The British Army took control…of their brand assets
As any organisation grows they are almost certain to collect a large selection of images, logos and other branding resources. The various copyrights, licenses and internal policies attached to each of these branding tools can easily start to get confusing, particularly when a wide variety of different people need to use the images.
Back in 2006 The British Army was suffering from this problem worse than most. The Army is formed of a great number of divisions, units and regiments all of which had developed their own traditions and methods for managing their brands. This, combined with a regular turnover in the command, meant that the Army had no clear policy for managing its brand assets.
Whenever the press or another media organisation wanted an image or logo it was enormously difficult to find the right version of an image and determine how and under what conditions it could legally be used. This fragmentation not only made work flow difficult and inefficient, but it was also damaging the Army’s brand.
The solution the Army adopted was to implement a brand asset management program. This effectively gave them a large online database where all the images could be stored centrally and kept up to date with all the relevant licensing information.
Centralising the brand like this helped consolidate the Army’s image and lead to one Army website which offered structured sections for each of the individual regiments and units to use for their purposes whilst sticking to the house style. This actually made maintaining a public image much easier for the Army from the ground up and gave them better tools, whilst leaving all their content protected by Crown Copyright.
As an enormous organisation the Army required a fairly sophisticated brand asset management program. However, even smaller organisations can struggle to keep track of their branding resources and licenses. Implementing a system to keep track of these whilst a company is smaller can make managing it a lot easier as it grows.
Contributor Ewan MacDougal is a professional blogger based in Leeds, England.