Ensuring Effective Brand Management in a Fragmented Media Landscape
As the number of media channels grows, brands need a way to centralize assets and automate workflows—ensuring a cohesive brand experience at every touchpoint.
Large retailers face a brand challenge. Not only do they have their own brand identity to uphold, but they also handle thousands of product lines from different manufacturers—each with its own brand identity. Now, compound that challenge with the ever-increasing number of available media channels. It’s overwhelming. For CMOs, marketing directors, and creative service managers today, managing retail campaigns may seem like riding a unicycle during a hurricane.
Managing brand consistency involves many different components. Retailers have their own visual identity, including logos, images, fonts, and approved color schemes. These must be used consistently in printed materials, signage, and on digital screens
Managing retail campaigns today may seem like riding a unicycle during a hurricane.
of every size. But there’s more. Retail marketing campaigns must also feature many products—out of the thousands they sell. Each advertised item includes a myriad of detailed information stored in a Product Information Management or PIM system. It also has numerous logos, images, and videos stored in a Digital Asset Management or DAM system.
Customers expect the same visual brand experience across every touchpoint.
Customers expect the same visual brand experience across every touchpoint and channel, from digital devices to printed catalogs and flyers. Such consistency builds trust and loyalty in those customers, who are only a click away from checking out a competitor. In theory, all of these visual and
product information elements can be orchestrated to create such an experience, but the cost of doing so manually is prohibitive. The only way for marketing directors and their marketing production managers to accomplish this cost-effectively is through automation.
It’s Still All About the Data
No matter what printed page or digital screen a customer sees, a retailer’s brand consistency depends on the nature and quality of the data used to generate advertising and marketing campaigns. In a previous post, we explored the intrinsic value any company can realize by having a well-governed, Single Source of Truth (SSOT) data strategy related to every aspect of its business.
SSOT practices reduce the cost of data entry and drastically reduce the costs of errors by as much as $100 for every dollar spent on their prevention. However, for retailers, perhaps the most significant benefit of a unified data approach is its potential to turn manual, brand-relevant steps into partially or fully automated workflows.
The benefit of a unified data approach it its potential to turn manual, brand-relevant steps into automated workflows.
This approach is the foundation of Comosoft’s LAGO system, which integrates the retailer’s PIM, DAM, inventory, pricing, and other data sources under a common framework. Marketing directors and their teams of individual production designers could use the system’s collaborative workflow tools to create attractive and accurate promotional layouts in a fraction of the time. This setup includes selecting products based on regional
By automating mundane tasks, LAGO frees retailers to select products and design promotions in ways that enhance their brand.
availability and margin, of course, but it also includes more subtle but still important factors—like those discovered using artificial intelligence. But the system does something even more critical. By automating mundane manual tasks, LAGO frees retail marketing teams to select products and design promotions to enhance their brand.
Selling the Products That Define You
Shoppers’ perceptions of a retailer’s brand are typically influenced by the products the retailer is known for, coupled with those products’ perceived value. It can be all about price (think Walmart or Costco), quality and convenience (think Target), high-end (think Nordstrom), social responsibility (think Whole Foods), luxury
(think Tiffany & Co.), or some other combination of values. By definition, most retailers advertise and sell products that align with their brand identity. However, with so many individual products to choose from, marketing teams can find it difficult to select and effectively present the right ones—day in and day out.
Retailers advertise products that align with their brand, but can find it difficult to select and present the right ones.
Fortunately, LAGO provides the means to do precisely that. Because it gives a detailed view of every product, including its images and other brand elements, marketing teams do not waste time hunting for the right products or for all the related assets to use in a compelling, brand-positive offering. Designers receive complete “blocks” of information and images for each product, using the LAGO Layout plugin for InDesign, so they can focus on creating the most impactful designs possible. During the design process, the bi-directional link between the data and the design ensures that only the most current assets and information are used. LAGO even automates creating separate regional or demographic versions of each promotional piece.
The Multichannel Challenge
Creating a consistent brand image on an ever-expanding array of channels is virtually impossible without automation.
Maintaining a retailer’s brand consistently is hard enough when one only considers printed promotions and in-store signage. However, the exponential growth of digital, screen-based media has made it even harder. Websites, mobile apps, and social media have compounded the challenge for retail CMOs everywhere.
However, the multichannel challenge can be met with a consistently unified data strategy and tools available in Comosoft LAGO. The system’s digital publishing software tools allow marketing teams to leverage the data-driven designs they created in InDesign, automatically generating XML, JPEG, and PDF for use in digital channels of every kind. Development teams can, in turn, include that code in their websites and mobile apps, maintaining a live link to the underlying data. From product images to copy, the user experiences the same information on any channel.
A retailer’s branding consistency has a net positive ROI regarding operational efficiency, customer loyalty, revenue growth, and long-term brand equity. Amid a sea of data and the exponential growth of alternate media channels, Comosoft LAGO provides all of that and more.
Schedule a demo today—to see firsthand how Comosoft LAGO can revolutionize your retail branding efforts.
