Managing brand guidlines wiki-style

A few years ago, a former brand manager once told me about the process by which he helped launch Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder in China. Brand guidelines — which get into the nitty gritty details of fonts, colors, logo usage, bottle shape, the number of holes on the top of the bottle (yes, that’s actually part of the brand), and anything and everything that goes into producing and selling a bottle of powder — used to be printed as don’t-drop-it-on-your-foot-HUGE manuals and shipped from the mother ship to hundreds of brand managers around the world. Make one typo or mistake, or revise your brand guidelines after the manual was shipped, and you’ve got to deal with reprinting part or all of it. Fun.

Does anyone still kill trees when distributing brand guidelines?

All this went through my head when I saw a Microsoft billboard in Italy. Seems to me that a wiki is a much smarter way to go these days. I have no idea how Microsoft does it (wiki, fat printed manual, or something else entirely), but they’ve done an impressive job of replicating the design (brand) of their ads in the US with their ads in Italy.