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Diageo is a UK success story. With a net sales close to £10Bn*, Diageo has 25,000 employees working globally across 180 countries. It is the acknowledged market leader in the global drinks industry and its 370 brands include category leaders and household-name brands such as Smirnoff (vodka), Guinness (beer) and Johnnie Walker (whisky).

Great marketing and branding are central to Diageo’s success. Creativity in advertising and promotions in particular is a critical factor. Diageo excels in this area, and Guinness for example has won numerous accolades for its impactful advertising campaigns.

With a £1.5Bn* annual investment in marketing, Diageo has been keenly aware of the need to protect its intellectual property and brand assets. This paper reveals how Diageo’s industry-leading global Brand Asset Management (BAM) system helps Diageo manage its exalted international reputation and global brand ambitions.

How Diageo Manages its Brands

Diageo

Industry: Global Drinks Site Scope:Brand Asset Management

A case study of Brand Asset Management (BAM) in action

* year ended 30 June 2011

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“ With a company of our size and complexity Smartbrand is essential in making it more effective, both at search and spin and from a compliance perspective. The site protects our reputation, assets and our ability to market our brands.”

Andy Fennell, CMO, Diageo PLC

Overview of SmartBrand

SmartBrand is the name of Diageo’s BAM system and is actively used by c. 5,000 Diageo brand, marketing, and compliance managers world-wide, and Diageo’s agencies.

SmartBrand is a suite of tools that helps Diageo marketers to find, create and adapt brand assets, and to share with, and learn from, other Diageo marketers. SmartBrand is where marketers find all the content created for brands.

SmartBrand is also a project management tool to manage the creation of promotional materials through campaign requirement, brief, creative development and fulfilment steps. SmartBrand supports Diageo’s consumer and customer marketing teams to deliver campaigns and ensures the commercial team is informed of developments and progress. The key SmartBrand applications are SmartLibrary and SmartApprove.

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SmartLibrary

Diageo marketers operate in all regions and time zones around the world, often working with local creative agencies to build localised promotional content and campaigns. Although local marketers are empowered to customise promotions to meet the needs of local customers and the community, centralised controls are required to maintain global brand integrity and consistency. This is the goal of Diageo’s SmartLibrary – to provide a central digital repository of brand identity, advertising and other marketing communications content for Diageo’s extensive marketing community. SmartLibrary tracks, controls and protects Diageo’s intellectual property and usage rights for 57,000 brand assets primarily created by Diageo’s agency partners.

SmartLibrary enables marketers to ‘search and spin’ – search, identify and re-purpose (‘spin’) digital assets such as logos, copy, photos and videos. SmartLibrary also flags the rights associated with brand assets, such as expiry dates and limitations on use (such as geographic availability).

The cost savings associated with re-purposing existing creative work, rather than commissioning agencies to produce new work is substantial. In addition, the speed and cost of asset distribution is radically improved, enabling Diageo to launch promotions in a timely and efficient manner. The sharing of internal best practice and the re-use of brand assets is a Diageo senior management strategic initiative that is personified by SmartLibrary.

“SmartLibrary spells out Diageo’s intellectual property rights and combined with powerful permissions controls delivers an enviable solution.”

Stuart Casey, Senior Counsel IP, Diageo PLC

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SmartApprove

SmartApprove is a workflow system that has 9 project stages: establish requirements, concepts / ideas, pre-production, localise, evaluation, brief agencies, creative proposal, final creative, and fulfilment. SmartApprove guides the creative process ensuring that the necessary management approvals are gained before promotions ‘go live’.

In particular the Global Brand Team ensures that corporate brand guidelines are followed, and legal and commercial managers ensure IP and regulatory compliance. In the US for example, there might be 50 different variants of product packaging dependent upon individual state rules relating to the sale of alcohol.

The Diageo Marketing Code (DMC) drives SmartApprove. The DMC is the corporate brand guidelines rule book for legal and advertising and corporate social responsibility (CSR) especially with regards to ‘responsible drinking’ of which Diageo is a champion. Such is the importance of the DMC that the use of SmartApprove is mandatory within Diageo.

Diageo encourages its external agencies to participate and to use SmartBrand as a mechanism for transmitting their creative work to Diageo for editing and approval. This again speeds processes and ensures the capture of valuable digital assets.

Other SmartBrand Features

In addition to SmartLibrary and SmartApprove, SmartBrand acts as a global brand portal for Diageo. It is a central corporate resource for marketers globally and provides content and tools for Marketing and Innovation, Brand Collections, Legal and Procurement, Search and Spin, Consumer Planning, Engagement Tools (such as Point of Sales, Packaging, and Campaign Products) and Corporate Relations.

“ SmartApprove’s easy to use workflow ensures all our executions are reviewed and approved against the Diageo Marketing Code, a code we take very seriously as a business. Without question, SmartBrand is the best rights management tool I have ever come across.”

Stuart Casey, Senior Counsel IP, Diageo PLC

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End Results and Benefits Gained

Prior to the introduction of SmartBrand, Diageo, like many others, distributed their brand assets via internal post on CDs; and approvals were sent via email. Neither of these methods provided an adequate audit trail, visibility of campaign processes, nor ensured best practice management and a measured control of processes. Since the introduction of SmartBrand, costs have progressively been reduced to the stage where annual running costs are delivering a 6X payback. In addition, the value of brand assets under Diageo’s control has ramped up considerably. Not only is the Finance Department pleased with this progress, but also the Legal Department and Corporate Marketing Department greatly value an improved streamlined management process. Most importantly however, the ever-present risk of damage to corporate reputation through non-compliance has been minimised.

“ SmartBrand is a successful project – a proven tool that delivers long-term competitive advantage.”

Stephen McKillop, Global Project Manager for SmartBrand, Diageo PLC