Brand control ensures consistent and uniform brand communication by monitoring and controlling all brand-related activities and ensuring compliance with defined guidelines.

In this article, you will find out which risks threaten your brand in document creation and how you can successfully counteract them with effective brand control.

The topic covered here offers you the opportunity to make your company more agile. Effective brand control not only protects the brand image and strengthens brand integrity, but can also increase your operational efficiency in brand management by up to 50 %.

What are the challenges in brand control?

One of the biggest challenges in brand control is to ensure that the brand guidelines are implemented consistently and uniformly.

Source: Brand Consistency Report

Especially in large companies, it can be difficult to ensure that all departments and employees understand the guidelines correctly and implement them on a day-to-day basis.

• Differences in interpretation: Differences of opinion or lack of communication often lead to the brand being diluted or presented inconsistently.
• Dynamic work environment: It is challenging to enforce the brand in a fast-paced, dynamic business environment where employees often need to make quick decisions and utilize flexible processes.
• Time lost due to lack of templates: Valuable time is often wasted because templates and guidelines have to be laboriously searched for and then correctly applied.

How the lack of template software slows down your company's agility and reduces operational efficiency

The challenges in implementing the brand guidelines lead to negative consequences:

Important professionals are retained

Unclear or poorly communicated brand guidelines lead to delays as employees waste valuable time searching for information, making corrections or coordinating with different departments. This loss of time is further exacerbated by the skills shortage: with fewer qualified employees available, inefficient use of already scarce resources is particularly critical. This significantly slows down the company's ability to react to market requirements, impairs productivity and increases the risk of falling behind the competition.

Source: PWC Studie Fachkräftemangel

Loss of confidence among stakeholders

If brand-relevant documents or guidelines are difficult to access, this leads to inconsistencies in brand communication. Employees may use outdated materials, resulting in an inconsistent perception of the brand. This can significantly affect the trust of external stakeholders and the identity of the brand.

Effects on customer loyalty

If the brand guidelines are not followed consistently, errors creep into the final content. These errors, which become visible to the public, can undermine the professionalism and credibility of the brand. Once lost, trust is difficult to regain and can have a negative impact on customer loyalty and the brand's reputation.

Where does a large part of the implementation of a brand take place?

The implementation of your brand takes place in a variety of everyday means of communication that are often overlooked, but are crucial for the perception of your corporate identity.

• Email signatures: Every employee contact reflects your brand. Consistent, professionally designed email signatures contribute significantly to consistency and credibility. They are often the first point of contact with customers and partners.
• Business documents: From letters to offers - many company documents influence how your brand is perceived. A consistent visual design ensures that your company always appears professional. Frequent changes make this difficult, and many documents often do not comply with corporate design guidelines.
• Presentations: Whether in sales presentations or internal meetings, visual consistency in presentations is crucial. Rapidly changing content, such as prices or product details, must be updated manually, which can lead to errors and inconsistencies.
• Tables and reports: Tables are a central component of reports, both internally and externally. Here, too, it is important to clearly convey the corporate identity in order to present the brand consistently in all reports and analyses.

To ensure this consistency across all channels, it makes sense to use template software such as primedocs.

With primedocs, these means of communication automatically comply with the brand guidelines, which reduces effort and ensures the integrity of your brand. You can find out how this works in detail in the next section.

How to operate effective brand control with primedocs

With primedocs, you have the ideal solution to manage your brand control consistently and efficiently across the most important communication channels such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. The template software ensures that all documents comply with your company's corporate design guidelines at all times and significantly reduces manual effort.

Microsoft Outlook: Standardized e-mail communication

• Central e-mail signatures: primedocs automatically manages the signatures for all employees and ensures that they are always brand-compliant and legally correct. Different profiles for internal and external emails are also easy to manage.
• Time-controlled campaigns: Use emails as a marketing tool and control content centrally and automatically to send professional and consistent messages.

Microsoft Word module: Efficient and consistent document creation

• Text modules: With primedocs, you can define central text modules that are to be used by all employees. This means that important content such as legal texts always remains correct and consistent.
• Corporate design check: primedocs automatically checks whether all design specifications such as logos, fonts and colors have been applied correctly and adjusts incorrect formatting with a single click.
• Interfaces: The software can be seamlessly integrated into other systems such as your CRM or other business applications, so you can use up-to-date information directly in your documents at any time.

Microsoft PowerPoint: Visual consistency in presentations

• Template library: With primedocs, you can provide centrally managed presentation templates that automatically include all design guidelines such as logos, fonts and colors.
• Automatic customization: Old or third-party slides can be adapted to your corporate design at the touch of a button, which is particularly crucial for external presentations in order to maintain brand consistency.
• Multilingualism: The software supports you in creating multilingual presentations so that your international team can work efficiently.

Microsoft Excel: Automated tables and reports

• Design conformity: primedocs ensures that all Excel tables and charts are automatically created with the correct colors, logos and fonts to present your brand professionally in figures and data.