What remains of a brand when thousands of employees work with it? The DHL example shows how a globally present brand can be managed and how efficiency can be combined with consistency.
A classic task for brand managers is to facilitate people's work with their brand. Internal creative teams, agencies, and regional marketing departments must be able to use the corporate design and create assets independently. With tools like Gemini, Adobe Express, or Canva, this is faster and more comprehensive than ever before.
Another important task for brand managers is therefore to precisely prevent them from doing that. Because the larger the number of people handling a brand, the greater is naturally the range of misinterpretations. Many marketers therefore used to see themselves as "brand police," roaming through the company with brand guidelines in their hands and insisting on compliance with the corporate design rules among overly creative colleagues.
Today, that would be completely futile. In an age where, thanks to Canva & Co., every employee can design and publish in no time, brand images are diluted faster than marketing managers can yell "Stop!"
And because that is the case, a completely new role is emerging for them in the age of AI. Instead of forbidding what shouldn't be, they must enable what benefits the brand. Enabling instead of policing is the new motto, and the DHL example shows how efficiently this approach works.
As a reminder: The DHL Group is a global corporation with around 600,000 employees in over 220 countries and territories worldwide. Among them are thousands of employees who work for, with, and on the DHL brand and its appearance. Day after day. Around the globe. In the most diverse media, cultures, and languages.
The fact that they still do this uniformly and in the spirit of the brand is primarily thanks to the DHL Brand Hub developed jointly with Strichpunkt. On the platform, which is accessible to every employee, DHL colleagues find all relevant brand assets, attractively designed guidelines, and explainer videos for dealing with them. Working with the Brand Hub is not only meaningful for them, but also fun. Which in turn is the prerequisite for its intensive use.
A central component of the Hub is the AI-supported Layout Creator, which DHL and Strichpunkt Design launched back in 2019. With the tool, DHL employees and external creatives can create up to 10¹⁵ different layout variations, fully automated, individually, and 100% in line with the corporate design. Over 100,000 layouts have been created in this way so far.
In other words: At a time when others were still talking about AI as a distant future, DHL Brand Management was already using it.
We at Strichpunkt are currently working on comparable creator tools for other large companies and institutions. The concrete implementations are as varied as the brands for which we design them. But at their core, they all answer the same question, which is highly relevant for brand managers in the age of AI, namely: How can the consistency and efficiency of a brand presence be combined? Even when tens of thousands are supposed to work with it day after day.
Fabian Hammans
is Creative Director at Strichpunkt and responsible for the framework of the DHL brand. He and his colleagues will present it at the Deep Dive DHL Brand Design: accelerated on 25.06. (Click here (opens in new tab) to register).