Brand Consistency - Is Your Brand Memorable?

I do a lot of audits on brands in my day to day, and there’s one thing that really stands out time and time again as a blocker to growth and that is that Brands struggle to stay consistent, and therefore they become less recognisable and less memorable.?

Whether it’s the videos you upload onto YouTube, the social media posts you release, or the merchandise you create, achieving brand consistency on one channel is hard enough, but achieving it across all channels is a big challenge.?

But the reward is worth the effort! Maintaining a consistent identity builds memorability, inspires trust and builds rapport with customers, which strengthens your distinctiveness, awareness and brand equity, which builds your pricing power over time.

Brand recognition is perhaps the most obvious benefit to maintaining a consistent brand identity. After all, the more people recognise your brand, the more likely they are to buy from you. And the more consistent your branding is, the easier it is for busy, distracted customers to recognise your brand when they see it.

Coca Cola are a great example of this (even though I am reticent to use them, bit we will take their brand genius and use it to share with more purposeful companies) in that ever year their Christmas truck hits the road, and we all feel a little cosier when we see the headlights hit the snow, the massive red truck and smile at the Christmas jingle. That advert has been running consistently since 1995.?

More so, we recognise their red and white brand colours, their script style typeface and we can even recognise the silhouette of their iconic bottle in the dark.

For a more ethical example we can look to another sweet treat icon Ben & Jerry’s, whose packaging is always visible in the freezer aisle with it’s light blue brand colours and its use of light hearted illustrations.?

So, How Do You Ensure that Your Branding Stays Consistent?

Honestly, it’s not easy to do, but with patience and the right guidance, you can create a brand that is recognisable, memorable and with any luck, maybe even iconic..

Here’s a few tips to get you started:?

1. Document Your Purpose?

For a brand to be truly authentic, and effective, it needs to accurately represent the culture and stakeholders within the business. Ensuring that the purpose of the brand is clearly understood internally, allows it to be communicated externally in a much more robust and potent way.?

Taking the time to clearly define your brand’s purpose, and involving expert facilitators and a broad range of stakeholders in the process is the first step in laying the foundations of brand consistency. A series of facilitated workshops to explore your purpose without the usual distractions is a great way to start.?

2. Create Your Brand Guidelines

Before you can start making decisions that affect your brand, you need to know the baseline of how your brand should look, act and feel. This includes everything from the brand story and tone of voice, through to visuals, messaging and sounds.?

Taking the time to develop your brand guidelines will equip you with a baseline tool to inform how you communicate as a brand moving forward. Remember, brand guidelines can and should evolve over time, and you should use data, feedback and market insights to iterate them.?

3. Store Your Brand Assets Centrally

Once you have your brand guidelines, it's important that they can be accessed quickly, otherwise off the cuff decisions may be made that could damage the brand. At Zebra Growth, we use Google Drive to store our guidelines, and they can be accessed by all the people in our organisation.

4. Template And Train

With your core brand assets created and stored, it’s important that your team members understand how to use them. A good understanding of brand application will really help all of your team members to achieve consistency in their communication.?

You can start by showing your team how to access, navigate and understand your brand guide. Explain how it can be used to inform future projects and communication in a variety of contexts. Loom is a great tool for sharing training videos on brand guidelines.?

Once your team understands the basics of your brand guidelines, a good next step is to build templates for applying the brand to real life situations. At Zebra growth we use Figma to create user friendly templates for most scenarios when our brand needs to be applied. Need to create a social post? There’s a template for that. Need to create a landing page? There’s a template for that. Need to send an email campaign? Yup, you guessed it, there’s a template for that. Templates can provide a way to systemise your brand application, but also empower team members to communicate the brand consistently without a detrimental effect.??

5. Regularly Evaluate Your Branding

Once you have your guidelines, design systems and best practices in place, take some time to review your branding on a regular basis. Look for places where it may be lacking consistency. Does your tone of voice match your guidelines? Are your brand colours being used correctly? Is the correct imagery or video being used??

And remember to be thorough. Mistakes here are costly, because anything that affects the consistency of your brand, will also affect your bottom line.

Don’t be afraid to test things out, but always go back to your baseline guidelines and be sure not to change too many variables all at once.?

6. Brand Assets And Communications

Using the framework you’ve created, it’s time for you to start creating on-brand assets. From campaigns, videos, and photography, to products, brochures and content. All touchpoints that will support your business goals and strengthen your brand consistency.

It’s important to have a holistic view of your brand when creating assets. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I have seen a great video produced for a brand, but it is so far removed from the brand guidelines and misaligned with other brand touchpoints that it has a detrimental effect on the brand.?

7. Have A Strategy

Brand consistency goes beyond your product packaging, taglines and logos. It extends into every facet of your marketing strategy. This includes your social media content, your video ads, email campaigns, podcasts, in-store experience, and content marketing.

Making tactical decisions in the absence of a strategy is risky. So having a clear and concise marketing strategy that aligns with your brand guidelines and business objectives is important. Having a coordinated strategy will save you both time and money in the long-run. What’s more, when you have clear goals, it is then much easier to measure and test marketing tactics without losing your way.?

Maintaining brand consistency is one of the greatest things you can do for your business, and it will lay a foundation for you to excel where most of your competitors are getting it wrong. Not only does it make a huge difference in terms of creating goodwill with customers, but it also heavily impacts your bottom line. By setting up a structure for managing and maintaining your brand consistency, you’ll have the tools you need to build a brand that people recognise, value, and love.