“This time it will be different.”

You’ve set your major milestones, allocated tasks efficiently across your team, and made tweaks to address any hiccups you experienced during prior projects. It should be smooth sailing from here. Yet time and time again, bottlenecks and unexpected circumstances cause your team to miss deadlines. It’s a common problem, so much so, that a study done by PMI found that only 49% of organizations across the United States complete their major projects on time.

There are plenty of project management templates available to help you get started with any given project. With this post, however, we wanted to share some out-of-the-box tips, specifically to address working with your team. Here are 4 of our top tips to help your team meet deadlines:

1. Set Expectations for Communication

While there’s no doubt that it’s important to communicate with your team, it’s equally as important to ensure you set clear expectations for how and when you communicate. This can include who to contact, what tools to use and the various milestones to notify on.

For example, with a project management system, you can set expectations for when someone receives the final edits of campaign photographs, ensuring they attach them to a new task and assign it to the appropriate designer.

The impact of this is two-fold:

1. It prevents your employees from disrupting each other’s workflows. While sometimes talking in person is easier, it can often be more disruptive than other forms of communication. A study performed by the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that as little as one minute of interruption can wipe your short-term memory, halting your entire work process. When communication is left to each person’s discretion it can cause over-communication, with teammates disrupting each other’s creative flow.
2. It ensures that everyone remains accountable to each other. 29% of US workers stated that accountability was their team’s largest obstacle to achieving success. When communication expectations are set, it reduces the possibility of a “he said, she said” about who’s to blame if the project goes sideways – everyone is on the same page about where, when, and how they can expect to be notified.

2. Add a Buffer for Deadlines

Only 37% of teams complete projects on time, more often than not. This is because, despite vigorous planning, small hiccups add up and cause projects to quickly fall behind. When planning out the various milestones and deadlines for a team project, it’s ideal to leave a buffer of 1 or 2 days for smaller milestones and a week for any major deadlines.

A great trick from Cal Newport is to span the deadline for the entire week in your calendar. Adding a visual cue that your deadline is coming up can prevent your team from attending unnecessary meetings and give them the opportunity to re-schedule lower-priority projects. Simply put, it adds visibility to any potential conflicts that could impact meeting that week’s deadline.

3. Plan for When Your Team is Most Efficient

Meetings, while sometimes necessary, can often be the downfall of hitting project deadlines. Office workers are now spending between 5 and 11 hours per week in meetings, 46% more often than the year before.

But, while you can do your best to avoid unnecessary meetings, sometimes they’re inevitable. In these cases, try to schedule meetings when your team is the least productive. Most people know when they’re most productive and when their creativity begins to fade. Examples of this are the “Night Owl” and the “Early Riser”, where someone feels more productive in the morning or at night. Take the time to analyze how each of your team members works, and do your best to find meeting times that cause minimal disruptions, allowing the team to be the most efficient.

4. Ensure Continuity of Projects

When your team is interconnected, it’s easier to stay productive. In fact, a study by the McKinsey Global Institute found that it can improve productivity by 20-25%. To ensure the continuity of your projects, have systems and processes in place to keep all work-in-progress projects available in a central location, rather than stored on someone’s local drive. This ensures that if unexpected circumstances arise, like an unexpected illness or trip, the project can easily be picked up by another team member.

If you’re using a project management solution, finding a central digital asset library (like a DAM or other file storage solution) that connects with it can help streamline continuity. It gives you the ability to quickly publish and pull digital files while staying in your workflow.

Hitting project deadlines can be a challenge, especially when there’s a large team involved. With interdependent tasks and limited time, it takes vigorous planning and fool-proof processes to stay on target.

While these 4 tips may not be the holy grail to nailing your deadlines, we hope they can take you one step further toward improving your existing processes. If you’re looking for some more quick tips, check out our DAM Trends report to learn how a DAM can help boost team productivity.

At the heart of every successful company is a strong, consistent brand. But, building positive brand association from a single voice across touchpoints is no easy task. It requires meticulous planning, thoughtful coordination, and vigorous training to ensure every person understands and is able to represent the brand. Enter the brand manager.

