[Podcast] Brand Management with Raitis Velps

In this episode, we tackle the often-overlooked challenges of brand identity asset management and explore why traditional style guides might not be enough.

Joined by Raitis Velps, we dive into the common pitfalls brands face, from outdated assets to inconsistent branding across platforms.

Discover how these issues can dilute brand perception and hurt performance in competitive markets.

We also examine where static brand guidelines fall short and introduce innovative tools like Corebook Studio, which offer dynamic, real-time solutions for modern brand management.

Learn how digital-first brand guidelines can streamline consistency, improve collaboration, and elevate your brand’s value.

Whether you’re an agency or a brand leader, this episode provides actionable insights to rethink how you manage brand assets in today’s fast-paced world.

Tune in and explore the future of brand management!

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Transcript (Auto-Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Please excuse the interruption to your scheduled podcast. It’s Matt Davies here. It can be lonely out there when we’re building brands, and having a support network around us can be very valuable.

About four years ago, I started my Mastermind Group. It’s a group of global brand builders. We meet once a month, virtually.

We discuss all the latest topics in brand building, and we offer support to one another as we progress. As well as the monthly meetups, you have access to our Mastermind platform. You’ll have over three years worth of past recordings and access to message boards where you can get support from the group.

To apply, go to my website, mrmattdavies.me forward slash mastermind. If you mention that you are a JUST Branding listener, you will be eligible for two free months per year as part of the group. So if you want to level up, grow and be supported every step of the way, check out the Matt Davies Mastermind Group.

I’ll see you there. Well, hello folks, and welcome to this episode of JUST Branding. We’re really, really thrilled to have Raitis Velps joining us all the way from Latvia today to really discuss brand management.

We’re looking at the brand management conundrum. Now, we’re going to get into that in enormous depth in just a minute. But just before that, who is Raitis?

Just to give you a bit of a flavor. Well, on his LinkedIn, he says that he’s a dog owner, so anything to do with dogs. He’s a Star Wars nerd, and he’s an avid reader.

So that gives you a bit of a flavor of the personality we’re about to interview. But what does he do? How is he qualified to talk to us today?

Well, since 2020, he’s been serving as the CMO at Corebook, which helps brands and companies in industry really manage brand identity systems. We’re going to be talking about that throughout today. And also, he’s a multidisciplinary guest lecturer across the Baltic region and with really a specialism in marketing, sales and branding as disciplines.

And I guess the final point to say is, he’s quite a celebrated expert in this area. He’s been featured in Creative Boom, Branders Magazine and many, many others. So welcome to the show, Raitis.

It’s amazing that you’ve carved out some time for us. Thank you.

Thank you for that incredible instructions of me. Definitely, if somebody wants to chat about Star Wars or what it means to be a dog owner, hit me up. I have a lot of talk to.

Yeah, actually, one fact, nobody reads Star Wars novels and I do. So that should tell a lot about my level of nerdness about this. So, but yeah, happy to be here.

I’m happy to chat a little bit more about what it means to be a branding expert and the brand itself in 2025, and how to manage the brand in a nutshell. Yeah.

Absolutely brilliant. Now, I’m going to probably regret this, but before we get on, I’ve got an amazing Star Wars joke that I have to just quickly offer to everybody. It’s a bit of a dad joke, so forgive me if you find this a bit embarrassing.

Right. So Luke and Obi-Wan, they go out for dinner and the dinner is served, and you can elaborate on this if you’re retelling it. Jacob’s like, what the heck is going on?

Where are we going, Matt?

Luke, the thing is it comes with chopsticks, and Luke can’t use chopsticks, okay? So he’s really trying to eat these intergalactic dumplings, and it’s really difficult for him to eat, right? So Obi-Wan leans over and has this advice for Luke, okay?

You ready for the advice? Use the fork, Luke. Use the fork.

That was so bad.

Let’s move on.

We might cut that out.

Yeah, Marco, just cut that one out.

Anyway, let’s move on. Let’s get into this seriously. This is a serious podcast.

We want to talk about brand management. So I guess, first of all, I’ve given a bit of an introduction about you, but give us a bit more flavor. Like how did you get involved in brand management?

And how did you come to join Corebook? And why is it something that excites you?

It’s actually quite a funny story. So-

Not as funny as Matt’s joke, I’m sure.

Definitely not a bad joke there, Buzz. I was actually leading a marketing and branding department in one of the leading healthcare brands here in Baltics, and we started to work on our brand guidelines, Refresh. And I was starting to look at solutions out there that wouldn’t be PDF, essentially.

