The Brand Glossary
This article is part of Air’s Ultimate Guide to Branding. Click here to explore the rest!
Glossary
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
A
An organization that provides one or more services for hire.
Example: Marketing agencies, PR agencies, Creative agencies, etc.
Assets
The Air term for “file” — any kind of document, image, audio, or video file used to promote and maintain a brand.
The practice of building and maintaining an audience for a brand using specific strategies implemented across multiple channels.
Audience segmentation
The process of dividing your audience into different segments based on defining features such as: product usage, demographic, position in marketing funnel, job role, or industry.
B
Board
Air’s version of a folder. A board provides you and your team with the ability to organize content visually. You can create organizational structure with a board for each of your teams or group content thematically with product-specific boards. Unlike traditional folders, your images and videos can live in multiple boards without the need to duplicate assets or mess with permissions.
A company’s values and services crystallized into a tangible concept that can be recognized by customers. Elements like the company’s name, mission, personality, and visual identity bring a brand to life.
The process of building a brand. Branding involves producing and curating brand assets that differentiate a brand from its competitors and portray a unique identity.
Brand assets
The elements that visually, verbally, and auditorily represent a brand. Brand assets include logos, fonts, colors, images, videos, and more.
A brand’s recognizability in a competitive market; the level of awareness that audiences in specific market segments have around a specific brand.
A brief, easy-to-understand document that defines the key design elements of a given brand. It serves as a single source of truth for internal and external collaborators designing brand assets and marketing materials.
A brand’s ability to maintain cohesion and uniformity across all branding assets, experiences, and products. Consistency is the key to boosting brand awareness and maintaining a strong brand identity.
Brand experience is the combination of brand strategy, customer experience, and user experience, to create a holistic brand identity and maintain consistency across all customer interactions with a brand.
Brand guidelines are the set of rules that clearly define the look and feel of a business. These include the rules that populate a branding board.
Brand manager
The person in charge of managing the creation and deployment of all brand assets. They are responsible for steering the greater vision of the brand, improving brand consistency, and helping the brand stand out.
Brand management
The process of managing and cultivating the brand experience end-to-end, making sure every touchpoint remains consistent.
The personification of a brand through human elements, such as brand voice, to empathize with customers and distinguish itself from competitors.
Brand preference
A customer’s liking for one brand or product over another.
The beliefs that drive a company. Brand values are fundamental to branding and help guide every business and marketing decision, from messaging to growth strategy.
The verbal elements that distinguish a brand in written communication and contribute to the establishment of brand personality.
C
Campaign management
The process of ideating, creating, launching, tracking, and analysing the entire lifecycle of a marketing campaign.
The person who has the need and use for a visual asset.
Example: Marketer, Executive, Salesperson
The method of uploading and sharing files to a centralized cloud platform where those assets can be accessed and used by others, regardless of physical location.
Any piece of information meant to be consumed by an audience.
The process of storing, organizing, and sharing content.
CMS (Content management system)
A structured home for content. A content management system keeps track of where content is located, its condition, and who has access to it, all while protecting it — this is the infrastructure that allows for efficient content management.
Content collaboration
The practice of accessing, sharing, and collaborating on visual and written content. In today’s businesses, this increasingly occurs on cloud platforms.
See: Cloud collaboration
A person who designs and produces creative assets.
Example: Graphic Designer, Photographer, Videographer
A document wherein clients and operators set clear expectations and make a request to a creative team to begin producing a creative asset.
A process that begins with an idea and ends with the deployment of a visual asset.
The sequence of processes and tasks required to take a creative asset from ideation to production to deployment.
A customer’s holistic perception of a brand.
Custom fields
Custom fields are a tool for organizing your Air workspace around your specific workflows. An example of a fixed, or non-custom field would be size or date created. Users tend to create custom fields for asset rating, approval, and digital rights management.
An Air feature that lets you assign keywords to your content. We like to think of custom labels like characteristics for a person — you use them to describe what you see in your images and videos, or any information your team might need, to help you stay organized.
D
The creative process of envisioning, constructing, and producing a visual asset.
The act of putting the assets produced by creatives into use in the market — as a paid ad, a social media post, etc.
Assets that you create, store, and share online.
Any method of storing digital files, from a computer’s hard drive to an Air workspace.
Differentiation
The process of distinguishing a brand from its competitors by cultivating and marketing the unique elements of its identity.