As the guardian of the brand, this role has become crucial for large organizations hoping to achieve brand loyalty. This post will answer the questions:

• What is a brand manager?
• What do they do?
• How do you become a brand manager?
• Who needs a brand manager?

What is a Brand Manager?

According to The Branding Journal, brand managers “are responsible for ensuring that the products, services, and product lines that fall under their brand resonate with current and potential customers.”

The role is ideal for any passionate marketing or creative professional who understands the power of a consistent brand and how important it is to the strength and longevity of a company. Brand managers have the important job of making sure brand assets are readily available and all brand activities are tied together with the same vision in mind. As we’ve learned in other posts, inconsistent brand activations can lead to brand dilution and customer confusion.

What Does a Brand Manager Do?

A huge part of the brand manager’s role is, as expected, in marketing. But, we describe them as “guardians” of the brand, because they protect all areas – from product development to communications. One of the most important jobs of a brand manager is training. They are usually part of the orientation and onboarding for any new hire. Effective brand training creates passionate employees at every level of an organization. Employees who truly understand the brand vision and aim to communicate the brand values in everything they do. Everything an organization does should send the same brand messaging.

Other day-to-day tasks of a brand manager, according to MediaBistro, include:

• Researching the marketplace,
• Analyzing competitive positioning,
• Developing marketing strategies,
• Helping create templates for content,
• Overseeing promotional activities, and
• Evaluating how the brand can appeal to other audiences.

Depending on organizational structure, a brand manager usually works directly under a top-level leadership role in the marketing department. Someone such as the VP or director of marketing, or even directly under a president or founder of a company. Working underneath the brand manager are typically roles like brand, content, or social media coordinator.

How Do You Become a Brand Manager?

According to Indeed, the core skills a brand manager needs to have include:

• Communication,
• Creative strategy,
• Data analysis and
• Flexibility.

As with most marketing roles, brand managers need to have stellar writing skills and endless creativity. Writing for both long-form (think blogs and eBooks), as well as short-form content (think social media posts or ad copy) that conveys the brand voice and tone is a must-have skill. Research and analytical skills are also important to the role, in order to stay up-to-date with marketing trends and technologies, plus being able to define what’s working and what’s not in a branding strategy.

The educational background typically includes a bachelor’s degree in marketing, communications, business, or advertising. It’s also possible to have an education in other areas and still have the skills to do the job. Individuals can undertake training or work their way up through the ranks in a company from an entry-level position. There are some specific certifications out there, including a certified brand manager (CBM) program or certified product manager (CPM) that can help one become a brand manager.

In order to become a brand manager, earning specialized certifications on top of a relevant bachelor’s degree would be a great first step. Pursuing entry-level positions like brand coordinator, communications, PR, content or social media coordinator are a great way to get into the department and work your way up.

Who Needs a Brand Manager?

Almost any kind of company could benefit from employing a brand manager, but it’s not realistic for very small organizations or certain industries. Companies that have creative teams and marketing departments creating a large amount of content definitely need brand managers. Especially if they want to achieve consistency across all departments and within marketing initiatives.

Acting as the guardian of a brand is an extremely important role, as it impacts how the public views a company, what customers think about a company, and how employees understand the vision and goals of the company they work for. Providing easy access to brand assets can be key to better marketing initiatives, cohesive communications efforts, employee satisfaction, and even the longevity of a company. See how MediaValet’s Branded Portals can help brand managers distribute important brand assets.

Have you had photo organizing on the to-do list for months… maybe even years? You’re not alone. This seemingly daunting task is important now more than ever, with studies showing that over 1.4 trillion digital photos alone were expected to be taken in 2020. However, with a few steps, tips and tricks along the way, there’s no reason to put off organizing your photos any longer.

We’ll walk you through the basics on organizing your photos, including:

• Storing
• Locating
• Categorizing
• Naming
• Editing
• Backing Up.

Storing Photos

There are two key factors to consider before you start organizing photos:

1. Where will you store your photos?

Depending on your storage needs (how many photos you have) you’ll likely need either an external hard drive or a cloud-based solution (or both). Check out the storage available on the solution that you want to use to make sure it’s capable of taking on your entire photo collection before you start.

