Outift: The New Secret Weapon in Brand Management and Marketing Material Production

Brisbane, October 26, 2015 (Newswire.com) - MEDIA RELEASE

Outfit: The new secret weapon in brand management and marketing material production

"Outfit effectively digitises an organisation's style guide, taking the guesswork out of brand management. With Outfit's constraint-based system, organisations know collateral will always be produced within agreed guidelines. This is the Outfit's major advantage over other players in the market."

Bruce Stronge, Managing Director, NetEngine

It’s a pain point all too familiar for large businesses – just how do you produce marketing materials that are on brand and customised for your needs without experiencing lengthy delays while the job sits with an overloaded design team?

Brisbane-based software developer NetEngine has come up with the answer, preparing to launch its enterprise brand management and marketing production tool, Outfit, this month.  

With the goal of developing marketing production software that strikes a balance between brand consistency and operational flexibility, Outfit has been two years in the making.  The result is an intelligent, cloud-based software solution set to change the way in-house and agency marketing teams do business – slashing costs, eliminating brand misrepresentations and making long waits a thing of the past.

And there’s been plenty of interest in the branding sector. California-based agency, PlainJoe Studios, started using Outfit to speed the production of branded marketing materials for their clients. Peter McGowan, the agency’s Creative Principal, is impressed with Outfit’s flexibility and is very excited to support the adoption of the platform in the US. There are also final negotiations taking place with two of Australia’s largest universities.

NetEngine Managing Director Bruce Stronge was approached by global open-source IT solutions company Red Hat in 2013 to help with managing the increasing amount of requests for producing branded marketing assets in the Asia-Pacific region.

Brand governance was a significant challenge as Red Hat expanded. Being wedged between the global brand manager, regional marketing teams and dozens of agencies gave NetEngine a unique insight into the conflict of producing all the necessary creative pieces, while ensuring all collateral adhered to strict brand guidelines.

“For decades the solution has been to throw more resources – designers, brand managers, content authors and photoshop licenses to cater for the ever growing need for marketing materials.  This ad-hoc solution is not only costly, but also does not ensure brand control.  We knew there had to be a better way,” he said.

With Outfit, Stronge and his team have created a platform that gives brand managers, content authors and marketers the power to use pre-approved branded design templates to update copy and produce marketing materials instantly, without waiting for a graphic designer.

“Outfit accelerates the production and re-purposing of marketing materials, but does not replace the creative team or graphic designer.  Instead, it frees up their time to do what they do best, creating high quality creative concepts, without getting bogged down producing countless versions of the same item of collateral,” Stronge says.

Outfit also allows organisations to avoid lengthy approval processes. Designers set up a variety of pre-made templates across various file formats to produce anything from business cards to billboards.  Then, others in the organisation can customise these items with their own text and graphics. They are also able to save their own versions and export their marketing materials, ready for online and print distribution.

Outfit effectively digitises an organisation’s style guide, taking the guesswork out of brand management.  With Outfit’s constraint-based system, organisations know collateral will always be produced within agreed guidelines.  This is the Outfit’s major advantage over other players in the market.

“Most marketing production solutions and cloud design tools focus on sharing assets and collaborative design.  But for global enterprises, whose company value is directly related to perfecting its brand execution, designers shouldn’t be doing copy changes and most certainly, marketers shouldn’t be tweaking designs to fit their messaging.

“There has never been greater demand for visual content, and being able to produce the right visuals that are on-brand in a short period of time has become essential for large global businesses who are managing a range of different brand requirements at any given time.  With Outfit, we are happy to provide a solution that can make everyone’s lives easier,” Stronge said.​

For more information please contact:

Brooke Chapman, Publicist – NetEngine

0407 163 876

brooke@netengine.com.au