And then totally randomly, because it was so early stage, I came across Corebook. Man, I tested it out. I was like, all right, this is such a young company.

Not sure if it fits. We’re pretty huge. We’re pretty big.

Definitely not for us. Let’s go ahead with the PDF. That was the story.

I told myself that then. And about a week later, Yannis, who is CEO of Corebook, totally out of the blue, just reached out to me and he’s like, hey, I love what you do. I love what you talk about.

I just checked out your own personal website. I love what I see. Why don’t you come and have a conversation with us about joining Corebook?

And my first instinct was hell no. Not in a million years. I’m in a well-established brand.

I’m not going to join a early stage startup who has an MVP version of the product. And that ended there. Essentially, that ended there.

And about two weeks go by and I’m like, I just can’t get out of my head this Corebook idea. And I sent him a message to LinkedIn and I’m like, hey, let’s have that conversation. And the first time I met them actually was, Yanis was in the woods just walking around, colleague Maksims was also somewhere else, like just going on and about.

And I was like, well, this is super unserious. I can’t join the startup where like they aren’t even at the office or at the computer. They’re just like going on about their life and doing the thing and having conversations with me.

But after hearing all this, what is their vision, how they see the future of the branding industry, we totally aligned on the issues at hand. And I was like, all right. So I’m going to leave this huge brand and I’m going to do a Hail Mary with you guys and I’m going to join.

And I was the very first employee to actually hire. So yeah, that’s about it.

What got you across the line? What did they say to convince you?

Well, it’s such a cliché. But they said that if you see a rocket ship, just jump on it and don’t think about it. And if you feel like we are a rocket ship, do it.

If not, don’t. Like stay with your brand. You’re going to be fine.

Right. And I was like, what the hell? I’m definitely going to get on that rocket ship.

And I think also the fact that by nature, I like to risk a lot. I remember telling to my wife that I’m actually going to join this new startup. And her first response was, aren’t they going to be able to pay you a salary?

Or what’s going on?

So how big is the company now? Give us a bit of a flavor of the size and the scale, and then we want to really get into brand management just generally.

Yeah. So we actually are, I like to call it like lean and mean machine. So we have just under 10 people in house, but we work a lot with freelancers and creative agencies to take care of the bulk of the work, for example, for creative, for marketing, for all that.

So we fully understand the freelance market and industry in itself. Nowadays is, I think, at the all time high, right? It’s so many great professionals are actually freelancers now.

And you can get their expertise and their experience at a fraction of the cost, it would mean to actually get them in house, right? And also the fact that nobody should be limited to having higher people from their region or like the local region. There’s a talent out there across the globe who can do such an incredible job.

And yeah, we love to collaborate with them, work with them. And I think that also reflects on our mission statement itself, right? We’ve been remote first since day zero, so we would like to also collaborate with the guys across the globe.

We haven’t actually talked about what it is or what it does just yet, so we’re kind of out of context here. Do you want to share a little bit about what Corebook is all about and I guess your role in it as well?

Yeah, so Corebook is essentially an online brand guidelines platform where instead of building out a PDF for the brand that will hold all of the guidelines for the brand, instead of doing that, you can just head to the Corebook, build it out. It’s totally an online environment just like as you would expect from something like a website, right? And it fixes a lot of issues that the legacy formats, I would say, had, right?

So the version control, access sharing, privacy, and at the end of the day, multimedia files, PDF just can’t hold like animations, audio, videos, none of that stuff, right? And yeah, that’s like elevator pitch kind of a thingy.

But there are some of the key problems around brand management these days. So it’s solving a big problem there.

Well, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the sort of the challenges. Just generally, you mentioned not a PDF, you mentioned that you can’t hold animation and audio.

But from my perspective, I think there’s this whole, I work with a lot of different size companies, particularly bigger companies. There’s loads of challenges, particularly when it comes to consistently applying a brand identity system. I find this particularly with global companies, where there’s different regions, where you’ve got different agencies, you’ve got different teams, even in-house.

You’ve got different partners that also log in and download stuff and start using stuff. It can be quite difficult to maintain consistency. Of course, if you don’t maintain consistency, you damage trust.

That’s my take on it. That’s why it’s so important for businesses to think about that. But what are your thoughts, Raitis?

How do you see modern brand management, online brand management systems? What problems do you see them solving for businesses?

I think we have to actually take two steps back. Not even think about the tools or platforms that we end up using for our brand guidelines and brand in general. I think it’s a question about lack of confidence in branding integrity.

Whenever somebody has to work on branding assets, there is always this overarching question. Is this the latest version? Do I have access to all of the assets?

