Umbrella branding: Vatnajökull region

When a series of products unite under the same brand and message, the result is often called an umbrella brand.

I came across a successful execution of umbrella branding in Höfn í Hornafirði, a town on the south-eastern coast of Iceland. “Wow! – Vatnajökull region” is a brand used by a wide array of local food producers. As soon as you see the Wow! sign you know you’ve found some of the high quality food produced in the region.

Among the benefits of a successful umbrella brand are

• Economies of scope
• Reputation linking

As the number of products promoted within the ubmrella brand is increased and broader media used, economies of scope kick in and more people can be reached with each dollar spent. Also, the reputations of products within the brand are linked and once the consumer disovers one of them he is more likley to try another.

Our goal is to make Brand Capital a perfect fit for brand managers of umbrella brands like Vatnajökull region. With Brand Capital, downloading and applying the relevant digital assets becomes fast and easy. Whether your product is icecream, freshwater fish or lobster, downloading the right asset for a sign for your door or a photo for an ad in the local newspaper will only be a click or two away.

Are your brand files scattered on network drives and FTP servers?

Last week I read a report from Aberdeen Group; The Marketers Guide to Justifying Investments in Digital Asset Management by Ian Michiels. How’s that for a snappy title. I have read my fair share of vendor sponsored reports and digest each one with a pinch of salt. This report however contains some very interesting statistics that chime with our business plan and support our outlook on the state of play regarding the management of brand assets within companies.

Aberdeen surveyed over 130 executives last April and May, mainly marketing people.

Storage solutions for Digital Assets

When asked about storage of marketing content, 72% of companies have some kind of a DAM solution. But still 55% use a shared network drive, 38% store files on individual hard drives and 38% use FTP servers.

This is the issue we’re tackling with Brand Capital. Our aim is to eliminate the use of those black hole mediums where digital assets go to die. The information not captured in the numbers are the Email folders and CD’s crisscrossing the planet with associated work and cost overhead.

One of the things I feel is missing from the report is identifying the type of DAM system in use. Is it an internal company solution behind the firewall or a web based solution?

My theory is that less than half of the DAM enabled companies have a true central repository where employees in offices around the world as well as 3rd party agencies and marketing people can access the digital assets. This again would explain the FTP servers. I might drop Ian a line and ask him to confirm this.

This quote from Kathy King, Digital Asset Manager at Staples Promotion is my favorite bit in the whole report:

[...]Today, the company has been using the solution for five years, “in the past, significant staff time was consumed with finding and disseminating assets, via email or FTP, as a result of customer, supplier or sales associate requests. We had one client for whom we were making 60 to 70 CDs per catalog release. Now it’s a simple matter of a ten-minute task”[...]

This is what we want to do for people like Kathy.
The vision driving us at Transmit is that we can actually do the world some good by freeing the marketing collateral from the shared network drives. We want them placed in a true central repository, easily accessible by all parties that have anything to do with brand implementation.

Tell us your story. How do you manage your files?

Managing Brands Online

Where to start? A fresh blog instance is like a calm pool just before you jump in with a big splash, right?

I’ve been working on brand related projects on and off for the last 5 years. The force of brand is strong with people working in marketing and advertising. New trends emerge and agencies struggle to keep reinventing the term and coming up with models on what defines a brand.

Gone are the good old days when a nicely designed logo did the trick. Today you need to have a tone of voice, sonic strategy, moving patterns, photography guidelines and participate in the online conversation with your clients.

This of course causes considerable headache for the people responsible for the day to day management of the brand, the gatekeepers of all things branded; the brand managers.

Some of the questions they get pounded with from co-workers, agencies and partners include:

• Do you have the vector format logo file?
• What is the HEX value for the corporate blue?
• Is this the latest power point template?
• I need a print resolution photo of this product.
• I just deployed this new microsite and used a much better colour template than the standard one. Don’t you like it?
• What is the corporate font and where can I find it?

I know from experience that there is always that certain someone who has the answers and associated files or knows who you should talk to. This is true for even some of the leading brands on this planet. These individuals are brand managers, even though it might not be stated on their business cards.

The brand elements exist in electronic format on some kind of storage medium. These range from CD’s in a drawer to highly sophisticated online brand management portals. In between we have lots of shared network drives and too many cluttered email accounts.

The same files are requested frequently and the same questions are asked by every newcomer to the brand. This is a great waste of everyone’s time and we want to fix that.

So, the plan with this blog is to start a dialogue around brand management and see if we can design and implement a solution to improve the quality of life for brand managers and save everyone some time by doing so.