Lessons in brand asset management from McDonald’s and Burger King’s rebrands
Burger King and McDonald’s both underwent major visual rebrands in 2021, unveiling their transformations earlier in the year
McDonald’s kept their logo and redesigned their packaging with a sense of “joy and ease.” Burger King redesigned their company logo for the first time in 20 years, as well as their uniforms and product packaging. Now Burger King’s new logo appears on everything from their social media channels to their storefronts. Both of these efforts demand a technology stack to handle brand management at a global scale.
A digital asset management (DAM) platform could help them both centralize their brand asset storage, build brand consistency, and enforce the new brand guidelines for their relaunch and beyond. If you’re planning for your own brand relaunch down the road, here are a few of the main benefits a DAM system can provide for you, too.
Store your brand assets in one place
Imagine if Burger King’s new logos were sent to their marketing teams and partners via email or even using basic cloud-storage tools. Inevitably, the file would need to be updated and there would be outdated logo files on desktops and shared drives around the world. With a global launch, this could cause serious damage to their brand at a crucial moment. But the good news is, you can avoid this kind of nightmare scenario from the start.
Instead of struggling with files scattered across shared drives, FTPs, and desktops, you can use a DAM system to store, organize, and make searching and finding new brand assets easy. And with customizable permissioning structures, employees are empowered to securely access assets without assistance. An intuitive taxonomy and metadata schema also allows users to search and locate assets via methods ranging from Google-like predictive search to category, text or suggestive search.
Create brand identity kits to maintain consistency
To keep things consistent, teams need to understand the rules of your brand and how to apply it holistically across all channels. A brand identity kit documents rules like where to find logos and how to use them, as well as houses approved color palettes, typography styles, and other visual attributes. Since products and language can change across regions, your brand identity kit might also include information for localization. For example, McDonald’s may use the same new visual design on their packaging, but the language will change from Asia to Europe to North America. So where to find assets in your DAM system could vary, too. By creating a brand identity kit for each region — and possibly for individual countries in each region — content is used and localized as intended.
With a brand management solution, your teams are able to uphold what’s outlined in your brand identity kit because they have access to the right files on-demand. And when new assets are introduced, versioning old files not only provides the updated content to all users, but also keeps a history of the asset’s evolution. So, if a logo or product packaging file needs to be updated, you can change it in the DAM system and it changes everywhere it’s integrated or embedded. No more resending the whole kit and hoping that the old files just stop circulating.
Power your content from a single source with integrations
Tools that don’t talk to each other can make a brand relaunch harder and scaling almost impossible. Using a DAM platform as your central source of truth provides a foundation on which to integrate other software your company uses to create, manage and distribute content and data.
With global relaunches like McDonald’s and Burger King, marketing technology, or martech, integrations can allow teams to work faster by streamlining processes and reducing time to market. In addition to automatic updates of versioned content with integrated or embedded assets, integration options allow teams to collaborate more efficiently, eliminate redundancies, and lay the groundwork for business continuity. Mapping your martech stack helps teams identify where there are opportunities or breakdowns in the process, which lets them move faster and react quicker during relaunches and everyday work.
Manage your brand with DAM
The complexity of changing a logo across the world in physical and digital locations is enough to make anyone’s head spin. The only efficient way to launch or relaunch brand assets at a global scale is to create a single source of truth for your digital assets. With a DAM solution in place, it still takes a lot of hard work, but launching and managing your new brand assets becomes easier and likely more cost effective.
At Widen, an Acquia company, we power DAM for everyone from Fortune 100 enterprises to world-famous universities. We help over 700 organisations across 175 countries in virtually every industry manage their brands with Widen DAM.
You can learn more about our brand management solution and check it out for yourself here.