. This happened because there was no communication from the branding team not to use that logo. A precarious situation, right?

To avoid such scenarios, you need to adopt a DAM system, as it can streamline and automate most of your creative workflows. ImageKit, for instance, can simplify feedback management and streamline approval workflows by allowing managers and approvers to provide instant feedback directly to the asset. In other words, no more back-and-forth emails between teams.

Access to approved version of media asset

Ensuring access to the approved version of media assets is important for maintaining a cohesive brand identity. Any deviation can lead to miscommunication and dilution of the brand's intended identity.

Now, there are two ways in which ImageKit helps in this regard. One, it ensures that all approved versions are stored in one accessible location. This means that any user, irrespective of their location and device, will be able to retrieve only the most recent and approved version of the asset. Secondly, ImageKit offers a powerful version history feature. This allows teams to track changes, revert to previous versions, and ensure that the latest approved version is always available.

Optimize assets for a multichannel environment

Today’s brands operate across a multitude of channels, spanning social media platforms, websites, marketplaces, and more. Each channel comes with unique requirements, necessitating the adaptation of your brand assets to ensure optimal performance and user engagement. For instance, different social media platforms have varying file formats and media dimension requirements compared to a website

Now, adapting brand assets manually for each platform can be time-consuming and prone to errors. This is where DAM systems can help. They automatically optimize assets to suit various channels, ensuring the perfect fit without manual intervention.

ImageKit has the capability to automatically optimize both images and videos. When it comes to images, ImageKit automatically evaluates different formats, your original image content, and the devices that need to support those images. It then uses this information to intelligently deliver the right format you need for the particular channel. The same goes for videos where ImageKit automatically converts videos to WebM or MP4 format or any other choice of video format as desired based on browser support in real-time.

Create a Memorable Brand Identity with a DAM System

A strong DAM system is the key to building a memorable brand identity. By streamlining access management workflows, a DAM system ensures consistency and coherence of every facet of your brand identity. ImageKit emerges as the perfect DAM solution, offering not only centralized storage and collaborative capabilities but also advanced optimization tools.

With ImageKit, you're not just managing assets; you're sculpting a brand identity that resonates and endures in the minds of your audience. To know more about ImageKit and how it can help, sign up for a free trial now.