What is Brand Advisory, and why is it so important?
Ever wondered how much off-brand content is slipping through the cracks? According to a survey by Marq [1], 77% of respondents see off-brand content in their company. Additionally, 15% said their organization lacks brand guidelines, 14% don’t know where to find or how to use them, and 23% said they are only used by creative teams.
Why does this matter? Inconsistencies in a brand’s image can hurt customer trust and the brand’s reputation, leading to revenue losses. The same study shows that brand consistency pays off, literally, with 68% of respondents saying it has contributed 10% to over 20% of their revenue growth.
With decentralized teams, multiple communication channels, and varying interpretations of brand guidelines, maintaining uniformity can seem like a daunting task. This is where Brand Advisory comes in. It involves managing a brand’s identity to ensure consistency and alignment with established guidelines across all touchpoints, including logos, colour palettes, messaging, and tone of voice.
With hundreds of brand assets produced daily, from major marketing campaigns to PowerPoint presentations, it’s crucial to make Brand Advisory more efficient. AI technologies could be the game-changer in maintaining brand consistency—if they aren’t already.
How AI helps to maintain consistency
AI technologies, such as machine learning and natural language processing are being more and more often put to work in branding. Since AI is capable of analyzing vast amounts of data, detecting patterns and making decisions faster than humans it could bring numerous benefits for brand management.
But how all of that can be practically applied?
- AI-Powered Asset Management Systems
Brand Asset Management Systems are the single source of truth for a brand’s image and are essential for maintaining its consistency. They allow companies to store, share, and track all of their branding assets, including logos, images, and marketing materials, making sure that they are easily accessible and always up to date.
AI-powered BAM systems are revolutionizing the way brands manage their assets, they enable brand managers to organize and manage them automatically. By using features such as natural language based search, they allow users to find assets based on context, visual elements, or metadata, ensuring faster access to compliant materials. Another AI-powered feature that can come in handy is the automated tagging of the assets, significantly reducing the time previously needed to do it manually. AI is also utilized to improve analytics, providing in-depth information about how the assets are being used and even predicting how newly added assets will perform in the future.
- Automated Compliance Checks
Tools that automatically check whether produced assets comply with brand guidelines could be a true game-changer in the way companies govern their brands. These AI models can analyze design elements, colours, fonts, and even tone of voice and flag any deviations from the brand guidelines, giving each asset a certain score reflecting to what extent it complies with the brand.
Some of these tools can go beyond the basic brand compliance checks—they are also capable of analyzing the contents of the images being used and triggering an alert if they violate any brand communication guidelines, such as portraying nudity or not adhering to diversity and inclusion policies.
Do automated compliance checks have the potential to fully replace human-eye reviews? They can significantly reduce the time needed to assess the assets in terms of basic branding requirements, serving as a great first step in the compliance review. However, they have some limitations—some of these models are capable of reviewing only certain file formats. They are also unable to understand broader contexts of usage or to give creative recommendations. Building a coherent brand image often goes beyond using a correct logo or colour scheme.
- Brand GPTs
An essential part of Brand Advisory’s service is educating about the brand. It involves pointing to the right design resources and answering day-to-day queries about the brand guidelines and their applications. Also this aspect of Brand Advisory’s work could benefit from using AI technologies. Solutions such as integration of brand guidelines with Chat GPT to create custom chatbots can decrease the time needed to answer basic questions about the brand. In a human style conversation, it can provide answers to questions such as what are the primary and secondary brand colours, what image style should be used in social media or where specific guidelines can be found. It could provide round-the-clock support, answering queries regardless of the time zones and schedules. A brand chatbot could serve as a first point of contact for simple, brand-related queries before reaching out to a human brand expert whenever more complex advice is needed.
What’s next?
AI has the potential to revolutionize how companies govern their brands by offering automated asset management, compliance checks, conversational AI models serving as digital brand experts, and many other applications.
Including AI tools in brand advisory should be an essential step for developing a future-proof brand strategy. AI can potentially enhance efficiency, accuracy, and consistency, making it a vital part of Brand Advisory service.
Will AI-powered tools replace the human-operated Brand Advisory? It’s more likely they will work hand in hand, leaving human brand experts more room for creative work while taking over repetitive tasks making the process of maintaining brand consistency more efficient.
[1] State of brand consistency (marq.com)
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