Do I know everything I have to actually do my job efficiently? That I think comes down to the lack of unified ecosystem for the brand. Let’s take an average brand.

Their assets live in asset measurement system. Their brand guidelines live on their laptops in a folder somewhere. Some version of it, at least.

You don’t know if it’s the latest one, but you know that you have at least one file that’s named brand guidelines that you should actually use. Then there’s a bunch of other platforms that you have to use. For the marketing purposes, for the sales purposes, all the decks, all the pitches, all of those things, including brand templates.

Usually, you actually live in totally separate environments. When you have to get actually down to the work and actually make something happen, you spend a lot of time just looking for the right information, not so much actually doing the work itself. Then if you spend a lot of time actually looking for that, you start to lose step-by-step that confidence in how you’re going to actually build out at the end of the day.

Because if you look into one folder, it’s not there, you look in another one, another one, then you try to get some form of context between the guidelines and then the assets and then what is the brief for your project, right? And as time goes on, you just lose that confidence in that branding integrity at the end of the day. And then we come across another whole bunch of things is that when you have like multinational brands, where you have brands in like USA, Europe, Asia, Australia, cultures also impact a lot of a lot in the branding, right?

Something that you would say in Europe, you wouldn’t necessarily say in Asia market, right? So again, having that one almost kind of a source of truth and like that unified ecosystem where it doesn’t matter who you are or what is your breed or from where you’re coming from, you still have the same confidence as the one who actually built out those guidelines and gave those initial assets for like, I don’t know, examples or what to do or how not to do things.

Can I just ask you a question around the difference between an online tool like that versus an online storage platform like Dropbox or Google Drive or just like a basic one like that. What’s the difference between those sorts of tools?

I would say that the biggest difference is that ecosystem feeling and ecosystem in general. So even with the classic scenario, right, PDF plus Dropbox or PDF plus Google Drive. We all know those scenarios.

And as we switch between those and as we try to find them, it gets troublesome real quickly. And we know very well what it means, right? So with really kind of a dedicated and almost like a specialty, kind of a place for that is where those both things can actually be linked.

And everything is in context. So if you see an example of how social media should be created, you actually have guidance next to it, which explains the asset or the guidelines in general, right? So everything stays in one place.

You actually don’t have to switch between environments, which usually is just bad in general from like user experience perspective.

So the benefit that I just reading through the lines is the creative ecosystem and that you can navigate more easily. It’s more user friendly.

Yeah, it’s almost like, you know, you would want to make a cup of tea. And you have to actually go to the store and buy the ingredients because you have nothing at home. So you would go to one store, you would buy a tea, you would go 500 meters, go to the next store, buy a sugar, etc.

And when you come back to the home, you no longer want the tea because you spent way too much time just walking around.

Yeah, I see that a lot. And then what people do is, let’s take that in a real world example, in terms of, say you’re in a sales team, you’ve got to create a pitch, you’ve got to do this at pace, your pitch is this afternoon, it’s the morning. Then you say, well, which pitch do I use?

You go to one place, you can’t find it or it’s half-baked, and then there’s some assets missing, you need to put some value propositions in, and you go somewhere else, and then you’ve got to, are the logos on this product are not quite right? Where do I go? So as you say, and I just haven’t got time, so I’m just going to create my own thing, and then that’s what happens, and salespeople, I find, often have the company decks, and then they have their own versions of them that they’ve developed because they know that they work, and that becomes really tricky to manage over time, because as time goes on, everything gets decentralized and really splintered, and that’s just one tiny example.

If you’ve got that going across regions, different teams, in different scenarios, you’re soon out of control real quick. So you’ve got to have a centralized place where there’s truth and where good lives, and if you don’t, that’s a massive challenge. I was going to ask though, in terms of performance, right?

I don’t know if you have any stats on brands that manage their assets in a centralized way versus those that don’t. I don’t have any stats, but I just know that all the top global brands do, and one brand that comes to my mind is HSBC. Wherever you go in the world, you come off a plane, usually HSBC is sponsoring the tunnel, and you’ll see a consistent application.

And when you go into their banks and you see all of their social media, wherever you are in the world, very, very well put together and usually very on brand, on point wherever you are. I don’t have the stats of the performance. I just know that it just builds trust for me personally as a consumer.

Have you got any thoughts, any stats, anything around that that you can share, Raitis?

We haven’t done our own research regarding the deficiency or how many degrees our designers spend on creating assets or brand management itself. Because I feel like it’s such tricky thing to actually measure, because it comes down to not only the brand itself, but also the size of the brand. For mom and pop shop in New York City, it’s going to be a totally different ballgame than it’s going to be with global brands.

