How Frontify Solves

Your Biggest Branding

Headaches

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frontify.com
According to Gartner, 46% of consumers
can’t tell the difference between most
brands’ digital experiences. To build a
successful, recognizable brand that stands
out in the marketplace, companies must
achieve brand consistency and engage the
whole business with their brand mission.

Your brand management tools will either

help or hinder your brand-building progress.
Teams can use Frontify to tackle and
overcome some of the biggest challenges
your designers, creatives, and marketers
face when working on your brand.

2 How Frontify Solves Your Biggest Branding Headaches

Break Down Information
Silos With a Brand Portal
Siloed information makes it difficult for companies
to encourage a shared process for managing their
brand across all teams in the business. When you’re
building a brand, silos tend to occur in two main
areas:
• Information silos: Only a handful of people, or
one specific team, knows where to find different
brand elements or how your brand should look
and sound. That information isn’t shared across
departments or readily accessible to all.
• Asset silos: Not everyone can access your brand
assets and related materials, such as templates
or guidelines, to help them create their own brand
assets.
3 How Frontify Solves Your Biggest Branding Headaches
Silos develop when one team (usually marketing)
owns your brand in the early days and then later
tries to create a shared sense of brand ownership
by engaging the wider company in building the
brand. Unfortunately, by this time, people across
the business have come to think of Marketing as
the “brand team,” so you don’t have the mindset,
infrastructure, tools, or knowledge-sharing
processes in place to change that.
For the Kuehne+Nagel Group, internal silos caused
frequent problems for its marketing teams. With
74,000 employees across 1,400 locations in over
100 countries, keeping everyone aligned and on-
brand was difficult.
Dmytro Taran, Global Marketing Automation Expert,
explained: “Our intranet was being used for storing
all our files and assets which obviously created a
very scattered ecosystem that only worsened over
time. ... This created growing inconsistencies and
work silos which our marketing team always ended
up having to firefight on a regular basis.”
But then Kuehne+Nagel started using Frontify,
initially as part of a rebranding project. Now it has
over 25,000 people using its brand portal and
experiencing its benefits firsthand. Taran explained
that “internal information exchange with smooth
communication flow and no silos” is one of the
biggest benefits the company has experienced
since using Frontify.
Frontify’s Brand Portal breaks down companies’
information and resource silos by providing a
centralized and accessible home for everything
related to your brand. It becomes your team’s single
source of truth, whether they’re looking for up-to-
date assets for social media or checking something
in your brand guidelines. It connects your teams,
whether they’re co-located or spread around the
world, giving them easy access to your brand
information, resources, guidelines, and finished
assets – all in one place.
Tackle Brand Consistency With
Centralized Brand Guidelines
Inconsistent brand visuals and messaging make
it difficult to build brand recognition in the market,
as customers don’t get a consistent impression of
your brand. This inconsistent presentation of your
brand can occur for several reasons:
Deezer uses Frontify Brand Guidelines to help employees find and use the correct
brandelements, such as its logovariations for different plans.
4 How Frontify Solves Your Biggest Branding Headaches
• People don’t have access to your brand
guidelines, so they can’t double-check their
designs against your guidelines
• Creative teams may be working from an old
version of your brand guidelines rather than
the most recent version that contains your
updated brand messagingCreate their own
brand materials.
• Your brand has evolved, but you haven’t been
able to update your brand guidelines to reflect
its development
Many companies store their brand guidelines in a
PDF document and often work with external
agencies or partners to create them. Then, when
they need to update the guidelines, they have to
enlist the agency’s help to do so – even if it’s just
adding a sentence or two. This means updating your
brand guidelines in-house is difficult, so companies
avoid making small iterative changes to develop
their brand.
Then, your marketing team spends a lot of time
distributing the PDF brand guidelines. First, when they
get the new version back from the agency. And then
countless times in the following weeks and months,
when other departments can’t find the latest version.
The traditional PDF brand guidelines are difficult to
maintain, and it’s impossible to be certain that
everyone’s working from the same (correct!) version.
Frontify’s cloud-based Brand Guidelines provide a
centralized, online home for your guidelines. For
example, Deezer uses Frontify for its brand
guidelines. It provides guidelines for using its logos,
fonts, and color palette, and users can download its
brand elements directly from the platform.
Everyone gets a single link they can bookmark so that
they can access your guidelines at any time. And as
it’s easy to update on the front-end, you can
regularly adapt it so that it remains an accurate
representation of your brand. In addition, any
changes you make automatically update all your
