What is a brand? Let me illustrate with a brand I'm partial to: New Balance. I used to think of New Balance as the maker of all white, extra wide “Dad” shoes. Now, as the proud owner of a dozen different pairs, I think of New Balance as a hipster modern shoe that goes with my jeans and shorts. I can wear them to church or to walk five miles. I can wear them anywhere!

There’s a lot of talk these days about how important it is for brands to give their customers an omnichannel experience. And, it’s true. Your buyers demand more. They expect that no matter where or how they interact with your brand, that you’ll provide one, connected experience. They anticipate that as they move between both your online and offline channels that they’ll encounter the same seamless, on-brand experience across each and every touchpoint.

Technology gives customers the freedom and power to research, purchase from, and communicate with brands. But in order to use technology effectively, marketing teams must deliver a seamless, superior experience.

The Widen Summit is coming soon. The 2018 edition promises to bring together the largest gathering of the Widen community — people who work in the trenches planning, analyzing, strategizing, and managing digital content across the entire content lifecycle — to see what’s new, discuss industry best practices, learn what other customers are doing, and go back to work with actionable takeaways.

Marketers in this day and age can no longer win on price or quality of offering alone. There’s just too much competition. And with consumers making buying decisions based primarily on their experience with a company, it’s clear that brands must adopt a customer-first approach to marketing.

As a brand in this day and age, you are (whether you realize it or not) in the experience business. Transactions are no longer a simple exchange of dollars for goods or services; consumers demand more. They expect you to win their affections and loyalty by delivering consistent, memorable experiences at each and every interaction. And, because of this, the digital assets and content you use to tell your story, educate your audiences, and represent your brand, are more important than ever. To help them deliver on this experience economy, more and more brands turn to digital asset management (DAM) systems. Here’s how the right DAM system can help!

“Everything’s fast now and it’s totally unreasonable,” says comedian John Mulaney. “The world is run by computers. The world is run by robots. And sometimes they ask us if we’re a robot just because we’re trying to log in and look at our own stuff!”

Marketing teams face the opportunities (and temptations) of more channels, more content, and more technology. And thinking about how it all works together to deliver a consistent, effective customer experience can lead to more headaches.

Integration enables marketing teams to ingest user-generated content from TINT into the Widen Collective® with metadata and image rights

We’re thrilled to announce our integration with the social display platform TINT. Mutual customers can now ingest user-generated content (UGC) from social media via TINT directly into the Widen Collective with all the metadata, including image rights. The integration enables brands to easily repurpose UGC for marketing initiatives at scale without the risk of misusing images.

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 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.