Digital asset management (DAM)
A system that organizes and stores digital assets in a central location, so they are easy to access, distribute, and share.
Digital rights management (DRM)
The method of protecting copyrighted digital assets and proprietary software from unauthorized use.
F
The process through which creative assets are assessed on their effectiveness by stakeholders and revised. Feedback is often the longest and most crucial stage of the creative process, and tends to go through several loops. The loop ends when the client is satisfied with the final asset and ready to deploy.
File hosting
How files live online, as opposed to on an isolated local hard drive. A server stores the file and makes it accessible to anyone with relevant permissions.
File management
The practice of organizing files in such a way that they’re optimized for searchability and usability; the creation of organizational structures within a system like Air.
The font is a specific version of a typeface resulting from the adjustment of size, format, weight, etc.
Example: Helvetica Regular 9 point
See: Typeface
A person who takes on independent contract work to complete tasks for different companies or individuals in need of their skills.
Freemium
A business model often used by software companies. It involves offering the basic version of a service for free, but then charging a price for upgraded plans offering increased features and functionality.
I
Image management
See file management; but specifically for images. Air is the premiere image management platform.
L
A visual embodiment of a brand’s identity. Different companies use different kinds of logos, including wordmarks, graphic logos, descriptive, and non-descriptive logos.
M
Marketing
A company’s efforts to establish a public presence, develop an audience, and attract customers while standing out from competitors.
Marketing assets
See assets; specifically an asset used in a marketing campaign or otherwise as marketing collateral.
A system that helps store and manage audio and video assets in a creative workflow.
See: Digital asset management
Images, videos, PDFs, and other forms of visual data are increasingly necessary for business operations. Yesterday, "content" was something business made for an occasional campaign, but today newsletters, social posts, and product demos are constantly being built for the modern, visual world — making every business a media business.
Media channel
In marketing, a specific channel used for advertising.
Examples: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Display, television
A brand’s way of communicating with its audience to encourage them to engage with the brand and purchase its products or services.
A short expression that describes a guiding principle of an organization.
O
The person who works with the client to understand their creative goals and translates those needs to the creative.
Example: Production Coordinator, Producer, Product Manager
R
A rebrand is a change in the overall brand image, voice, or values of a company or organization.
S
A short phrase used in advertising or promotion to capture the audience's attention and get them interested in the product. While both slogans and mottos are short, a motto is focused on expressing a belief or idea whereas a slogan is meant to grab the audience’s attention to sell something.
An Air feature that uses image recognition to automatically tag images and videos and make your content effortlessly searchable within your workspace.
Social media assets are all the components of your social media presence, including the photos and videos you post, as well as your accounts, your followers, the hashtags you use, and more.
Social media manager
The person who manages creatives, creates a social media plan, and generally oversees a brand’s social media efforts.
The process of defining a strategy to grow your social media presence, with the goal of increasing brand visibility.
A component of brand guidelines, focusing on brand voice and tone.
See: Brand guidelines
T
A short catchphrase that's used to represent a brand as a whole. It communicates what the brand hopes to achieve or what value they provide without explicitly mentioning the product or service. Taglines and slogans are often used interchangeably, but they are different. Whereas slogans are tied to a single marketing campaign, taglines are connected to the brand as a whole.
A set of characters that share a common design. The typeface acts as the parent design of a certain text and adjustments to its size, shape, and weight become various fonts.
Example: Helvetica, Times New Roman
The art of designing the appearance of printed text.
U
Use case
A potential scenario where a product or feature could be used to solve a problem.
The consumer’s perception of the usability, efficiency, and overall experience of interacting with a particular product or service.
In software, what a user sees and interacts with. The visualization of the underlying code that allows them to use a product.
Refers to any content (e.g., video, image, or social media post) that features a brand or products and was created by a customer or someone outside of the organization.
V
An Air feature that lets you stack new revisions on top of your original asset to help you and your collaborators track your progress. No more lost content, no more confusion around what's up to date, no more clutter.
Video asset management
Focuses on storing, organizing, and sharing video content.
See: Digital asset management
Visual identity
The holistic representation of what a brand looks like, cultivated through the brand’s consistent use of logo, colors, typography, packaging, and more.
W
A type of logo that showcases the typography of the company’s name without any other images, symbols, or illustrations.
Your visual headquarters on Air for all of your creative assets and workflows. You can invite collaborators to your workspace, organize assets with boards, share content with permissioned links, and more.
