Your brand is a way for customers to identify your business. It is how they recognize and differentiate you from the competition. But, just as a sports team is more than the uniform they wear, a strong brand is more than a logo or tagline. To its most loyal fans, it’s a community. It’s an emotional connection, a badge of honor, and a driving force in why people buy what they buy. According to a recent Nielsen survey, nearly 60 percent of global respondents prefer to buy new products from brands familiar to them, and 21 percent say they purchased a new product because it was from a brand they like.

Whether your brand is traveling down the hall to a colleague's office or across the globe, you need to safeguard it for the journey ahead. With freelancers, marketing agencies, internal teams, and many others using your brand in communications and content, it's easy for inconsistencies and misuse to arise. A brand identity kit can help by providing disparate groups and individuals with the tools and information they need to uphold your brand consistently. While every brand identity kit looks different, here are a few essentials to pack in yours:

“The company was growing at a really fast rate, and we knew we couldn’t keep up with doing things the way we’ve always done it,” — Jeanne Duncan, Masco Coatings Group

Digital asset management was new to Jeanne Duncan and her team at Masco Coatings Group. She’s worked at the manufacturing company for 19 years, and throughout most of that time, they had gotten by without a digital asset system. Their creative team relied on those who worked there for a long time and just knew where to find things. “The company was growing at a really fast rate, and we knew we couldn’t keep up with doing things the way we’ve always done it,” says Jeanne.

Sandra De Biasi is the project manager of digital assets and graphics at Varian, a Fortune 500 company and provider of radiation oncology treatment software and hardware.

At Varian, she manages their digital asset management system, which has played an integral role in managing the company’s brand assets during their recent corporate rebrand. Here’s her exciting story about how monitoring content analytics in their DAM system helped secure their valuable brand assets.

Widen was among the select companies that Forrester invited to participate in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management For Customer Experience, Q2 2018. In this evaluation, Widen was cited as a Strong Performer among the top thirteen DAM solution providers.

Forrester’s analysts noted Widen’s “attractive UI” that “reference customers praised.” Moreover, Forrester says, “Partners we surveyed ranked Widen as one of the top DAM solutions they implement.” The analysts also note that “…Widen has made significant improvements to its capabilities since our last evaluation, especially in the areas of metadata, search, and work-in-progress functionality.”

Founded in Madison, Wisconsin, Widen recently opened its European headquarters in London to expand the company’s global presence and better support customers in different time zones. Recently, the company launched a string of innovations including:

The quality of your images on social media, websites, blogs, and presentations influences the perception of your personal and corporate brand. Not all image formats are the same. Some are meant for charts and diagrams, while others are intended for eye-catching photographs. Knowing which file format to use when will keep your images looking their best.

The connectivity between people, processes, and technologies allows marketers and creatives to perform their best and create incredibly meaningful experiences. But how? That’s what we decided to find out by talking with a range of professionals around the world about what’s behind true connectivity. Our team conducted and analyzed 32 phone interviews and 506 online surveys to generate the data.

The report explores how modern marketing organizations balance the power of technology with the familiarity of the human touch, and the role of connectivity in marketing operations, strategy, and business results. Among many findings, we discovered a significant gap between interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and understanding of that technology in marketing departments.

“We looked at our workflow, and things that we were doing manually, we thought, ‘Okay, we can do that using the DAM.’" — Sheryl Connor, Exactech

Eight weeks before the Exactech national sales meeting, Sheryl Connor and her small team set out to implement their Widen Collective® digital asset management system. It’s the busiest time of year for their creative team, but they were inspired to launch the new system at the big event. Sheryl and the team decided to focus on their international customers and the product launch materials they needed for 2018 and got to work implementing the DAM system.

When engaging in digital business today, marketing organizations need several systems to guide their work functions like file sharing, data management and analysis, and project management. So it’s not unusual for the management of so many systems to quickly become overwhelming with multiple logins, functionality overlaps, isolated files and data, and project bottlenecks.

“Think about what's going to make it easy to manage on the admin part and what's going to make it easy for your users.” — Colleen Raccioppi

Exactech develops and produces innovative bone and joint restoration products that help surgeons worldwide make patients more mobile. They work with offices and distributors around the globe. To support their rapid growth without losing control over their content and brand, their leadership team tasked Colleen Raccioppi to find a better way to create, store, manage, and distribute assets internally, to investors, and to doctors.