2. Where will I back up my photos?

It’s best practice to not rely on a single storage space for your photos (unless that space has a dedicated back-up feature). Backing up your images is a top priority, as electronics can have a chance of failure.

Locating Photos

To start, it’s worth noting that you probably have print photos you’d like to organize with your digital photos. This means you’ll have to find and digitize these photos. Physically locate all your treasured photos, and reach out to friends or family for additional photos you’d like to have in your collection.

Once the photos are digitized (in as high resolution as possible) it’s time to locate your other digital photos. These steps are time-consuming as they require going through all your devices and hard drives to find the photos you want to organize. Don’t worry, it will be worth the effort!

Here are the steps we recommend:

1. Create a local folder on your desktop.
2. Digitize printed photos and transfer them to the folder.
3. Find photos on your computer(s) and move them to the folder.
4. Go through your mobile devices, copy photos onto your computer and into the folder.
5. Find your photos on the internet (such as email and social media) and save those to the folder.

Categorizing Photos

Folder structure plays a huge role in designing an easy-to-use photo organizer. Organizing photos by the year, month and event name, for example, is a great way to do this. If you can’t remember the year a photo was taken, remember that kind of metadata is stored in the photo file itself. To view this metadata (on a PC), right-click on the image and select “Properties” then “Details” and you’ll see the date it was taken.

Naming Photos

Since it’s not practical to navigate image files using the numeric file names that most cameras generate, you’ll need to rename your photos. This may sound like a lot of work, but in the long run, you’ll be able to find your photos so much easier. You can batch rename photos to save time on this process. Here’s how to rename files on Windows and a Mac.

Editing Photos

Vetting photos is an important step to get the most out of your storage device. During this step, you can delete duplicates or photos that you no longer want to keep. Once you have the collection you’re happy with, taking some time to quickly edit your favourite photos can take them from “great” to “fantastic”. This article from REI shares some helpful tips for editing your photos.

Backing Up Photos

The biggest question most people have is how often they should be backing up their images. One easy rule of thumb to follow is to simply do a new backup every time you add new photos, or when you complete a round of editing or other work. Make sure as soon as you’ve finished organizing your photos for the first time, you immediately do your first backup.

Organizing Photos to Scale

While for individuals, the process above can work well for years to come, many organizations find that they outgrow the type of photo organizing solution. Digital asset management (DAM) solutions, like MediaValet, are built to scale, designed for the purpose of offering a smart, easy way to manage photos that grow with you.

It’s Time to Get Organized!

While photo organization seems like a big undertaking, that’s only the case before you’ve gotten started. Once you have the right photo organization solution in place, it’s easy to stay on top of storing new photos and doing regular backups. Look at it as a necessary project that you’ll thank yourself for in the long run!

Most people have experienced brand dilution at one point or another. You find a brand you know and love, but over time, it grows in a direction that no longer aligns with your needs or values.

As organizations grow, they commonly take on new product lines, trust more people to represent the brand or even acquire other businesses. With this comes a risk that the original promises, values, and quality the brand represented become less and less prominent.

In this post, we cover:

• what is brand dilution?
• what causes brand dilution, and
• examples of brand dilution from susceptible industries.

What is Brand Dilution?

According to Hubspot, “Brand dilution is when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in.”

When a company unsuccessfully extends its brand, it dilutes the power of its original brand story and existing associations with the brand. Typically, this happens when a once-strong brand name is attached to a new, lower-quality product or a product that’s extremely different from the core brand (which leads to confusion and the brand losing customer trust).

Another situation where a brand can become diluted is when the company tries to grow and the team becomes too big, too fast. This causes dilution in two ways: the first is that the team is stretched too thin, which results in lower-quality work; the second is that they lose control of the brand due to a lack of brand standards.

What Causes Brand Dilution?

