How Huron Consulting’s rebrand led to brand consistency & productivity gains through Astute Review.
The Facts
95% of organizations have branding guidelines, but only 25% have formal guidelines that are consistently enforced.
10% ->20%
Brand consistency can increase revenue from 10% to more than 20%.
According to 77% of organizations, materials not conforming to brand guidelines are always, often, or sometimes created.
54% of U.S. office workers waste time searching for fi les and documents than doing actual work.
57% of organizations consider the ability to quickly fi nd fi les and documents as one of the top three problems to solve in 2021.
236
hours/yr
Teams lose 236 hours per year on duplicated work.
50%
On average, knowledge workers spend 50% of their time creating and preparing documents.
Overview
Companies introduce and enforce brand guidelines for a reason.
They spend precious hours — even big money — working with creatives and branding experts to create a brand that resonates with target audiences. The right blend of branding elements — logo, colors, images, fonts, templates and tone of voice — help you tell your story in an instant, connect with like-minded audiences, and set your company apart from the competition.
With consistency, your brand becomes easily recognizable and your message more distinct and powerful.
But therein lies the problem.
In organizations with a large number of content contributors, how do you ensure everyone works effi ciently and the way you want them to from a branding and compliance perspective? With tight deadlines and varying abilities among employees, how do companies align employees and managers to produce better business content faster, while maintaining the brand you worked so hard to build?
The Challenge
Huron Consulting Group (Nasdaq: HURN) (Huron) is a global professional services fi rm that collaborates with clients to put the possible into practice through creating sound strategies, optimizing operations, accelerating digital transformation, and empowering businesses and their people to own their future. By embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging new ideas, and challenging the status quo, Huron creates sustainable results for the organizations they serve.
Huron was named by Forbes as one of America’s Best Management Consulting Firms in 2022. This company works with organizations across a range of industries, including education, healthcare, energy, fi nancial services, life sciences and manufacturing.
In late 2021, Huron’s marketing team launched a large-scale brand refresh across the organization. Consistent branding was a challenge before Huron started the rebranding process. The marketing teams wanted to ensure a smooth and effi cient transition to the new brand.
As a global organization with thousands of consultants, tens of thousands of client deliverables are created on an annual basis, but only a small percentage of client work went through a formal marketing review before getting to its end destination. As a result, it was not uncommon for employees to use old logos and templates when putting together documents, diminishing the value of the brand that Huron worked so hard to build.
Astute Review was chosen to help Huron’s marketing team maintain consistent use of the company’s templates and digital assets throughout the organization, while also helping consultants work more quickly and effi ciently on client engagements
The Solution
BRG brought in Astute Review, a software company focused on brand compliance and automation solutions to help.
Astute Review’s presentation automation tool was implemented to help the HPI team maximize the quality of their presentations and reports to clients, and save time while creating them.
By taking advantage of Astute Review, the Healthcare Performance Improvement team at BRG saw a signifi cant increase in productivity and compliance rates.
Astute Review Solutions
* Presentation automation: Think Spellcheck, but for presentation formatting. Teams no longer have to review documents, slides, and other deliverables manually. Astute Review automates the entire review process for consistency. The tool automatically analyzes your presentations based on your company’s brand standards, and allows users to fi x mistakes in just one click.
* Asset library: Directly access all your fi rm approved templates, slides, images, icons and more directly in Microsoft Offi ce. Workers spend on average 1.5 hours per day looking for up-to-date fi les. This ineffi ciency can mean a signifi cant loss in productivity and brand compliance across an organization. Astute Review’s asset library readily integrates wherever your fi les are currently stored (SharePoint, DropBox, DAMs, etc.)
* Real-time brand monitoring: Your company’s brand is its most important asset and Astute Review is here to help marketing teams protect it. Astute Review helps monitor how employees are using your brand…wherever fi les are stored. In real-time Astute checks to make sure employees are using the most upto-date logos, images, fonts, trademarks and more, giving marketers actionable analytics to further drive compliance.
The Results
After implementing Astute, Huron and its marketing team realized improvements in both brand consistency, as well as productivity across the organization.
* Increased Digital Asset Compliance: Employees were accustomed to navigating SharePoints and 150+ slides fi les to locate digital assets. Astute improved the workfl ow and compliance for end-users who now have one-click access to all fi rm approved templates and corporate images when creating documents
* Understanding of Brand Health & Actionable Insights: The Marketing team is able to understand where old templates and corporate images are still being used across the organization. This data allows marketing employees to target problem areas within the company and expedite the transition to the new corporate brand. Finding out of compliance content across the company would take a team of dozens of employees hundreds of hours to audit tens of thousands of fi les. With Astute, 1-3 people are monitoring the brand, developing actionable insights and providing the latest content to employees
* Increased Productivity:
1. 60% reduction time consolidating slides, reviewing, editing, polishing, and
fi nalizing presentations. 1 hour of presentation formatting is reduced to 24 minutes,
while also eliminating human error.
2. 30% time saved fi nding fi rm approved slides, images and other digital assets.
About Astute Review
Astute Review is a brand compliance and productivity solution provider. Our solutions help organizations maintain brand consistency while fostering happier, more productive colleagues
Astute Review helps align employees and managers to produce better business content faster, and on brand.
Recognized as a High Performer in the Spring 2022 G2 Grid Report for document generation and proofreading solutions, Astute Review is working consistently — and tirelessly — to support organizations’ various brand compliance and productivity needs.
Learn more about us at https://www.astutereview.com/.