We just recently had a webinar where my colleague Lourdes actually just went in with some general stats about the brand management. She mentioned that more than a half of brand stakeholders actually end up wasting time on just simple asset searching and just trying to find those relevant assets that they need. We should definitely do a research.

That’s one of the things that I really, really want to do. But something that I love more than stats is actually what people say. Whenever brand reaches out to us and say, hey, we just launched our brand.

Everybody loves that. After six months, they send over an email saying, hey, I no longer I’m sending over those version 7.1.2 versions. I’m spending way less time in an email.

That’s what really drives me. Just having those emails from those people saying, hey, I’m spending less time on operation stuff, and I’m doing more on creative side of things. That’s what really matters for the brand.

Yeah, I think a few things we haven’t talked about is the fact that these online versions are interactive, and they’re easily accessible. You can update them in real time, and that’s some of the extra benefits of these online tools.

Yeah, and that also drives an engagement for the brand. So again, if you take a look at just simple comparison about when you receive a PDF Brand Guidelines, usually your first thought is, not again, I had to read through the whole thing. I have to try to memorize it, and it’s essentially a rule book.

I have to read a bunch of texts. I have some stock imagery there, and I have to get through it. It’s almost like I have to put it in the calendar to get through it, try to memorize, give my notes, highlight key pages that I actually will end up using.

But with Online Brand Guidelines, it’s a different story because it actually builds not so much of a rule book, but you actually build out an experience. You have those multimedia, you have those attachments, audio, Spotify, integrations, whatever you can imagine, really. If you are new, hip, cool brand, and you want to focus on audio identity more than actual visual identity, you can do that.

And everything stays in one place, right? And what happens when we switch that mindset from like, this is a rule, rules that we have to adhere to, to more of a like, hey, this is an experience we want to give our stakeholders, is that actually people want to spend time in that hub of truth for the brand, right? So they want to be there.

And when they see that they actually don’t have to read so much as they have to actually experience it, people want to come back. People want to see the newest update. What are they going to create now, right?

What can, this was still an image before, like now it’s animation, what the hell? Right? So people want to see, see people want to be, you know, it comes down to like, to us as a people in general, we want to have fun, right?

And brand guidelines can be fun, although it also has like practical meaning.

Yeah, I think that’s a great point, Raitis. And particularly if you think about the types of people that tend to use, you know, and we need to use brand identity guidelines well, they tend to be visual people, they tend to be creative people themselves, right? And if you go like, hi, you know, Mr. Creative, here’s a 300, you know, page PDF that you need to understand, you know, and all your team, by the way, because you’re an agency coming to work with us.

And if they don’t, then, you know, we’re going to be really upset with you. It’s like, it doesn’t happen in real life. As you, in my experience, and I’ve worked in design teams where this happens, I completely agree.

You skim through it, you find the bits that you want to work with, and then you do that. And then there’s always stuff around the edges, you just think, oh, well, it’ll be fine. And that is the problem, because everybody likes to put their own flair on it and so on.

So I agree. Hey, I’ve got a question for you, a bit of a curveball question, right? How do you see AI developing in this space?

Because, for example, I’m working with a brand right now, we’re there, and I don’t do all the design stuff. I’m more consulting from a strategic perspective. We’ve carved out a brand positioning, we know what’s going to make them different in reality, and then how it looks is what’s coming now.

And so we’re working with the creative teams and on that. And one of the things that we’ve been thinking about is, as we build this out, like we can potentially use AI to generate standardized assets within particular rules that we put into place. So in other words, the logo is going to always appear top left.

We’re always going to use these colors, we’re always going to use this font, we’re always going to use this type of image. And the vision that they’ve got is that they will have some form of system where a marketing manager for example in India can go on and say, I need this type of asset to advertise this type of event. And the AI will spit out on brand three or four potential options for them for small sort of campaigns that they’re running.

Now, I could see that developing as time goes on into amazing campaigns, not just little static kind of graphics. But like that’s where I think this is going. And I know all the designers and Jacob’s like sweating a little bit now, just thinking, what the heck?

But like that’s where I see some of this going. And that’s the reality. How do you see it developing, Raitis?

I love that idea that AI could just generate a bunch of assets that we can use in like a matter of seconds, right? How I feel about AI is pretty tricky one. I actually just last year, I think I gave a chat about like the future of AI in a branding space, right?

