How to keep brand consistency across your business & why it’s important

For any company, keeping brand consistency can often be challenging. As most marketers will know, brand isn’t just about the logo, that’s often the easiest thing to keep consistent; it’s about every touchpoint a company or brand has with its clients, contacts and prospective clients. It’s everything from colours, images, tone of voice, a user’s journey through a website, how the phone is answered, to how visitors are greeted and how emails and standard communication is written.

In today’s digital age, every employee can create content and it will contain their vision of your brand look and feel or messaging - whether it’s a simple social media post or a quick blog. Whilst you don’t want to quell this enthusiasm (often your employees are your best brand advocates), you want to be able to guide people and give them clarity on what can and can’t be done with one of your most valuable assets. It's important that you don’t leave your brand open to a wide variety of interpretations and customisations

Why is brand consistency important?

People often forget that by ensuring a consistent brand will help the business build awareness and develop trust and loyalty with clients. A constantly changing or tweaked brand just doesn’t do the job in the long term. That’s why it’s so important to develop clear guidelines for brand consistency across all communications, both online and offline.

Can local and regional brand strategies exist?

So often in multi-location businesses and multi divisional businesses, there can be a want and a need to ‘localise’ a brand, whether it’s for Google local search purposes or running of local events. But at the same time, companies need to preserve brand consistency whilst allowing various parts of the business some freedom to be able represent the brand and be brand advocates on a more day to day local / regional level. So, can local and regionalised tailored strategies and brand consistency coexist? The answer is yes but it can be a fine balance.

So, what steps can you take to achieve this?

Brand guidelines

A clear set of brand guidelines need to be issued to all parts of the business. Brand guidelines should not only reside in the marketing department of your business. Everyone in the business should know they exist, know what they are and how to use them if necessary. Let's look at the elements that are key to your brand, and why they should be protected and be clearly mapped out.

Your brand guidelines should include sections on:

Logo(s) – A comprehensive set of logos should be available in full colour, reversed out and clear guidance on which logos to use in which scenarios. Sizing and positioning of the logos should also be clear.

Brand Colours - for also sorts of scenarios such as print, online, paint, signage etc.

Fonts - for professional print and day to day for Emails, Word documents etc.

Imagery – examples or mood boards of type of images that can be used (if possible, set up a media library of pre agreed imagery)

Application – this can cover more comprehensive details on various channels such as social media, web, signage, presentations, proposals etc.

Contact points – It should be clear who someone can contact for help or advice on brand usage – this could be people in the marketing team or potentially external agency contacts.

Tone of voice & writing style

Many companies create brand guidelines that deal with their logos, colours and imagery but so many companies don’t define how they want to sound. It’s as important to keep a consistent tone and personality in your written content as it is to control the use of your logo. For example, if your brand is fun on Twitter, it should have a similar voice on Facebook and LinkedIn. However, it’s possible to use the same ‘voice’ for your brand but change the tone to suit the marketing channel you’re using. What’s the difference between voice and tone? Simple: when you speak, you have the same voice, but you change your tone to suit the situation or audience. Writing’s the same.

You should look to create a brand voice which remains the same, but your tone will change depending on the audience, the situation or the channel you're communicating through. For example, you will have a different tone when you talk to people at work than you may have when you are socialising with friends. The same goes for your brand personality and different marketing channels.

Just make sure your brand doesn’t sound like a completely different brand altogether on various channels.

Choose your channels carefully

It’s so easy to get excited about a new trend or online platform these days and it’s easy to think you need to participate to keep in the game but think really carefully about your brand and your audience. Ask yourself these questions:

1)     Are our current clients/customers on these platforms and will our prospective target audience be on them?

2)     Would you expect a brand like ours to be on this platform?

3)     Would this platform add or take away from our credibility and would someone trust our brand if are part of the platform?

Participate in marketing channels that align with your brand’s identity and positioning and where your customers and prospective customers may ‘hang out’.

Choose your brand advocates & influencers carefully

So many companies want to use online external contacts to act as influencers and promoters of their brand. If you do decide to target external people to represent your brand, make sure you ask yourself these questions:

1)     Will this person appeal to my target audience and are they followed or connected to people that are my target audience?

2)     Does that person understand my product / service and talk / write about similar issues and topics that we do?

3)     Does their personality and writing style complement / fit with our brand?

4)     Will then enhance my brand positioning or damage it?

Internal communications and corporate culture

Brand consistency isn’t just important for external client-facing communications. A client's brand experience will come through every one of your employees they deal with. So, you need to ensure that your internal culture matches and portrays your external brand. Sticking a load of words representing your corporate ‘values’ simply won’t cut it long term. Often marketing doesn't get involved in internal communication and culture, but they should. You should ensure that you:

• Recruit based on your brand values and culture.
• Onboard new employees using your brand values, brand guidelines and tone of voice details to ensure new team members truly understand who you are as a brand.
• Reiterate your brand, it’s values and what it stands for throughout every training program you run.
• Provide employees with branded items such as notebooks, pens, business cards, values cards etc to ensure they have the brand to hand day to day.
• Empower your people and make them feel confident to go out and be brand ambassadors for your company. Don’t ‘tell them off’ for breaking brand guidelines, encourage them, mentor them and help them to represent the brand every day and reward and recognise those people in your business that do this well.

Only when your employees understand and embrace the brand, will you ensure consistency of your clients / customers brand experience.

Making your brand your most valuable asset

You should focus time and effort on developing and retaining brand consistency to ensure that you build awareness, trust and loyalty with your customers and prospective customers.

Make sure you develop clear guidelines, have the right brand advocates and think about every interaction your brand has with your customers, employees and prospects. A constantly changing brand will confuse your audience and potentially affect long term loyalty and trust.

Maintaining brand consistency, whilst giving some freedom and autonomy to individuals and different parts of the business is a fine balance to strike. But get it right and your brand will become your most valuable asset.