3 trends shaping the future of brand-building

Having number-crunched data from 2.5 million users of its brand-building platform, across 200 countries Frontify has an answer. Digge Zetterberg, VP of Marketing at Frontify explains: “A brand is a collective impression of a product or company, shaped with every touchpoint. Simply put, your brand is your company’s most valuable asset. That’s why we’ve identified today's emerging trends when it comes to brand building. These are the foundations that are allowing world-leading brands to grow at scale.”

Here are just three of those key insights:

1. Going ‘glocal’ needs a single source of brand truth

There’s an increasing shift towards ‘glocal’ (global + local) brands, with more brand teams spread out across more countries and time zones than before. For example, the average brand is now accessed from 10.2 countries on Frontify’s brand-building platform, and the number of monthly active users has increased by 91% over the last two years. This growth also highlights that today’s brands are creating more organized and open brand-building systems and embracing more collaborative ways of working.

The trend towards increased globalization means that even if a brand’s commercial focus is local, it must be prepared to travel and scale. And that means that maintaining brand consistency from a single source of truth is more important than ever before.

Marketers need to check how they’re monitoring international brand compliance and provide global team members with access to shared guidelines and assets to stay agile and competitive. That’s especially true for those operating out of the US, the UK, Germany, Western Europe and the Nordic countries: those markets are more likely to use shared brand platforms, which means competitors will already be one step ahead.

2. Manage the asset avalanche

The growth of digital media and modern brand demands has led to an explosion in the number of assets owned by the average brand on Frontify: a 458% increase over the last three years, to be precise.

This asset avalanche is creating new organizational challenges among marketers, designers, creatives and other brand guardians. And, not surprisingly, it’s impacting on their behavior: Frontify users are carrying out more frequent and sophisticated searches to locate their files, with search volume up by 125%.

What does this tell us? As brands are dealing with more files and touchpoints than ever before, they need even better routines for tagging and structuring files, so they can better measure brand compliance and optimize asset usage.

Zetterberg comments: “As brand touchpoints increase, creative teams face the challenge of creating and managing thousands of assets. Having an integrated brand-building solution with a DAM to create, organize, and collaborate on brand assets increases efficiency for the entire organization. In addition, teams can track the use of assets, to gain a clearer insight into their ROI.”

3. Templates power up efficiency

Templates for campaign visuals, business cards or social media assets have emerged as powerful tools for brand consistency and efficiency, with a 42% uplift in template usage in the last year. Brands use the same template at least 30 times on average, meaning they’re theoretically increasing efficiency x30 for marketers and designers. However, there are still more time savings to be had: the brand with the most successful template usage on Frontify created over 180,000 publications using all its templates.

As Zetterberg explains: “Replacing multiple one-off design processes not only improves brand consistency but also reduces a lot of manual work for design teams, allowing both marketers and designers to better allocate their resources. Templates also allow companies to market themselves globally and localize campaign materials efficiently."

The most used template on Frontify has been published 13,000 times. That’s a lot of productivity potential. The key, as ever, is to keep track of usage. Marketers and brand builders should assess which templates are being used, how often and why. This can help identify new opportunities for brand enablement or pinpoint which templates would have the most impact if they were improved.

For more insights and advice on how to future-proof business success through brand building, get Frontify’s Brand-Building Trends report.