The Nike swoosh. McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle. The primary colors used in the letters of Google’s name.
These are all distinctive brand assets, instantly recognizable to millions of consumers around the world. As a business owner, you too can leverage effective brand assets to solidify your company’s identity and help your target audience recognize your brand. By practicing effective brand asset management, you can foster customer loyalty and create strong brand recognition.
What are brand assets?
Brand assets are marketing materials conveying your business’s personality and value proposition—including your logo, slogans, color palettes, jingle, brand voice, and more. Brand assets can be used to build a unique brand identity, trust, and brand recognition among prospective customers.
Brand assets are integral to creating a consistent brand identity connecting with consumers across your digital and outdoor advertising channels. Businesses effectively leveraging brand assets can create a unique persona, drive customer loyalty, and convey their brand’s personality, ultimately leading to improved marketing return on investment (ROI).
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Important brand assets for ecommerce
Your company can use any of the many types of brand assets to shape its identity and differentiate it from the competition. Here are some common examples of brand assets:
Logos and fonts
Logos and brand fonts are effective assets for cultivating visual brand recognition. Your logo will likely be the key signifier for your audience, especially if you incorporate it into your advertising, marketing, and packaging.
Similarly, using the same brand fonts is one way to maintain consistency throughout your marketing channels, website, and packaging. Fonts can also embody your brand ethos. Consider Apple’s sleek typeface, a variation of the Garamond font, and Ford’s Centennial Blue Oval cursive font on vehicle hood emblems. These two fonts are distinctive brand assets, conveying vastly different tones.
The Outrage, an activist fashion label, is a great example of a brand that understands the power of a strong logo and curated fonts. Its main logo is a megaphone, nodding to the activism focus of the brand. The logo appears on its website, packaging, and social media accounts. In addition, the label uses bold, retro fonts to convey the business’s carefree culture and approach to fashion.
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Brand names and slogans
Your brand name is a powerful brand asset that conjures up the essence of your company in customers’ minds. It is the textual cue to the core elements of your brand and what it stands for, setting the foundation for a strong brand identity. A brand name is often followed by a slogan or tagline, adding more context to help your audience understand your brand’s mission. Slogans often take the form of memorable phrases or a brand promise that’s catchy and unique to the product or service.
Wedding linen and custom invitation retailer Silk & Willow uses moody, dramatic visual brand elements to establish the high-end, luxurious nature of its products. The company follows this with the tagline “Inspired by Nature,” emphasizing the eco-friendly aspects of the brand’s identity. This signifies the product’s connection to the natural world, encouraging brand loyalty among like-minded consumers.
Websites and social media
As an ecommerce business owner, you know consumers expect you to have a website and social media presence. These digital platforms provide an opportunity to create brand consistency across marketing channels, and portray your business’s unique personality, authentically connecting with your audience.
Designer ebike company Cowboy created cohesive website content and social media posts to showcase its sleek, contemporary bikes to visitors. Its website and social media feeds feature modern imagery and fonts designed to increase engagement with a target audience who appreciate elegant design.
Photographs and videos
Photographs and videos are common yet important digital brand assets you can use to display your products, create a narrative, and form a distinctive brand aesthetic. They are also key to inspiring an emotional connection with your customers.
Sease, a luxury outdoor apparel company, uses stylized photography and video content to create a unique aesthetic and encourage brand trust. The landing page, social media profiles, and product pages are populated with visuals to impart a sense of rugged yet high-end fashion. They emphasize the use of quality natural materials that warrant premium prices.
Color palettes
Often overlooked as marketing assets, color palettes can shape your audience’s perceptions of your brand. A color palette establishes the look of your marketing materials, locking in specific brand colors aligned with the feel of your business. Color theory is the idea that every color has an emotional connotation, which is why you may notice similar color schemes in various industries—like red and yellow in fast food chains or blue in the financial industry.
Australian baby product outlet The Memo understands the impact of a color palette as a brand asset. Its logo is a neon orange, which is meant to grab the attention of new customers. On its website and social media, the color palette adds splashes of lavender, chartreuse, and royal blue—vivid, complementary colors to help keep customers engaged.
Sounds
Most of us have heard a jingle in an advertisement that sticks in our brains. Sound effects can function as strong brand assets that come to be easily recognized over time. Refer to the Yahoo! yodel, the Netflix two-note crescendo, or the staccato sound Apple uses as you type on its products as inspiration for ways you can use audio to make your brand stick in consumers’ minds.
Brand voice
One of your most important intangible brand assets (or assets that are not as concrete as photos or fonts) is your brand’s voice. Although you cannot technically own your brand voice in the same way you can trademark a product or logo, it is important to your branding strategy because it showcases your brand’s values. A financial company may use a formal tone that promotes credibility, while an energy drink maker may lean toward a fun-loving tone to excite its target audience.
Packaging
Product packaging is often the cherry on top of all of your other marketing efforts because your customers can interact with it physically. Polished packaging shows your brand’s commitment to the customer experience, encouraging customer retention and increasing satisfaction.
🧁 Success Story: Why Getting Packaging Right Was Important to this Brand
The founding couple behind Pastreez moved to the US to share their love of traditional French sweets with a new market. They faced a challenge: packaging that would protect delicate confections in the mail but also represent their brand and be special enough to give as a gift.
Tips for brand asset management
With so many brand assets at your disposal, you may wonder how to keep track of them all. Here are a few tips to successfully manage brand assets using a digital asset management (DAM) tool:
- Develop a style guide. Each brand asset you store or use must adhere to clear guidelines representing your brand’s identity.
- Manage access to brand assets. Regardless of the size of your organization, each asset should have parameters for who has permission to use existing assets and add new assets in each category.
- Organize brand assets by category. Each brand asset type should have specific use cases like social media posts, website product pages, and marketing campaign elements. Create tags for each asset to outline where it’s appropriate to use them.
Brand assets FAQ
What are some examples of brand assets?
Common brand assets include brand names, fonts, logos, and brand voice, as well as digital brand assets such as photos, video content, websites, and social media content.
What is the difference between brand identity and brand assets?
Brand identity is made up of the qualities the public associates with your company, such as its purpose, personality, reputation, and actions. Brand assets are the elements—such as logos, colors, sounds, and images—to support and reinforce your brand identity.
Does Shopify offer tools to manage brand assets?
Shopify offers merchants access to asset management tools to categorize, store, and allocate your company’s brand assets. If you need more robust tools for your digital assets, you can also browse the Shopify App Store for third-party management applications.
