How do I make my Brand more Consistent ?

WHAT'S THE BEST WAY TO BUILD BRAND?

When you are a brand owner, part of the job is effectively managing the resources at your disposal to build your brand. How do you get the best bang for buck? What do we invest in? What metrics do we apply? It's a hazy, fuzzy world where there are no clear answers. The old adage in branding / advertising / marketing that still holds true is:

60% of my marketing budget is wasted, I just don't know which 60%

A COMMON ISSUE: A LOT OF DIFFERENT HANDS ARE TOUCHING MY BRAND

In addition, if you're handling a brand, you deal with a lot of partners, you have a marketing team that each wants to be executing on different activities that should help results in hitting certain commercial KPI's, you have agency partners, you have different creative directors touching a brand, sales teams, digital marketing partners, and lots of other different stakeholders that need to either touch the brand or need to approve of what's happening.

MY BRAND IS LACKING CONSISTENCY, ACROSS TOUCH POINTS

Now for a long time consistency of brand executions has been the answer. For consumer brands that are launching a new campaign, a key visual is created - then that key visual gets cropped a thousand times and voila, there's your IMC-kit or your brand 360 plan.

Even being consistent in execution is hard, especially when you're dealing with different types of creatives that are working on your brand - there are the award chasers, that want to win their lions, there are those that are adapting but not sure how to do it best, there are your production partners that just rush to get the job done and you might have some partners where creativity is not part of the process, rather a necessary thing they have to deal with - for example your digital agency that is very knowledgeable about algorithms, but they're surely no brand design experts.

Whatever we're trying to do we're not able to get our brand consistent. How can we fix that?

BUT WAIT, ARE WE ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTION?

One of the most difficult things in any profession or even as it relates to personal development for that matter is asking the right question. Is it really consistency that will drive brand growth and help us propel sales and revenues? Or is that not the ultimate goal.

Let's take a step back and figure out what the objectives are we're trying to hit.

When managing a brand the optimal result usually is to drive loyalty. If we are able to establish a long-term connection with a consumer, the life-time transaction value is what will deliver the highest pay-off.

DOES CONSISTENCY IN BRAND EXECUTION DRIVE LOYALTY?

No, consistency is an execution tool that helps your fragmented communication appear more cohesive and unified. The ultimate goal is to deliver superior value and ensure you have a really good offer that beats competitors.

How do you accomplish that? Delivering value starts with understanding pain points you're trying to solve for the audience you've targeted. Are we delivering superior value, or are we offering #5 in a busy saturated market? If that's the case, good luck - it'll be an expensive exercise to stand out and even if you succeed, there's so many reasons to switch it'll be hard to keep up.

Yet, for most of us out there who are managing brands the lack of extreme clarity of what your audience's pain points are and how you could truly differentiate yourself in solving is the biggest struggle. Start with this before you do anything else.

A second thing is to understand where your market is moving towards. You can learn from more advanced markets, or you can look at changing needs of next generations.

For many brand owners another complexity is really being aware that brands exist in the context of time. Time is always on the move and the only constant is constant change. How does a brand adapt to changing environments, changing needs.

It's constant improvement, constant evolution and innovation. Critical. But often forgotten. Brands end up copying the moves of others, without having their own clear perspective on audience and competitive brands value propositions.

SO IF DO DELIVER SUPERIOR VALUE - HOW TO BRAND YOUR BRAND THEN?

Consistency in your execution is no longer the holy grail. Especially since brands are dealing with layered sophisticated audiences - there are different buyer persona's we're trying to appease - not every one is catered for by that same image and message.

How do we personalize?

How do we customize?

How do we engage?

How do we truly connect?

Be agile. Executions do not need to look the same all the time. In the fast moving 5-second swipe world we live in currently, a consumer that is exposed to a key visual and who judges that the message is not relevant for him / her will autopilot behave the same way at all the other exposures to the same key visual.

You'll want a second change or a third change or even a fourth and fifth change as a brand to hit that consumer - we A/B test our digital message as well right? Some resonate more with some audiences and others with different ones.

Brands should be more agile, adaptive, flexible.

We don't want to look boring right?

DISTINCTIVE ASSETS / CONSISTENT BRAND ELEMENTS ARE KEY TO BUILD A ROLE IN MEMORY

So the theory of distinctive assets in the space of brand design has made a lot of progress. Yes, it is important there are enough anchors around your brand to drive recall and to build easy, quick recognition.

What does it mean - when designing your brand focus on the execution that spends most time with the user, for most consumer brands it's their packaging design as out of all touchpoints you have to interact with users, a pack spends most time with the audience. Layer that pack with distinctive elements - colors, shapes, typography, visual styles, patterns, unique devices, the combination of elements - these will start to form a visual picture in the mind of the user.

Do you currently have strong and solid assets? Do a blind test, ask a consumer to draw your brand from recall - the elements that make it to paper is your starting point - if there's not much there - that's a worry you'll want to be working on.

Keep your assets consistent across your executions..

BUT...

ALLOW FOR MAXIMUM VERSATILITY, FLEXIBILITY, DIVERSITY AND VARIETY IN EXECUTION

You don't want to create a boring brand do you? A brand that always looks the same lacks depth, persona, realness - it creates a barrier for an audience to even want to build a relationship with a brand like that. It's too artificial.

Allow your brand different ways to express itself. Allow it to react to circumstances. Events that are happening in the world of the user. Reimagine itself.

In a world of short attention spans - you want to be able to reset and re-attempt to make connections, to win that consideration back.

FIND THE RIGHT BALANCE: CONSISTENT USE OF ASSETS, CREATIVITY IN EXPRESSION

A strong visual brand identity is all about balance.

Ensure consistency on an asset level - keep the way assets are shown consistent

Be very creative in how you mix assets - how you apply them on a background, when creating expressions.

Share your visual assets with your partners, let their creativity take it away.

You'll want to create a signature style for your brand that is not captured in a key visual. A style that is not campaign based - but that lives beyond.

A style where you can express yourself in different ways, but it always feels on-brand, where over time your assets are enough to drive recall and recognition for the brand.

RESPECT YOUR ASSETS, DON'T CHANGE THEM ALL OVER NIGHT - EVOLVE

When reinventing the brand, modernizing, extending etc. Stay respectful of your assets. Don't change everything overnight, evolve.

It's important from the start elements are unique and distinctive enough, and you have enough ingredients to cook different recipes with, but once you have those in place, nurture them and build them up, so you are able to build a living brand over time.

AND THAT'S PART OF WHAT WE DO..

Thanks for sticking around till here, it's always difficult to explain what a brand design agency is to some. So that's part of the job. Would love to hear your thoughts on how you build brand. Tricks and secrets you've learned over the years that are perhaps insightful and worth sharing with others.

If you need a hand with making your brand more distinctive, if you need a hand with crafting that signature style and look for your brand feel free to reach out anytime.

:-)