users, so every team can access the correct assets
and information without asking your marketing
department for the latest version.
5 How Frontify Solves Your Biggest Branding Headaches
Empower Everyone to
Find Their Own Brand Assets
(So You Don’t Have To)
People from all across the company will need to use
or create branded assets from time to time. If they
think of the marketing department as the “brand”
team, they’ll be the ones on the receiving end of
lots of ad-hoc requests, such as:
• Asking for specific brand assets, like for
your most recent marketing campaign
• Requesting help from your designers to create
new brand assets
• Asking them to check over (i.e., fix) brand assets
designed by different teams that don’t follow
your brand guidelines
If your marketing team are the gatekeepers of your
brand, they’ll spend hours every week fielding these
requests from other teams and creating brand
assets or sending files back and forth. These
requests come in when companies don’t manage to
create a shared sense of brand ownership within
the business and don’t enable employees to find
and use brand assets by themselves. A lack of brand
ownership means employees don’t have the
confidence to create their own brand assets
because they don’t feel empowered to represent
the brand without marketing approval.
But with the right tools, your marketing team can
shift their roles from brand policing to team
empowerment. A Digital Asset Management (DAM)
platform provides a centralized hub where employees
can find and download brand assets without needing
to ask marketing. Frontify’s DAM connects with our
Brand Guidelines and other parts of the platform, so
people can find the assets they need – but also
adapt them, use them to create new assets, and
download them in different formats.
Borussia Dortmund uses Frontify's DAM to provide its global team and external partners with
the tools and assets they need to create marketing collateral quickly and easily.
6 How Frontify Solves Your Biggest Branding Headaches
Frontify’s DAM enabled sports brand Borussia
Dortmund (BVB) to expand internationally while
maintaining the visual consistency and strong brand
identity that its fans associate with their team.
BVB explained, “Frontify helps us bring our globalized
brand identity to life. ... [It] allows anyone – with or
without design skills – to quickly access our brand
world, download brand logos, fonts, and assets, and
create brand visuals all on their own.”
We commissioned a study by Forrester to
understand the value our customers get from using
the Frontify platform. One of the biggest benefits
was time savings for the design and marketing
departments. The report found that having a single
source of truth for brand assets saves design and
marketing teams up to 16 hours per week.
Want to learn more about the Total Economic
Impact of Frontify’s Brand Management Platform?
Download the full report.
Bridge the Gap Between
Brand & Product Teams With
a Design System
Brand building is often thought of as something that
only relates to your marketing campaigns, website,
and social media activity. As a result, there’s little
consideration given to how your products – and your
customer or user experience – contribute to building
your brand.
Companies have a gap between their marketing and
product teams. While you’ll find designers and
creatives working in both departments, you’ll likely
find them using different tools, following different
guidelines and best practices, and working toward
different goals.
7 How Frontify Solves Your Biggest Branding Headaches
For example, your marketing designers use the
Adobe suite for creating marketing assets for their
campaigns. The UX designers on your product team
use Figma for creating wireframes and product
interfaces. And your software engineers prefer
Sketch for its easy developer handover. This means
it’s difficult for marketing and product creatives to
collaborate effectively, as they’re working from
different tools, platforms, and documentation.
Frontify’s brand management platform helps to
bridge the traditional gap between marketing and
product teams without needing anyone to ditch
their favorite tools. Its Design System brings
together all the relevant components needed for
both digital and UX design projects:
• Guidelines
• Documentation
• Visual assets
• Live components (not just code snippets)
• Code generation for design elements
Frontify’s Design System connects UX docu-
mentation directly with other parts of its platform,
including Brand Guidelines and elements in its DAM.
Additionally, the Frontify platform provides a
centralized space for teams to share draft assets
and get feedback and approvals, which improves
cross-team collaboration and communication. This
enables greater creative consistency across all
teams, tools, and touchpoints and ensures alignment
between marketing and product teams.
Energy company E.ON has built a comprehensive
brand portal and design system on Frontify’s
platform. This has helped the company provide
customers with a cohesive brand experience across
different touchpoints.
8 How Frontify Solves Your Biggest Branding Headaches
Holger Castritius, Head of UX, explained, “Whatever
sits on Frontify is the standard and reference for all
marketing and communications activities across E.
ON. What has been true for UX is also true for the
brand: our brand guidelines are always up-to-date
and they’re easy to use – to share and to
collaborate on.”
E.ON has built out a full design system on Frontify.
It documents its UI components, so they’re
