A Comprehensive Guide on Building Brand Consistency
First impressions. No matter what anyone tells you, they’re not everything. Especially when it comes to your brand. Do you know what everything is? Consistency. It’s how the best brands keep their audience coming back time and again. In today’s digital landscape, breaking through the noise is increasingly difficult. With competition across so many different channels, how do today’s audiences decide where to direct their attention? It ultimately comes down to personally aligning with a company’s values. Your brand is built from carefully chosen elements. This includes not only visual aspects but also the mission and values that define your company’s purpose.?
These values should align with the audiences you aim to reach. As your brand presence takes shape across a growing number of platforms, inconsistencies in those brand elements will directly undermine their impact. Brand consistency builds a strong foundation from which audiences will better be able to understand a company. The result is brand trust, loyalty, and ultimately, the driving force of repeat business.
What is Brand Consistency?
Brand consistency is how an organization delivers messages aligned with its core values and mission, culminating in a cohesive brand experience. Ultimately it comes down to how “on-brand” your company’s communications and campaigns are with your established brand guidelines and identity. More than ever before, brands can be built in an instant, and in turn, they can fall just as quickly. Those brand details must be carefully thought through and communicated clearly to avoid limiting their impact. Changing business objectives and priorities can complicate how brand guidelines are followed. A successful brand is one with longevity. Built up over time by being flexible enough to adapt to the current market trends and expectations while remaining consistent.?
The activities at an organization that can impact brand consistency are far-reaching. This is especially true for marketing, sales, customer experience and any other team that has an external presence. Keeping everyone on the same page relies on a clearly defined brand architecture. Brands have different structures for defining how brand responsibilities are organized. Internal confusion will, one way or another, also reach potential customers.?
If your brand isn’t new, then it’s bound to have pre-existing content. Any effort to truly establish brand consistency needs to first have a complete view of the current brand. What campaigns have been launched? What is the sales team using during outreach? What’s featured, not only on our website but on other websites that mention us? Answers to these questions will begin to paint a picture of where and how the brand is making an impression. Documenting these items in an audit will help identify where there is already inconsistency with your brand and allow you to form a plan for addressing those issues.
Benefits of Brand Consistency
The most obvious benefit of brand consistency is brand recognition. Every business should strive to be immediately recognizable by its target audience. Not only does it help to build a strong association between your core messages and values and the visual elements of your brand, but it also sets your brand apart from the competition – a particularly valuable perk in highly competitive, saturated markets. Other benefits of brand consistency include:?
When you have brand consistency in your corner, shaping the perception of your brand in the minds of consumers is more easily achieved by introducing key messages alongside your consistent brand elements.?
When you tie brand consistency to positive emotions (through carefully crafted words and imagery), your audience will begin to associate those positive emotions with your brand. When done right, those emotions are eventually evoked with exposure to a stand-alone logo or your brand name, whether or not those positive emotion-evoking messages and images are present. That means mere exposure to your brand can make people feel happy, and happy people are more likely to buy (especially from a company they trust).?
Speaking of trust, brand consistency leads to confidence among consumers that they’ll have a certain experience when they engage with your brand. One often-cited example is Coca-Cola, a beverage brand with worldwide recognition. No one ever wonders what a bottle of Coca-Cola will taste like, because brand consistency ensures that it’s always the same. Remember: brand consistency is as much about the customer experience as it is about the visuals.?
Brand consistency is a key differentiation factor, as well. In a competitive landscape with a variety of near-identical offerings, brand consistency often means the difference between earning a customer’s business or losing them to the competition. Leverage brand consistency to communicate, again and again, what it is that sets your company apart from the rest.
How To Build Brand Consistency?
While you’ve laid the foundation for your brand presence, you’ll need to take steps to ensure that voice is amplified across channels. In this chapter, we’ll cover the importance of keeping all teams that touch your brand on the same page while opening the door to content distribution.?
The unfortunate truth is that 78% of a brand’s assets go to waste. That adds up to a lot of time and money. This is often the result of teams simply losing track or not knowing what content exists. It all amounts to chaos and it’s the enemy of both efficiency and brand consistency. Instead of wasting time searching for an asset they might not even be sure exists, stakeholders will often just request them directly from the creative or marketing team. They may decide it isn’t worth the time and give up. Or worse yet, try to create their assets.?
The most important aspect of building a central source of truth is creating a clear structure for asset organizations. When thinking about how to organize content, consider these questions:?
You likely won’t need to take into account each of these details but it will help identify the structure that makes the most sense for your business. Knowing which assets are most likely to be relevant to the right groups of your company will allow them to self-serve their needs and get content into use.
While you may know where to look, you still might not always know exactly which asset you’re looking for. Oftentimes you have a project or purpose in mind for an asset, but it might be just right for another purpose you haven’t even considered yet. This is where taxonomy and tagging help. When uploading assets for distribution, attaching relevant keywords will make them more searchable. Think about how people are searching for assets and what terms they’d typically use. Be sure to attach any relevant terms to all your assets, streamlining their search for any purpose.?
Asset distribution isn’t always straightforward. With different versions and iterations in the works, brand consistency depends on making sure the wrong assets don’t accidentally fall into the wrong hands. When building your central source of truth you’ll need to add steps for approval so that content is immediately distributed when ready and permissions so that users only access the correct assets.?
We’ve now covered how brand consistency operates inside your brand. But there’s a whole other piece to the brand presence puzzle. External teams and relationships account for a significant portion of many brands’ activities. These external relationships can include agencies, contractors, publications among others. And their involvement with your brand can take place at any point in the content creation and distribution processes. Naturally, brand guidelines are just as important – if not more so – than what you’ve established internally.?
Extending the reach of your brand beyond the confines of your organization opens the door to brand other consistency concerns. By providing those same brand guidelines, those issues can be mitigated. The longer and closer a relationship is with an external partner, the more familiar they will become with your brand, but their activity will still fall outside of your established creative workflow. Access and oversight of work that’s done with external teams will often involve additional steps.?
In every way, a company’s content is its brand online. It’s the company’s salesperson, its store, and its marketing department. It’s the company’s story. More and more a brand’s presence is a digital presence. There’s a good chance that your digital activity represents the majority, if not the only type of interaction audiences have with your brand.
Conclusion
Brand consistency is a must for any company that wants to build brand recognition and foster trust among its target audience, and that means that brand consistency is essential for every business. Without it, your target audience won’t recognize your brand, they won’t associate your brand with feel-good messages and positive emotions, and they won’t have confidence that they’ll have a consistent experience if they choose to engage with your brand.