Insights tagged with 'system insights'

We are continuing our series examining the possibilities of how you can configure and utilise the bethebrand system. This time we look at how bethebrand can help you get the most from your partner and supplier relationships.

Operational Challenges

In a busy marketing department, many programmes are worked on at the same time. Different members of the team work on different programmes in different combinations. When you add to that a variety of external agencies, printers and other suppliers, a spider's web of briefing, development and approval emerges. This needs careful oversight, project management and cost control.

Whether you are looking at print quotations, DM assembly, website updates, minor amend requests or lead creative, the quality of the outcome is maximised (and the level of frustration minimised) if requirements and instructions are clearly communicated.

Furthermore, diligent and inspiring briefs are the most important element in the creation of great creative. Frustratingly, however, these briefs can all too often be reduced to snatched moments at a meeting or on the telephone. This can be the pathway to delay and confusion, and, ultimately, creative elements that do not meet the brief.

bethebrand System Solution

With bethebrand, you are able to request, create and approve work quicker and with fewer resources. It allows multiple teams and external agencies, suppliers and partners to work together, following standardised processes, via one collaborative online workspace. Initiate creative projects; allocate resources and users to tasks; manage deadlines, approvals and signoffs; and track status - all with a clear audit trail

This process instils a discipline and focus on briefing and collaboration, both internally and externally, that acts as a firm bedrock for superb creative that is also efficient in terms of both time and cost.

Client Outcomes

Discovery is a South Africa-based financial services group that is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, with its headquarters in Sandton. A long-standing bethebrand client, Discovery engages in long and short-term insurance, asset management, banking, investment, wellness programmes and employee benefits through its various brands. The Group has subsidiaries in South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, Singapore and Australia.

Through its journey with bethebrand, Discovery has developed a comprehensive and highly sophisticated system. An important element of its system is how teams collaborate creatively with each other and the external agencies.

Senior Marketing Manager Sylvia Torannini said: "We have been working with bethebrand since 2012. We started with a specific goal of further improving our review and signoff process. We then expanded the system through workflow and asset management right across our businesses, and married it perfectly to our processes."

Sylvia added: "We have a sophisticated marketing programme spanning five brands, all of which is managed by a centralised marketing team. As you can appreciate, the creative development process driving five brands is equally sophisticated, necessitating close and detailed agency relationships. With our bethebrand system, which we call 'Trending' internally, we are able to create and track every agency project within the system."

"With Trending, we have an end-to-end workflow process that touches multiple department within the business, as well as marketing and systems teams. To cater for specific business processes, we use the workflows that were specifically designed for various marketing areas. Each brief is carefully developed, checked and distributed to the agency. The agency's own system dovetails with 'Trending', enabling seamless workflow management and close partnership"

"We use the system to initiate workflows to review, approve and sign off all communications and creative elements. This allows us to build a repository of completed work and - most importantly - create a reliable audit trail for governance purposes."

"Our bethebrand system therefore delivers highly efficient working practices that creates outstanding creative, plus the management oversight for both operational and cost optimisation."

Would You Like to Know More?

In our continuing series examining the breadth, depth, and possibilities of how you can configure and utilise the bethebrand system, this time we are taking a look at the CommsBuilder functionality and how it creates time savings and cost benefits for marketing departments needing to work their budgets ever harder.

Operational Challenges

Having a really good creative agency is absolutely key in ensuring that you can punch through and stand out in ever more cluttered and confusing market spaces. But great agencies are reassuringly expensive, because you are bringing premier league talent to bear on your marketing challenges and opportunities.

But there can be a substantial ongoing cost to using agency teams to execute every single outing for the creative. After all, they are time cost businesses, but the cost in relation to the specific application can be out of proportion and consume as much budget as the initial creative development.

But what if your own marketing team could undertake specific execution tasks themselves? Even if they are not trained designers?

bethebrand's CommsBuilder functionality delivers just that. In fact, you could reduce the cost and time spent localising your campaigns by up to 85%, whilst maintaining your brand consistency across all markets.

bethebrand System Solution

CommsBuilder brings marketing asset execution and delivery into the hands of the whole marketing team.

By working with your creative teams in conjunction with CommsBuilder, you can create templates that preserve the sacred cows of brand, creative and compliance. But you can empower your team to specify and personalise with the help of easy-to-use design and layout tools within the CommsBuilder module.

Artwork set up as templates delivers complete control over the whole lifecycle of the asset:

• Generate packs for specific customers or prospects. In fact, create up to 100 packs at a time if you have all the personalising information in an Excel sheet!
• Deploy pre-approved content swiftly by locking down key components.
• Implement ads and posters through changing size and other mechanical requirements directly from your desktop.
• Change standard requirements, such as legal information, across the whole asset suite without having the fiddle and faff of changing each one individually (with the associated errors and omissions risk of repetitive tasks).