Here, we’ll expand on the top three reasons behind brand dilution:

1. Stretching Capacity Too Thin
2. Introducing Unrelated Services or Products
3. Losing Control of the Brand

1. Stretching Capacity Too Thin

When organizations take on new product lines or services, they can require teams to work beyond their capacities. When teams are stretched thin, standards can be diminished, resulting in a lower-quality message or product. For example, asking a creative team to now work on the messaging for a brand extension along with the existing brand will likely result in disrupted workflows, unreasonable deadlines, and inconsistencies.

2. Introducing Unrelated Services or Products

A company taking on new products or services that don’t align with the existing brand values or messaging is often a recipe for disaster. Not only can it confuse your supporters, but it can also deteriorate the perceived value of the overall brand.

One famous example among marketing professionals is the Cadbury instant mashed potatoes story. In the 1960s, Cadbury launched a product called Smash, which was instant mashed potatoes. The product sold well but at the expense of Cadbury’s overarching reputation as a premium chocolate brand. Due to extreme brand dilution, Cadbury sold Smash in 1986 despite being popular.

3. Losing Control of the Brand

The more people can represent a brand, the higher the risk for dilution of that brand. For example, imagine a brand with complete control of any marketing messaging; then, to grow the brand, they open up offices across the country where dozens or even hundreds of team members can send out messaging on behalf of the brand. This is where the dilution can happen – outdated logos, slogans, or images; activities that are not on-brand; social media messaging that doesn’t match the official vision of the brand. This dilution can be just as harmful as a failed brand extension.

Learn how ACAMS effectively manages a global brand with a MediaValet DAM

Four Ways to Prevent Brand Dilution

While there are several ways to prevent brand dilution, there are 4 we recommend:

1. Prioritize the Core Brand
2. Introduce New Products Slowly
3. Communicate the Brand Clearly
4. Provide Access to Approved Brand Material

1. Prioritize the Core Brand

It is highly important to hold on to earned, loyal customers and fight for the brand associations you’ve worked hard for. Brands should be selective when choosing how and where to expand products or services. Always look at expansion through the lens of protecting the core brand, which is important for the company’s longevity. Ensure that any new ventures won’t contradict the messaging or reputation of the existing brand.

2. Introduce New Products with Care

Provide the necessary space and time to introduce new products with care and thoughtfulness without diminishing quality. New product development and roll-out processes deserve a place in the brand strategy.

3. Communicate the Brand Clearly

Ensure that every person who can represent your brand understands the brand messaging, values and expectations. These brand standards allow these individuals to provide the same messaging and level of service aligned with the brand.

4. Provide Access to Approved Brand Material

Ensure that everyone who is representing the brand is set up for success. This means providing the team with easy access to brand assets, such as logos, images, graphics for social media, etc. It’s vital to standardize brand messaging and collateral as part of an overall brand strategy and make it accessible.

Brand Dilution Examples by Industry

Franchises

The most notorious industry for being impacted by brand dilution in the franchise industry. This is mainly due to the free rein that franchisees are granted when it comes to creating and distributing marketing collateral or messaging. It’s almost impossible to maintain control of the brand when multiple franchise owners are providing different service levels and not adhering to any specific set of brand standards.

Consumer Products

The consumer product industry is typically the most susceptible to failed product extensions. One example would be the documented failure of Colgate Kitchen Entrees—when the well-known oral hygiene brand tried to take advantage of the take-home meal market in 1982. This confusing move to link toothpaste and frozen meals threatened to dilute the brand. It can be hard to evaluate when a brand extension is too far out there—but this one should have been obvious.

Technology

The problem in the tech industry is that things move so fast because of the highly competitive environment that it can cause brands to release new features or products at a speedy rate—too fast to get things right. Tech companies need to be meticulous in planning releases to prevent stretching the team too thin and not doing the brand justice, thus causing brand dilution.

Keep Your Brand in Tip-Top Shape

A robust and well-represented brand starts with consistency. A consistent brand not only improves brand awareness and recognition but it’s also linked to an increase in revenue. A digital asset management solution helps organizations stay on-brand by providing seamless access to your approved, high-quality assets – from anywhere in the world. Learn more about digital asset management and its benefits.

Take the self-guided MediaValet tour to see how a DAM can help you organize your brand assets.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.