And what I talked about is that I feel like the AI is actually, if we’re talking about brand and brand guidelines in general and brand management, then the AI is actually going to be almost like your brand guardian. So it will not allow you to deviate, to be of brand, right? And we already, our Corebook AI R&D department already has created an integration with OpenAI, where you can create your own GPT.

That takes the whole information from your brand guidelines. It learns in real time what it says, what are the roles, and instead of generating new assets, it actually helps you to be on brand. So for example, you just ask it, hey, I’m new employee, I’m new designer, what are the key things that I need to know from my brand guidelines?

And it will speed it out like highlights. Or hey, I have created this asset, is there any faults or errors to be on brand? And it will say, hey, yeah, your topography is one way too big.

Or hey, logo is positioned in top right corner, but it usually is on bottom left corner, for example. So it essentially will be almost kind of a guide helping you out to be on brand. I think like generative AI in general is totally different ballgame, right?

And it can create really nice concept arts and before design that actually goes in and fine-tunes it to actual usable asset. But I feel like, at least from our perspective, we feel like it’s just more about having information quicker, easier to access. And coming back to that thing that you mentioned about like 200, 300 pages brand guidelines, skimming through it, right?

Perhaps you don’t even have to do that. We just ask the super nice AI that the brand has, hey, what are the key things I should know before I do anything like in my position? And it will just say, hey, nice to meet you.

How about you just go ahead and start with the brand fundamentals and just helping you a little bit more. But I feel like the AI is evolving so quickly that predicting what it’s going to be and what role it will play, I feel like it’s almost mission impossible. And if somebody says that they know what’s going to happen in the future and what role it will play, they’re just trying to catch some likes and share some social media.

Please excuse the interruption to your scheduled podcast. It’s Matt Davies here. It can be lonely out there when we’re building brands and having a support network around us can be very valuable.

About four years ago, I started my Mastermind Group. It’s a group of global brand builders. We meet once a month virtually.

We discuss all the latest topics in brand building and we offer support to one another as we progress. As well as the monthly meetups, you have access to our Mastermind platform. You’ll have over three years worth of past recordings and access to message boards where you can get support from the group.

To apply, go to my website, mrmattdavies.me forward slash mastermind. If you mention that you are a JUST Branding listener, you will be eligible for two free months per year as part of the group. If you want to level up, grow and be supported every step of the way, check out the Matt Davies Mastermind Group.

I’ll see you there. On that basis, I’m going to ask Jacob, what do you think?

Yeah, I was going to comment. You said I was sweating, but on the other side, I’m actually using it already, especially Gen. AI.

Uploading a particular style. For my summit that I’m organizing at the moment, I needed icons for the website. I created one or two icons in a style, uploaded that style, and then typed in new icons.

I wanted it to generate a new icon of, let’s say, a microphone. You type in microphone, it will literally copy the style that you’ve uploaded and create the icon exported as SVG, and then you have an icon file. This saves you hours of time.

I see it as a tool, and I’m already using it pretty much every day, and I’m excited for where it’s going, especially the video side of things which is going rapidly, and it’s just in one year, it’s improved so much. So I look forward to that.

Sometimes I wonder if you are actually not an AI yourself, Jacob, just putting it out there.

I am a custom GPT or agent.

Maybe he is. This is the question we all need to ask ourselves. Just talking about video though, and just going back to some other experiences that I’ve had, I think one of the things that I find businesses struggle with, like they usually have a centralized brand team, right?

And this team are in charge of consistency, and usually in a company, in a big company anyway. But it’s very hard for that team because they’re often seen as the bottleneck. So the marketing teams are trying to get stuff out.

They got to get it approved by the brand team. The brand team then, if they’re not happy, say we need to change that, a lot of tension involved. And particularly if the marketing teams are working with agencies.

Because then they’ve got to go back to the agency and then explain the brand team are not happy and it’s very inefficient. So one of the things that I often look at is, well, how do we onboard anybody that’s going to touch the brand into the brand’s world? And if we can do that, as you said, Raitis, you know, swiftly maybe with video and audio, like we can do that, we can get them up to speed quicker, get them excited about working with the brand, and get them to understand the core principles.

And from my perspective as a strategist, understand the strategy and the core positioning. So one of the things I always try and do is make sure when I’m advising clients that we get a video on onboarding people into the essence of the brand. Do you see a need for that?

And do you see in, for example, your software, do you allow those videos to go in, those training and onboarding videos that are explainers? And do you feel that a lot of your customers use that?

I’m all over tutorial videos or just simple explanations of what people should actually go ahead and pay attention to. We do allow that. Not a lot of brands actually go ahead and do that.