Client Outcomes

Circle Health Group is an award-winning healthcare provider operating Britain's largest network of independent hospitals. Circle's aim is to be the most innovative, patient-focused healthcare organisation and, by equipping its people with leading-edge technology, deliver the highest quality care. It supports patients whether they fund their own-treatment or are supported by private healthcare insurance, and the group also works in partnership with the NHS. Circle Health Group acquired BMI Healthcare in January 2020. The group operates independent hospitals, runs integrated care programmes and rehabilitation services, and has an overseas division which operates in Shanghai, China.

Design Manager, Natalie Bainbridge, said: “We started working with bethebrand in 2016 with a specific objective of helping us with the management of our busy and fast-growing studio. At that time, we were operating an analogue 'ticket system' on Excel as our workflow management approach. I had known bethebrand from a previous employer and we invited them to tender. They stood out from the other participants because of the CommsBuilder module. Combined with Template Builder and the Asset Store, we could see that we had all the ingredients for a seamless, end to end, solution. Onboarding was equally seamless, and our new system 'Kaleidoscope' was swiftly operational.”

Natalie added: “With 50 plus hospitals across England, Wales and Scotland, we need to ensure that our regional marketing teams are fully supported for all their local and workplace marketing requirements. By creating a portfolio of 26 templates covering every marketing asset that could be needed for local adaptation, we are able to empower our marketing teams to create exactly what they need for themselves. Confident in the knowledge that every asset created will be on brand and consistent, our central design team can then focus on developing new core creative.”

Natalie concluded: “In early 2022 we launched our new brand identity. Our bethebrand system was pivotal in making this project as smooth as it turned out to be. But what made an amazing impact was the support we received from the bethebrand design team. They created an amazingly adaptable new suite of template assets for local marketing deployment. We were quite demanding, as we needed to be quite iterative as we went along in incorporating all of the requirements. But throughout it all they were nimble and insightful, with a real eye for detail. They always made us feel loved.”

Would You Like to Know More?

If you would like to unlock the potential of CommsBuilder for your organisation, contact Chief Executive Adam Hainsworth at adam@be-thebrand.com.

In our continuing series examining the breadth, depth, and possibilities of how you can configure and utilise the bethebrand system, this time we are taking a look at brand guidelines and how bethebrand can not only make their management easy, but also have an impact on your marketing effectiveness.

Operational Challenges

There are many reasons why brand guidelines get side-lined in a busy business:

• They are hard to find;
• They are cumbersome and hard to understand;
• People ignore updates and changes because they are stretched and updates are hard to disseminate;
• How they are laid out in the guidelines and how you find the assets themselves in the company’s systems are the same leading to confusion and time wastage;
• Teams going rogue because they are unsupported, leaving them to self-interpret guidelines.

bethebrand System Solution

The bethebrand brand guidelines module overcomes all of these challenges:

• Because it is built as a microsite and extremely user friendly, the brand team can update it themselves;
• There’s no need to set a new PDF and send it to everyone every time there is a change, as it’s all online and up to date every time it is needed;
• Notifications of changes to the guidelines can be sent to colleagues via banner and or email;
• There are page layout options for both text and images, making the system completely customisable;
• If users require additional assets for their particular requirement, you can provide downloads from either the page or the asset store:
• With full on-demand image resizing functionality within the microsite there’s no need to keep every permutation and file type of a particular image – you simply purpose the master image for what is required;
• With the ability to embed videos you can provide handy hints and tips to bring the brand guidelines to life for everyone;
• Users can submit their work via the system to be reviewed by the brand team to provide a simple and effective ‘second pair of eyes’ approach.

Here’s a handy diagram to show you more, kindly offered by Wesleyan from their live microsite.

Client Outcomes

The outcomes achieved from the development of this functionality are best summed up by our clients

Founded in 1841, Wesleyan Assurance Society (Wesleyan) is a financial services mutual dedicated to some of the most trusted professions in society and is committed to creating brighter financial futures for doctors, dentists and teachers, so they can focus on the vital work they do.

Brand Executive, Katie Wright, said: “Originally we had a number of storage solutions across the business for our assets and brand guidelines. When bethebrand built our system, it gave us the opportunity to bring everything together into a system that was simple and intuitive. Like many companies we utilised external agency support to keep our brand guidelines up to date. Also, like many brands our guidelines and accompanying asset suite are constantly evolving. The brand guidelines module has completely changed our approach. We can now manage assets ourselves and keep our own guidelines up to date, with no time lag and no additional external expenditure. It has made us more responsive and colleagues, as well as our external agencies, can enjoy appropriate access to all they need to bring our brand to life.

Katie added: “A great example of the benefits of the module can be found in how we have been able to create amazing consistency very quickly in our slide decks. Every company has the same issues with slide decks in that they morph through usage. By having our template decks within the guidelines module, and a template within the assets area of the system, it not only aids presentation quality and consistency, but also supports compliance oversight and ultimately makes it easier for our teams to use the decks.”

Would You Like to Know More?

If you would like to unlock the potential of brand asset management for your organisation contact Chief Executive Adam Hainsworth at adam@be-thebrand.com.