When a Brand Center Goes from Optional to Critical 

“What’s driving the marketing team nuts right now?”

Most marketing leaders have an active frustration or challenge that would disappear quickly
and affordably with a Brand Center in place.

They know they need stronger structure for the brand, but executives often aren’t as connected
to the day-to-day. They may see a Brand Center as a luxury. Getting budget approved can be difficult
without a clear business reason tied to risk, current market pressures, or active initiatives.

In practice, most organizations already deal with lack of consistency, reduced efficiency, and
low or limited brand engagement. A Brand Center is a simple and cost-effective way to address
these and many other issues. It’s just a matter of developing some urgency and importance
around the impact of addressing these issues.

Companies enjoying a new Brand Center almost always say they wish they’d done it a lot sooner.
Once it’s in place, the brand becomes easier to support and easier to explain. It’s also easier
to track the impact of your brand management against the organization’s performance as a whole.

These examples reflect common situations many companies experience. Each is a natural
on-ramp for a Brand Center. In a way that feels justified, aligned with leadership priorities,
and directly connected to existing needs.

Option 1: A Pilot Program

If you have a recurring pain point, an upcoming initiative, or something that would offload repetitive
work for your or your team, a pilot Brand Center site might show how you could address it.

A few examples from other projects:

• An intake form for project and support requests (to get them out of your email)
• A temporary interior sign template that doesn’t need a designer or software to complete
• A newsletter template with flexible layouts, to replace the current version with only one structure
• A versatile email signature template, with options to select logo, location, signoff, and social links
• Training or on-boarding for a new initiative or program
• A brand knowledge survey (What does your audience know or not know about your brand?)

On a pilot project, we help scope and build a proof-of-concept as part of a minimal but effective
Brand Center to address the specific goal or issue.

This lets you quickly see how a Brand Center might meet the immediate need, but reveal how
future expansion or improvement could bring even greater benefit. If the pilot succeeds,
(which it almost always does), you’ve already trained your teams on the concept of a Brand Center,
and it’s easy to evolve into more features and resources down the road.

Option 2: A Brand Audit

Brand audits are a common tool to measure how well your brand is being represented
across the network of your business. They look across the different channels to see if
the distributed marketing and messaging match what your audiences expect, and if it
matches what you’ve specified in guidance, standards, and resources.

More than just signage and environments, an audit should monitor customer service
experiences, messaging, and any regulatory material that needs to be part of how you
work with customers.

• Do you know how your brand is showing up in real-world locations and scenarios?
• Are there signs needing some TLC?
• Are brochure shelves a mix of old and new versions?
• Is your understanding of your brand’s real emotional meaning up to date with what customers expect, and with the current trends in your industry?

Solve’s brand platform is the only one with a fully featured Brand Audit module available
alongside the common features that deliver brand standards and assets. It’s available as
an optional feature within any Solve Brand Center site, or as a stand-alone module to support
a brand audit project that may eventually lead to other organizational and brand changes.

The Brand Audit module can let you capture the current state of your brand across
the network of teams, offices, facilities, and experiences, both digital and in person.
Employees use phones to upload images, videos, audio, and any other asset that represents
or captures the brand as it relates to the customer experience.

Your audit team can review submitted materials to assign tasks and timelines for things
that need to be updated. Implementation progress can be tracked in the module, and the
field teams can upload photos or samples as evidence the changes were completed.

Everything captured in the audit can migrate into a complete Brand Center site. User
permissions control who can see the audit results and implementation activity. It can be
useful reference material as your brand evolves, to show the history and know the current
state of how your brand is represented in various markets.

Option 3: A Rebrand or Refresh

Change events like rebrands or refreshes are popular starting points for Brand Center projects.

They always involve a lot of transformation and communication. Managing the inherent changes
without a central resource to guide and inform everyone involved can be a tightrope walk to
launch successfully.

A Brand Center offers the perfect solution. Not only does it organize everything in a single place,
it starts training users where to go for anything brand related. It also becomes the cornerstone of
a new culture around branding, building awareness and engagement, delivering training, and
monitoring adoption. You can learn from what employees enjoy, embrace, and struggle with
as you continue to map out the brand launch beyond Day One. (You do know the most important
part of a rebrand project is what happens after Day One, right?)

The ongoing training and learning happens through our Engagement module, which is unique
to Solve’s Brand Center platform. It’s an optional but very important and effective way to
measure how users are absorbing and applying the resources and training you provide. It
helps establish a Brand Awareness baseline, which you can track alongside other business
metrics to see the impact of brand engagement across the org.

No extra integrations or systems are needed to use the Engagement module. The analytics
of how users are responding show up on your existing Brand Center dashboard.

Everything you’ll learn from watching the Brand Center support employees and partners
through the brand transition will influence future updates and refinements you make.
You’ll see how to keep everyone even more engaged, and make the site even more useful
and valuable going forward.

While people sometimes consider rebrands and brand refreshes the same thing, and both
can benefit greatly from having a Brand Center as their foundation, we see them as very
different types of projects. They’re so different that we created a refresh vs rebrand checklist
to clarify what separates them, and help determine if a refresh or a rebrand is the better
choice. Along with that, we also developed booklets for rebrands and brand refreshes,
to explain the key factors in each project and help influence a more successful outcome.

Whether your is related to one of these or something entirely different, we’ll create plans
for development, testing, launch, training, and evaluation of how we would approach it.
We help understand and define your expectations, to then manage and measure the
system to meet those goals .

The best part of about building a Brand Center with Solve is once you start, it’s easy to adjust and adapt.
Unlike many of our competitors, our solution and support offerings are designed to flex with you.

Many of our clients have been on our platform for a decade or more.
Their solutions have evolved and expanded over time to meet how their business and brand continues to grow.

We offer tiers to start at a scale that fits now, and adjust as your needs evolve.