I’m not sure why.

Why? I see this as well. People don’t do it as much as they should.

Yeah. Because, for example, just coming back to the AI question, most probably it’s very easier to explain how to prompt and what to look out for in a video than to simply just type in a bunch of text saying, hey, this is the prompts. Do that.

Don’t do that. But in a video, just explain, hey, if you do this, it’s going to create this. But if you change this one small word, to set of on-brand prompts, it will spit out this kind of results, right?

And in that way, it’s way more visual and people actually learn just a tiny little bit more from the video than from text itself, right? So, and it’s also a little bit more fun to actually see the other person explain and actually perhaps even show in real time how that impacts their workflow or anything of that.

It’s funny, just going back to the AI again, I was just thinking about something that happened to me the other day. So I’m working with a brand, and they asked me to look at some core messaging, and we’d had another sort of tone of voice expert build out tone of voice. Now, I understood the brand’s key value propositions and the type of message, but I’m not at heart a copywriter.

But the copywriter was unavailable, and we needed to get this done fairly swiftly. So what I did was I went into AI, and I told it all the principles of the brand tone of voice. And I said, this is what the value propositions that I’ve written.

I’d like you to rewrite these in the right tone of voice. And it wasn’t perfect. We had tweaks and stuff, but it was pretty good.

And it gave me lots of options. So as time develops, I’d be interested in the brand management systems. Like you were saying, there might be chatbots you can ask about it, but you might actually then evolve it into generating at least concepts that are on brand that then can be tweaked and change.

And for me, I think there’s so much opportunity with these systems that you’re involved in building for all of that. They’re going to be an essential requirement, I think, for businesses to take brand seriously going forward. Any ideas, any thoughts that that sparked?

Yeah, definitely. I think in concept, it’s actually amazing what we can do with that. I’m just taking an example of yours, right?

But then we have to take a step back. So what are actually brands on a voice or brand assets or the guidelines in general? It’s actually very, very sensitive information that has been crafted meticulously, like over the years, depending on the brand.

And then there is this huge question, what happens with our information when we put it in AI, right? Who lands from it? Where the data is stored?

Of course, that’s European and me speaking with all the data protection and GDPRs. But there’s this huge question, right? And I feel like brands are a little bit afraid, right?

They don’t know if their brand assets are going to be used for training purposes. How can they perhaps leverage AI in a safe way that actually doesn’t compromise that information? Let me get through all of those questions and we actually establish this kind of a flow, right?

Just as we had with actually simple Internet. When Internet came out, nobody was like, what the hell? What happens when I type in something there?

What happens when I put information there? Who owns it? What happens?

When we get through that stage for AI, I feel like it’s going to be just an incredible tool that will help not only brands, but I think just globally for everybody.

Okay. So we’ve talked a little bit about the future, where it could go. We’ve talked about why it could be useful right now.

Let’s just talk about how. Say I’m a company and I think, okay, this makes sense. I’m going to put my assets online, going to make sure that everybody right now and then into the future is going to use them in a consistent way.

As time goes on, I can update them and make sure that that’s pushed out to everybody correctly. I see the value in that. So imagine I’ve been used to working though in the old school way, we talked about PDF and Dropbox or something.

How do you recommend that people start to begin to move more into this centralized brand management system?

I think just taking it step by step. Whenever we think about legacy formats, it usually means that when we start to work on it, to share it, we actually have to be finished with it. So if you start to build it up, we have to make all the things happen and then we can share it with the rest of the team.

With the Online Brand Guidelines and this solution in general, the cool thing is that you actually don’t have to finish anything at any point and you can start to share it with the team. So let’s say that you have 200 pages in your Brand Guidelines at the moment, and you’re like, just me taking that information and transforming into an online environment is going to take ages. I’m not going to do that, that’s for sure.

So you don’t actually have to do that. Start with Brand Fundamentals. Put up the logo, typography, tone of voice, perhaps some basic assets, and start building it out step page by page, all the while sharing with the rest of the team, so they can already start to benefit from that.

So it’s like believing and believing documents. So you don’t have to be actually finished as you had before this kind of a form even was available. So yeah, I think just taking a step by step, just start building out little by little, perhaps transform already existing brand guidelines, and then eventually, in no time, you’re actually going to get to the finished product.

Often, well, brand guidelines can be finished.

How do you get the team on board and up to speed with how to use the tool and so forth?

That really depends on the tool itself, right? I can only speak about Corebook in general. We, since day zero, have always put ease of use and really kind of a simple to understand UX UI as core principle for Corebook.

