Last week Quark introduced a new enterprise solution that at first may not appear to have any relevance to many creative pros. But behind the announcement of Quark Brand Manager are some interesting ideas that may one day affect how you work.
Quark Brand Manager is what’s called an SaaS — Software as a Service — that lets corporate users better manage the process of distributing information to sales and marketing personnel. Assets are stored on a remote server where they can be edited, tracked, approved, downloaded and printed from anywhere. In other words, it uses “the cloud” to give access to users in the field yet allows headquarters to manage how they are using the corporate message. It’s built on Microsoft’s Azure Platform, which is the foundation of Microsoft’s cloud computing initiatives.
The basic idea is based on a scenario like this: Joe is a salesman for Company X who is out courting Corporation Y. As he’s preparing for his presentation, he wants to customize materials and leave-behinds for his prospective new client. Joe isn’t a designer, not by a long stretch, so mucking around with graphic files is a recipe for disaster. He could request changes from the marketing department via email who would then ask the design department to update the Quark or InDesign files, who would return the PDFs to marketing, who would review them (perhaps asking for more changes) before emailing them back to Joe. Meanwhile Joe is pacing and panicking. The presentation is this afternoon, and he has no updated files. Furthermore, he needs to have them printed at a local shop and he’s running out of time for that.
Quark Brand Manager is designed to solve that by giving companies Web-based systems that create a more efficient and secure way to ensure the brand is being used appropriately. Designers convert Quark or InDesign layouts into Quark Brand Manager templates that can be changed appropriately and approved accordingly.
As a result, guys like Joe can customize a presentation for his clients and rest assure that he won’t incur the wrath of marketing. So Joe, sitting in his hotel room, logs into the cloud, chooses which predesigned templates he needs, updates the text accordingly, and waits for marketing approval, a process that is much faster thanks to the elimination of email transmission that is often bogged down by slow networks.
Quark says this cloud-based system is much more efficient — it claims the system reduces by “up to 50 percent the time it takes to create templates for brand-compliant collateral” and “up to 90 percent the time it takes field teams to deliver customized collateral to consumers — and as a result gives field reps enough time to get their materials printed.
Yes, print on demand is mentioned as part of this scenario. No, Quark isn’t going into the business of printing, yet the company says its research says that 60% of marketers would do more print if it were more cost-efficient. Now that cost of putting ink on paper isn’t controlled by Quark Brand Manager, but all the hours leading up to that point is. Companies know that leaving print materials on the conference-room table still packs a powerful punch. The idea, says Quark’s Nick Howard, is to “take the cost out of print.”
Quark Brand Manager is not for creative pros outside major corporations who have the money and infrastructure to support such as a system. Yet the idea of streamlining approval cycles to allow more time for printing is one that benefits all of us.
This article was last modified on August 2, 2021
This article was first published on February 21, 2012
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