The need for a brand templating platform was on Rick’s radar. Initially, he and his team were in talks with a competitor platform but found that solution to be severely lacking in quality and sophistication. However, fates collided when a colleague mentioned Marq to Rick. Upon further discussion, Rick found that Marq was able to offer the granularity, brand consistency and agency that Towson (and his team) needed.
“Marq gives us the ability to democratize the design process by delivering branded assets to other departments and people on campus, so they don’t have to go through my group [for assets]."
For Towson, successful implementation of Marq meant rolling things out in a slow, methodical fashion. The university was in the midst of rebranding, which caused the implementation and template creation process to take longer than anticipated. But Rick knew that the time spent on planning and building templates would pay off in the long run. In his words, “You have to spend more time in order to save more time.”
Rick recommends that any organization new to Marq start off by conducting a content audit — identify who your core users are, which departments make the most requests and what assets can be applied to multiple people or departments. For example, look carefully at the type of projects that you are doing repeatedly, and consider the projects that tend to get caught up in a seemingly endless cycle of changes and approvals. Couple a content audit with Rick’s strategic approach to empowering Towson departments with the right materials for the right job, and it’s easy to see that Towson is and was set up for success. And as Rick said, “Templates have a connotation of [being] very basic, simple and bland. I’m not interested in distributing ‘templates’ to my clients because that’s not necessarily what’s going to help them. I’m interested in creating customized solutions that empower them to create their own assets.”