So I would say that if you have ever used a web builder, there are a bunch of them, right? You will feel pretty quickly at home. Of course, with our, like, Flare and Finesse and all that, but you will feel really, really quickly at home and you’ll really start to do advanced stuff real quickly.

And I feel like on average, if you spend about, I don’t know, full working day, you can create a lot, a lot of things on Corebook real quickly.

And you’re just sharing a link or a log in to the portal and then people learn how to use it until once they’re there.

Yeah. So just for example, one of our clients, Miro, they have set up like bankit.miro.com. It’s publicly available.

If anyone is listening, go ahead and check it out, see what Miro’s up to. But yeah, everybody can go in, see what’s what, right? And learn from it.

And of course, with online environment, there’s also this huge additional benefit that actually you can hide information behind like a password or you can hide it from everybody except editors. So for the first time, brands actually have full control over like access, security and the sharing capabilities as with like with the legacy. Well, we know what happens when we send something out.

It goes to live their own life. We don’t know where it will end up. And that’s why we have so many like branding leaks at the end of the day, because somebody shares an MVP or in production version of the brand, and it ends up in on some website just says, hey, these guys are working on this amazing stuff.

Check it out.

But with online environment, it’s like it’s not even possible, especially if you’re utilizing something like single sign-on authorization, where anybody who wants to visit those brand guides actually have to have a work email. Only that way they can log in. So you can make sure that only approved people essentially can get access to the bank island.

So I feel that that’s like so much overlooked feature of online environment. It just buys you not only the environment, but actually buys you that safety feeling and making sure that essentially, you have the peace of mind when you’re working with brand, and especially when you’re working on a rebrand or pretty big refresh, or you’re an agency actually working with the biggest client you ever had, and you’re like, we can’t tell anyone about this. Like we have an NDA inside an NDA which holds another NDA, right?

We can’t mention any of this stuff even to like five and kids. If you’re working on a PDF, well, it’s pretty hard to control it, especially if you have to collaborate internationally, right? You have to send over things, you have to share that way.

I think it really, really, well, you can create that tension that’s not needed essentially.

That’s really interesting because what you’re in effect talking about there and I hadn’t really clocked this until just now, so maybe I’m just a bit slow is, what you’re saying is these platforms, they can be used in the development of the brand identity system, as well as when it’s finished at the end. Obviously, when it’s finished in inverted commas because as you say, it’s always going to evolve and change over time. That’s a really interesting thing and then in the development phase, you can make sure it’s all locked down.

Then even after that, you can lock off areas of the system if necessary. But one thing I find quite fascinating is there is a rise, isn’t there, in brands being super transparent. You mentioned a brand earlier, was it Miro, about how they’re developing their brand.

There’s loads of online, publicly viewable, brand identity systems, which people can go and look at and use, particularly international brands, particularly in the tech, SaaS space, I find that there’s this openness to developing and being free with, this is us, this is our typography, this is how we do it. They need to be like that, particularly if they’re scaling at pace because they need access to that information to be widely available. Do you find that in terms of that transparency, that’s a good thing for brands or do you see a need for brands sometimes to be, I’m not talking about sensitive information, I just mean just their brand identity system to be more closed on that.

What’s your take on that, Raitis?

I’m all over publicly available identity systems, especially with those bigger brands. So we can have that publicly available, we can have it private. But what happens if somebody wants to grab the logo?

They’re going to go to your website, grab a low-resolution version of it, try to find which typography you’re using, and try to mimic some form of asset. So why don’t we just provide everything beforehand? So when people want to build out assets that are related to a brand, they actually have access to high-resolution resources, right?

You still have the information publicly available. That’s why I think sometimes brands have this fear, what’s going to happen? They’re going to have access to logo files, typography, tone of voice, all that.

Hello. You have that already publicly available in your website, in your social media. If somebody wants to replicate your identity, they will be able to do that from social media, from your website.

They already will be able to do that. But the drawback of that is that they can do that. They’re going to do a lesser job on it because they have access to low-resolution assets.

They don’t have access to actual guidelines for that. And that just saves a bunch of time for everybody included, right? Of course, there is conversations to have about access to information like campaigns or that.

That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about like essentially brand fundamentals that are still that are out there already. It’s just a question about providing just better way how to access that information.

I saw this little feature when you on a website, I can’t remember what website it was, but you right click on the logo and a little pop-up comes saying download style guide or view online style guide, and that’s where you can download all the assets. So I thought that was pretty handy.