accessible to all users – not just its UX team. The
Design System is used by all their designers and has
helped streamline cross-team collaboration and
handovers between design and development teams.
E.ON includes comprehensive UX guidelines in its
brand portal to improve collaboration between
its brand and design teams.
Streamline External Agency
Collaboration With a
­Dedicated Partner Portal
Your full-time employees aren’t the only people who
need to use your brand resources. Agencies, free-
lancers, contractors, and even the press will need to
use some of your brand assets from time to time.
Companies often manage their brand partners
by manually sending individual files or creating
dedicated shared folders to give to the agencies
they work with. This is manageable when you’re just
working with one agency or freelancer. But as your
company grows and you’re working with multiple
types of agencies on different projects at the same
time, it becomes hugely time consuming and
difficult to keep track of.
Relying on manually sharing files and brand assets
with external partners can hold up key projects,
cause delays on other internal work, and ultimately
damage your relationships with the agency.
But there is an easier way to collaborate with your
external partners without sacrificing brand
consistency. For example, MAN Truck & Bus has
12,000 users on its brand platform – and more than
9 How Frontify Solves Your Biggest Branding Headaches
1,900 of them are external partners. Before the
company started using Frontify’s brand manage­
ment platform, the MAN team found it difficult to
work with external partners efficiently. Marina
Wamboldt, Corporate Design Lead, explained,
“[T]he collaboration between our service and sales
partners, regional markets and HQ needed to be
faster, better and more transparent.” She added,
“We can now work faster, more efficiently, and most
importantly, more together.”
As the MAN team has experienced, it’s easy to add
external partners to your Frontify brand portal,
just like your internal team. You can set up a
separate portal specifically for external partners or
add them to your existing one. If you take that
approach, you can set permissions on a company,
team, or individual basis to ensure your partners
only get access to the brand materials and
guidelines they need.
This makes collaborating with external agencies
and other partners easier and more efficient. Both
parties can spend less time emailing back and
forth, requesting access to various brand assets or
guide-lines. Frontify helps reduce common roadblocks
when working with external partners while improving
brand consistency across your externally managed
projects.
Manage More Than One
Brand at Once With a
Multi-Brand Portal
As companies grow, they often have multiple
brands or sub-brands to manage, each with its own
assets, guidelines, and use cases to follow. You may
have always been a multi-brand company, but if
not, there are several ways to scale up a brand:
• Launching sub-brands for new audiences or
product ranges
• Acquiring additional brands under their original
brand umbrella
• Creating regional or localized brand variations
The more brands you manage and the more people
you have working on your brand, the harder it is to
maintain consistency across every team and
channel, which is essential for building recognition
and awareness for each brand.
It’s hard to ensure everyone has access to the
correct guidelines, creative assets, and brand
resources – especially when you have global and
local variations of your brand, and you need to be
sure specific teams have access to the correct
materials. It gets even more challenging if your
10 How Frontify Solves Your Biggest Branding Headaches
regional offices all use different tools rather than
having a standardized creative toolkit. Telefónica
used to struggle to manage all of its brands in
different regions. It has a portfolio of more than
10 managed brands across 16 regions, including
global telecom brands Movistar, Vivo, and O2. The
Telefónica team used to manage its brands across
separate, siloed tools.
Cristina Terrón Moreno from Telefónica’s Brand team
explained, “Previously, some of Telefónica’s larger
markets were using their own local platforms [for
managing their brands].”
Frontify’s Brand Portal has enabled Telefónica to
manage all its brands within one platform. “This is
actually the first time we’ve been able to implement
a solution globally covering all larger markets and
their brands,” shared Moreno.
Frontify’s Multi-Brand Portal means teams can
manage, view, or share the guidelines, assets, and
digital components for several owned brands all in
one place. This means that even as you scale your
brand, you don’t need to worry about finding
different platforms to manage each of your brands.
Get Everything You Need
to Grow & Manage Your Brand
in One Place
Growing a brand is a long-term process that requires
a lot of collaboration from your team. You need to create
an internal culture that encourages all employees to
play their part in contributing to your brand and
communicating it to customers and prospects alike.

Make it as easy as possible for your whole team –

plus your external agency partners – to contribute to
building your brand. Give them a shared, centralized
platform where they can find everything brand related
and collaborate effectively.

Frontify’s Brand Portal can be the new home for

your brand. Try Frontify for your company with a free
14-day trial.

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frontify.com