In episode 53 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Bill Swallow discuss rebranding as a business case for smart content. How can you make sweeping branding changes as quickly and as painlessly as possible?

Related links:

* XML business case calculator 
* Smart content for marketing: automated rebranding

Twitter handles:

* @billswallow
* @PattersonScript

Transcript: 
Elizabeth Patterson:   Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 53 we discuss rebranding as a business case for smart content. How can you make sweeping branding changes as quickly and as painlessly as possible? Hi. I’m Elizabeth Patterson, and I’m joined today with Bill Swallow.
Bill Swallow:   Hello.
EP:   We’re going to talk about smart content and rebranding. Rebranding is a business case for smart content. Bill, can you describe a little bit about what that business case is?
BS:    Sure. Rebranding happens when you either have a merger, acquisition, you are taking your company in a slightly different direction, modernizing the look and feel, or you might just have a new content marketing officer who comes in, decides that sweeping changes need to be made. Then all of a sudden all of your content is in the wrong color, wrong size, wrong font, wrong logo, wrong taglines, what have you.
BS:   Usually what this means is that you have to go in and replace them all, but in a traditional content shop you generally have thousands of word files, thousands of FrameMaker or InDesign files. This is all technical content that, while it’s not going to be as flashy probably as your marketing content, it still needs to have a lot of this information applied. Whenever you do make these sweeping marketing changes, you also have to be mindful of all of the supporting documentation that your company has that’s going out to customers, going out to field people, and what have you.
BS:   How do you rebrand all of these things when you have all of these many, many, many files distributed probably across your company, being accessed and used by a variety of different people? It’s very, very time consuming and expensive to rework all of these static files. Replacing logos in word files, resizing them, applying new fonts and so forth. You’re lucky if you have templates to drive this, but generally what we’ve seen is that a lot of people do have these one off files that have ad hoc formatting in there, and everything needs to be redone by hand.
BS:   When we talk about smart content, we’re really talking about separating the formatting, all of that busy work, to get the content to look right, from the content itself. That way you can use the budget that you would have spent redoing all of this stuff to update tools and processes to make things flow a lot more smoothly.
EP:   Okay. With all of these files, you were kind of going into this some. But, rebranding can definitely be a very large undertaking, and you started touching on this a little bit, but what methods are companies and authors currently using to do that rebranding, and how can that be improved so that it is working most efficiently for them?
BS:   Well, a common method that actually shows a best practice is that on the web side. All of your web content is generally stored in some kind of a content management system, and that system is powered by HTML.