Not like that, but we have this feature called attachments, where for example, if you put up a logo file that is just editorial asset at that point, you can actually add attachments to that and you can upload anything you really want. So if you want to provide like EPS, PNGs, perhaps you have animated version of the logo, you can add all of those assets easily available for everybody. All they have to do is just, oh, logo, hover over it, click on it, grab whatever they need.

So super quick. The best part about it is that it’s actually on-brand. It’s actually brand-approved assets.

It’s not like some weird sketchy size that says that they have PNG, but we know what means downloading a PNG from Google.

So yeah, giving that confidence for everybody included.

Great. So I mean, I think we’ve danced around this quite a bit. I’m just wondering, is there anything else that we haven’t covered off that you think that we should discuss?

Because I think it’s quite obvious that this is the future for brand management, and definitely makes an awful lot of sense. Any other areas you think we should discuss before we close up?

I think I just want to leave with the last bit is that usually when brand managers or creative agencies start to work on the brand guidelines, they think about it as a tangible resource. They’re thinking about it as a practical use case of the brand guidelines. But if we zoom out for a little bit, brand guidelines isn’t actually, and afterwards brand management isn’t really about the practicality of the brand guidelines or the brand assets.

It’s actually about just you’re actually creating a confidence and reassurance for the brand. If the brand guidelines have been created beautifully, easily accessible, and every stakeholder knows that they can count on that sort of truth. When they work on their own time, in their own time zone, it gives that confidence to actually move forward a lot quicker, but faster.

And what happens is even you don’t have the confidence. It’s something that I mentioned at the beginning of the call. People start to scale down, they slow down, they start to question.

And a lot of those things can actually just distract collaboration instead of actually improving it. Especially nowadays when not only remote firsts, but global teams that are just interconnected as essentially a norm, right? It’s not all too ordinary that someone from the New York City is collaborating with someone from Sydney, for example, right?

So just making sure it doesn’t matter when, how, if you’re working on the brand, you have that full confidence. So, yeah, I feel like that’s what I would love to leave with that.

Yeah. That’s a great ending part. And I think even beyond that, if I push it further, like why do we want to give people confidence to what they’re working with is, right?

And why does the brand need to manage it? Like we were saying at the start, it’s really because what the brand is trying to do is manage its positioning in the market. It’s wanting to make sure that people recognize its touch points, recognize its messaging and it wants to build up that equity in the share of its audience’s mind.

And if you’re not doing that, then you’re opening yourself up to all sorts of confusion and lack of confidence from a consumer’s perspective, which are ultimately the core thing, right? So I think you’re right, internal confidence and with the partners and the agencies and the stakeholders that are working with the brand. But also, let’s push it right back down to consumer confidence, that you are who you say you are, that the brand is doing fulfilling this amazing promise and that you’re reliable to buy from.

I think ultimately that’s got to be front of mind as we close up. Any final thoughts, Jacob?

Well, you said that’s the core thing and it just made me think of Corebook. So you came full circle there. There we go.

Talking of Corebook, how do people kind of, I guess they kind of get a demo, can they explore that? Like, you know, where do people go to find out a little bit more about Corebook and also find out more about yourself?

Yeah, definitely. So all you have to do is just Google Corebook and we should be the number one hit. Also happens to be on online brand guidelines.

So you can also just search for that. But for direct link, just go to corebook.io. You can give it a shot.

We have two weeks free trial where you can actually see how it fits into your workflow and tech stack. And you can also, of course, book a call with our amazing product team, right? And for you guys that are listening, if you book a call and you mention the reference as a source where you’re coming from, this podcast, I will personally take over that call with you and we have a conversation with you.

Nice.

There you go.

Careful what you promise, Raitis, because our listenership is growing to the thousand, so good luck. It got beyond the thousand. I think we’re somewhere.

I don’t even look at it anymore. But yes, so be careful. Keep writers busy, everybody, and make sure you do that.

Brilliant. This episode isn’t sponsored at all, so there are other platforms. Feel free to explore them.

But Corebook is an awesome platform, so definitely check that out. I guess we’ll end there, Raitis. Thanks so much for coming on.

It’s been amazing to have you and your personality. Love to talk Star Wars with you and share more terrible Star Wars jokes later on. From Jacob and I and all our listeners, thank you very much.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. It has been incredible. Lovely to chat with you.

And guys, let’s stay confident in our branding. And yeah, Corebook is one of the platforms, but there are a bunch of platforms out there that can fit into your needs. It doesn’t matter the size of your company or brand.

So just choose whatever fits for you. And let’s just make sure that PDFs are a thing of the past. I think that’s what matters the most.

Oh yeah.

See you then.

Thank you.