Managing a brand, producing thousands of marketing materials and overseeing consistency can be a tough call, particularly if you have decentralised teams working in different locations who need to create or localise artwork.
For the University of Greenwich, this is particularly true. Its campus encompasses numerous small office units spread across the 17th-century buildings of the former Royal Naval Academy. Hardly the most conducive environment in which to foster brand consistency.
In addition, the University offers thousands of courses and produces marketing material, both online and in print, to promote every course. This was proving tricky, partly because the small in-house design team was causing production bottlenecks trying to output the sheer number of marketing materials required.
The University of Greenwich marketing team knew that the solution lay in putting non-design trained people in charge of producing their promotional materials for their departmental courses.
And that required using Digital & Print Templates.
With Digital & Print templates, frequently-used marketing artworks can be turned into dynamic templates, each pre-approved for brand compliance and pre-designed to allow specific fields and images to be updatable. Non-design trained users can produce consistent on-brand, localised marketing materials to an approved design.
The University of Greenwich decided to use the integrated Digital & Print template feature in Brandworkz. Following a rebranding programme in 2017, they were already using a Brandworkz brand management platform for brand education and asset distribution across the University’s internal management teams.
An integration with two external marketing platforms also used by the University of Greenwich – called Banner and Squiz, respectively – was the next step.
The Banner database stores national curriculum course information; Squiz is a website CMS system in which additional information specific to the University is held.
The University used its design team to create a selection of standardised, brand-compliant course brochures and leaflets as dynamic templates, which were uploaded into Brandworkz.
Now any approved user at the University of Greenwich can simply select a brochure template, select the appropriate course from a drop-down field in the template, and the Digital & Print template feature in the Brandworkz Brand Management Software hub auto-pulls in approved, compliant text information about the course direct from Banner and Squiz.
Images can be updated from a pre-approved selection in Brandworkz, and text layouts tidied up, but essentially the user produces a fully designed item of promotional course literature that is brand and regulatory compliant – in minutes, not days.
This Digital & Print template capability has delivered major time savings in producing marketing content and substantial cost reductions. But perhaps most gratifying of all for the University of Greenwich is the gain in brand consistency it has achieved in addressing its all-important audience of prospective students.
