How to Leverage Your Brand Assets
The key element to building a brand asset that will instantly be associated with your company, product, or service and that will positively promote your business is consistency.
In the end, it’s all about:
- the elements you choose to make up your brand assets
- how you choose these elements
- how you organize and distribute them to your audience
Be consistent and organized
Consistency is what makes a brand asset what it is and it’s what gives it its value.
Internationally recognized brands stay true to their brand image by consistently using and incorporating their most significant brand assets into every line of communication they have with their audience. Be it customers, partners, suppliers, vendors.
Once you’ve identified what brand assets already make your brand recognizable and what assets you can invest in to further supplement the value of those assets, include them in all your communications.
Use your brand assets:
- on your packaging
- across all your brand’s communication channels
- when building your SEO strategies
- in the social media content, you share
- in your online marketing and email marketing strategies
Strengthen your brand assets by making sure they are supported by clear brand guidelines and rules. This includes everything from color to size variations, tone of voice, or terminology.
Your brand assets should be coherent, constant, and used by every one of your teams in the same manner. You can’t have 6 different versions of the same logo or 3 different color palettes. And you can’t have your marketing team creating its own version and your sales team using another.
To facilitate everyone’s access to the approved versions and avoid any errors in using the brand assets, use a system to centralize them. This way, when anyone needs to use a brand asset, they know exactly where to find it.
This will help you improve your workflow and save resources and time. Not to mention help you avoid unnecessary frustrations.
Continue to Collect and Analyze Brand Asset Data
Your work collecting and analyzing feedback on how your brand assets are perceived does not end once you’ve identified them. Make it a point to regularly reassess how audiences perceive your brand and products and what elements they most associate with them.
This will help you stay on track with your brand guidelines and customize your messages for different groups of potential customers.
Extend Your Brand’s Reach
Yes, brand assets will attract more potential customers and they will help you build a loyal following. Those are indeed very valuable benefits to any business.
However, once you’ve established your main brand assets, one of the best ways to leverage them is using them to expand your business.
One example is creating and launching a new product or a new product line. In such cases, your brand assets will be the ones paving the way for the new products to become successful.
For instance, let’s say your company sells sneakers under a certain brand name, with a certain logo or pattern. A brand name that customers and potential customers easily recognize.
If your brand is established, your audience should already be associating your brand with positive attributes. Like “reliable”, “comfortable”, or “fashionable”. So, when you decide to introduce a new line of sneakers, you won’t have to go through the same motions a new company launching a new product would.
Your audience will already know your value proposition, the benefits of choosing your brand. And, as soon as they see your logo or your specific pattern, they will know what the company selling the sneakers is.
In the same way, you can use brand assets to expand your brand by accessing a new product category.
For instance, let’s say your brand is often associated with the term “luxury”. When potential customers see your logo, they instantly think “premium product”. This allows you to choose from a wide range of product categories to develop further.
Ideally, you will be targeting product categories that relate to the one your brand is established for. For example, you could be selling luxury purses now and expanding your business to include products like travel bags or suitcases.
Other examples of new directions you could be expanding your brand to using your brand assets include:
- developing complementary products such as socks or sports gear if you sell sneakers
- creating items for specific customer base categories such as a line of baby shampoo if you sell shampoos or other hair care products
- using your brand authority to access new markets like Apple did when they used their reputation as quality computer manufacturers to start selling other electronics like iPhones and iPods
