Asset production just saved your rebrand!

Woah, when did asset production become the dirty word in all things brand?

Some amazing things have been happening over the last few years. We’ve gone from brand guideline PDFs to actual living and breathing embodiments of a brand (thank you Frontify), coupled with all of the enablement tools to muscle up teams to create great content (thank you Canva, Figma etc).

But woah, woah, woah. This isn’t a Tesco Express. Self serve is a capability, not “the goal now” (thanks SNL for the awesome Tucker Carlson skit).

If we put all of our eggs into the self-serve basket, the brand gets stuck. Before you know it, it’s 2028 and you’re looking down the barrel of the next rebrand.

“Aha!” I hear you say. “But we’ve freed up the designers! THEY will keep the brand moving!”

And keep it moving they will. Bespoke campaigns, detailed one-off pieces of collateral, the investment of time in areas of the brand that can so easily get lost when we’re knee deep in the day to day.

But there’s another, vitally important, source of innovation within a brand as it matures. “Where!” I hear you cry. “What could it be?!” - ok, in my head you’re way more excited about this article than is plausible, though not entirely impossible given that I actually wrote it by hand…

It’s in the production! Production, real life use, is where a brand evolves (hell, sometimes even dies if the people doing the brand strategy weren’t actually connected with the business outcomes). Every asset, every blog image, PowerPoint deck and carousel is an opportunity to iterate and refine.

Periodically it’s vital that these iterations, these ‘improvements,’ are captured and the preferred ones folded back into the brand itself, recognised in the brand platforms and added to templates in Canva, Figma and elsewhere. But to leave production purely to self-serve is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. There’s so much to be gained from involving real, skilled designers in production, and those who forget this in the transition to AI, where taste is the ultimate decider, are the ones who will be punished by the buyer the hardest.

It’s all about balance, of course. We must leverage every tool at our disposal to empower our teams. But production still needs to play a huge role.

Talk to us if you could do with a brand asset management help

Dodgems and Floss works in Pods, an extension of your team with a factional strategic lead. Brand + Digital + AI, plugged in to your organisation to bridge capability gaps, smooth demand peaks and, yes, tackle production head-on in a way that keeps brands growing and evolving. Reach out for a chat about your challenges and let me suggest how we can help.