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Enhancing Brand Consistency and Governance: How Astute Review Transformed Huron Consulting Group
Companies who display a consistent brand in the market outperform their peers by 20%.
Only 55% of companies over 1,000 employees have a brand governance or compliance team. It’s somewhere between 15-55% for companies with 100-1,000 people.
The average budget for a brand governance team is $3.3 million.
Brand governance teams spend 32% of their time enforcing and ensuring brand compliance, that’s over $1 million a year.
95% of organizations have branding guidelines, but only 25% have formal guidelines that are consistently enforced.
In this day and age, businesses now understand that a strong and consistent brand image results in increased trust, business, and revenue.
If you want a brand image that sets you apart, consistency is critical. According to a report from McKinsey, companies with a consistent brand image outperform their competitors by as much as 20% in revenue.
Outdated logos, wrong fonts, poor formatting, and tone misuse are all problems that can make businesses look unprofessional. And these issues are all too common, even in companies that invest big money to market their brand more effectively.
Bringing all employees, management, and the marketing staff on the same page is not easy – at least, it wasn’t until our Brand Identity Monitoring Tool made it.
Here are some insights into how Astute Review helped one of our clients, Huron Consulting Group, improve its brand consistency.
Our client, Huron Consulting Group (Nasdaq: HURN) (Huron), is among the most highly acclaimed management consulting firms in the country. It was also titled as such in a 2023 Forbes publication. Huron helps its clients improve operations optimization and streamlines their executions to help them improve their overall performance.
At the close of 2021, Huron invested heavily in a rebranding effort. Since then, they have struggled to maintain brand consistency. Among the thousands of client deliverables, only a small percentage were able to be reviewed by marketing.
Of course, this is nothing out of the usual with companies with thousands of employees. Even organizations with dedicated brand governance teams struggle with consistency after a rebranding.
Huron was experiencing countless instances of template misuse, old logos, and brand image inconsistencies.
That is until Astute Review stepped in.
Sadly, this struggle is very common for organizations across the world. The more years in business… the more marketing assets. The more employees… the more inconsistencies. The more documents created… the more brand deviations.
After installing Astute Review, Huron had immediate clarity into the use of their brand.
Here’s what was found out:
This reflected general failures in brand activation. Why so many brand misuse issues, you may ask?
Well, as it turns out, the IT department had not set the MS Office apps with default fonts. This meant that employees were operating with MS Word and PowerPoint apps that did not have the company’s preferred fonts set as default. For PowerPoint, the company’s preferred template was also not set as default.
For companies with thousands of employees, this is not only understandable, but it’s also common. Brand activation takes time, repetition, and patience.
Following this initial analysis, Astute Review began our monitoring activities for around 1,500 employees. Once we discovered the issues, figuring out the solutions was the simpler part.
Keeping an eye on all brand usage across a company with thousands of employees is humanly impossible for any marketing or brand governance team.
This is where Astute offers much-needed help via its real-time brand monitoring. This game-changing dashboard allows companies to scan all company files to spot brand misuse.
Astute’s Brand identity monitoring tool helped Huron:
Monitor brand identity compliance where employees and teams store files (e.g. Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Google, etc.).
Using the actionable insights offered by Astute, Huron could take action. No more old logos, outdated templates, poor font choices, and off-brand content. Since Huron does not have a dedicated brand compliance department on board, they rely solely on Astute’s automation to help them in this manner.
This again is quite common in the industry. Only 55% of companies with 1,000 or more employees have a brand compliance team on board. For companies with 100-1,000 employees, that number is even smaller – between 15-55%.
Why so? Well, because it’s simply too expensive.
According to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), companies have to set aside as much as $3.3 million on average for a brand governance team. And even if a company invests big money in such teams, they usually spend around 32% of their time ensuring brand compliance. And that makes out to be over $1 million a year!
A much more cost-effective and thorough option is to get Astute Review. This way you can always stay on top of your brand marketing efforts.
For Huron, the results have been beyond impressive – at least that’s what they say!
“We had no idea how frequently our brand identity was being diminished when going to market. Astute helped us drastically improve our brand governance,” said Gaby Valdez, Director of Marketing Strategy and Operations at Huron.
Brand identity consistency and overall marketing productivity both skyrocketed following Huron’s adoption of the Astute brand identity monitoring tool.
Before Astute, Huron’s marketing staff was unable to spot thousands of brand misuse– but Astute Review identified each instance in a matter of days.
The results speak for themselves and so does Huron’s consistent brand image!
