How do you create a consistent brand image across different channels and platforms?

When you're first creating your brand image you need to ask yourself: - Who am I looking to attract? Who is my target audience? - What feelings do I want to evoke through my brand? - How am I pricing my product/service compared to what is out on the market? These questions are going to help you understand the overall aesthetic of your brand.

A consistent brand image is a symphony that resonates with trust and recognition. Unite your brand across diverse channels with these concise tips. First, define your brand identity – vision, values, and personality – as the foundation for coherence. Next, harmonize visual elements such as colors, typography, and design, drawing inspiration from brands like Airbnb. Then, fine-tune your messaging and tone to strike a consistent chord, following the lead of brands like Slack. Lastly, iterate and adapt, listening to your audience's feedback and embracing growth. Let consistency be your anthem, guiding your brand's journey across all channels and platforms.

As a 30-year veteran of branding and design, I start the brand identity process by reducing the essence of the brand down to as few words as possible. While my first pass of a brand constitution might take me 500 clumsy and inelegant words, I'll whittle that description down to 250, 100, 50, and eventually a 5-word description of the brand. I know I've hit the right profound simplicity of the brand when it sparks an ah-ha sound from others that read it. Once I get that 5-word description of the brand, I assemble a series of brand rings similar to how you'd get to know a person from the outside first, brand reputation and brand image, to their brand personality and brand attitude, and then their inner core, brand values, and brand soul.

While a brand style guide does highlight the dos and don’ts of creative elements and tone of voice, it can deliver so much more. The most powerful brand style guides showcase all of the reasons to love the brand, inspiring both internal teams and external partners (ex. creative agencies). It highlights the history of the brand and the value it brings to both the customer and the community. Take the time to thoughtfully curate your brand style guide - the downstream impact is immeasurable.

Having a brand style guide is vital and can help you keep your branding consistent. It can also be helpful if you're looking to hire someone and would like them to have a clear understanding of your branding. Here are some of the things I include in a brand guide: - Mood board - Colors - Fonts - Adjectives to describe the brand -Adjectives we don't use to describe the brand - What we stand for - What we do not stand for - Any miscellaneous points you feel needs to be highlighted

I've worked with some of the world's most famous brands, all of which have detailed brand style guides. Far too many of these guides come off as policing documents that produce boring, overly professional, corporate-looking brand manifestations, like playing sheet music. But the best style guides are more like a manifesto given by the parents (founders) of a brand to the godparents (consultants) entrusted to care for and nurture the brand and carry it forth into the world on behalf of the parents. While there is no way to write down every single step of what the brand should look like, the best style guides help you understand the brand's values, particularly what's acceptable and unacceptable for the brand to embody or represent.

When it comes to branding, consistency is key. You want to make sure your branding perfectly aligns throughout all of your social media accounts, website, and any printed material. Once you have developed your brand book, look through all of your platforms and materials and identify the shifts you should be making to be more consistent in your branding. You ultimately want your audience to see your brand and know it's your content from the beginning. Being repetitive and consistent with your branding is key to making sure your followers know and remember you.

We use a wide variety of tools to monitor, check and ensure that our brand representations align with our brand identity standards and guidelines. While computer tools and AI analytics can help us, nothing beats the human eye for checking these things. Of course, we can monitor every single representation of the brand worldwide or on the internet, we have developed random selections which do a good job of catching misrepresentations and error patterns.

Staying consistent in your branding is key but make sure you are also adapting your content for the platform you are posting to. For example, your social media content will not be as long and detailed as your website. You would be using your social media to drive people to your website if they're looking for additional information. Each social media platform also has a different style so make sure you are tweaking your content depending on the platform.

While most companies focus on how they want to see their brand represented, our experience has taught us that people—particularly those entrusted with manifesting the brand in public—learn faster and more intuitively by understanding what is out of bounds for the brand. So we developed a category we call "Brand Felonies," which describes those things that others can not do with the brand. More than any material we develop, these felonies generate the biggest attention, focus, and consensus among the leaders of organizations. Why? Because as humans, we don't always know what we want, but we definitely know what we don't want. And this information can be extremely helpful in defining a brand across different channels and platforms.

Your goal is to develop a brand image that captivates your audience and that people will remember and associate with you. It is also completely normal to go through rebrands every couple of years. Styles change and your business will evolve. When you are first looking to brand, really take your time to do it, and don't rush through the process. If you have a couple of people that you trust then ask their opinion. Ask them how this branding makes them feel and if there are any disconnects between the visuals and your brand.

As a standard business practice, successful companies have regular meetings to discuss accounting, legal, HR, distribution, IT, and other business matters. But I am frequently shocked at how many companies don't have regularly scheduled meetings to discuss their brand's health, vitality, and livelihood. So it's no wonder brands get out of alignment and find their brand in a rut. To address this issue, companies need to appoint one person—not everyone—to be the Chief Brand Officer to monitor their brand's health, vitality, and livelihood. This CBO can have other organizational roles and assemble a Brand Stewardship Committee of rotating leaders. But the key is to have a defined role and single point of accountability regarding the brand.

One of my favorite thing to do when I am branding is to look at the branding of other industries that I love. By doing this, you will come out with a brand aesthetic that will look completely different from most of the other competitors in your industry. This will not only help you to stand out but it will also help you be remembered. I personally use travel as my inspiration but other industries that you can reference include: - interior design - beauty - fashion

At any given time in society, a handful of brands transcend commodity preferences and even brand loyalty. These brands have a loyal following that defends the honor of their cult brands and advocates the transformative powers of the brand in an evangelistic way to the public. My team and I study, monitor, and decode these brands to uncover their secret sauce. And what we find in every case is that these brands have an emotional coherency that everyone gets because no matter how you slice or dice the brand, it always comes up saying the same things in its staff presentation, packaging, customer services, advertising, social media, and consumer experiences.

When it comes to branding, the main part is to try and be original and use your own personality and values when thinking of the overall aesthetic. My branding is travel-inspired and Mediterranean because that is what I love and it also connects back to my Italian roots. Your branding should be a reflection of YOU!