How do you ensure brand consistency?

Brand consistency gives you a competitive edge.

Why?

Because being consistent reinforces your messaging, making it more believable and trustworthy; customers are confident they know what to expect.

Your brand comprises every experience a person has with your company, tangible and impalpable. It’s your logo, your colour palette, your tone of voice, your messaging, your signage, your values, your culture, your personality, your positioning and so on.

And in order to be remembered for all the right reasons, all of these elements need to be consistent. This consistency means you’re then recognised as credible and dependable, characteristics customers look for in a company.

So, here’s how you can make sure your branding stays consistent.

Create brand guidelines

Brand guidelines offer a set of rules for how to represent your brand. Think of it like an instruction manual for the whole company on how to keep your brand consistent.

What do brand guidelines include?

• Brand summary: brand history, vision, personality and key values
• Mission statement: your brand’s purpose
• Buyer persona: your ideal customer
• Tone of voice: how your brand communicates through language
• Logo: how to display your logo, including primary logos, secondary logos and icons
• Colour palette: your brand’s primary colour and 3 or 4 others for a secondary palette
• Typography: font, size, weight and colour
• Images: type of illustrations and photography

Making sure each team member in the company knows and embraces these guidelines ensures everyone is on the same wavelength.

Anything that goes out is then in line with the brand, forming that sense of familiarity in your target audience.

Communicate with your team

As we mentioned above, consistency is only possible if the whole team’s reading from the same page. And that’s only possible if every employee knows what that page is.

Some ideas for how you can get your team to embrace your brand:

Go through brand guidelines in the onboarding process.

Make the guidelines easily accessible so employees can refer back to them anytime.

Give employees tools and resources to communicate your brand. These should include email templates, social media graphics, business cards, logo variations and images.

Set up an approval process

Having an approval process in place means each customer touchpoint is on brand.

This doesn’t mean creating a load more work, it’s actually about making things more efficient.

Whether it’s appointing one employee as lead, forming a designated group of employees for sign off or using collaboration tools, there’s multiple ways to establish an approval process that keeps the brand consistent.

Allow evolution

Consistency doesn’t mean unchanged.

The only way for a brand to succeed is if it stays fresh. That means adapting to current times and consumer behaviour. What’s important here is that any evolution is in line with your core values, continues to connect with your audience, and doesn’t happen too quickly or too often.

It’s about first establishing a strong foundation for your brand, then developing in line with that foundation.

To sum up

Your brand’s success relies on being consistent.

One google search presents your target audience with pages of results. You need to cut through the noise and stay heard; you need to be remembered so customers keep coming back.

But not every brand has the time and resources to create this consistency.

That’s where we can help. Creating, developing and amplifying brands is what we do. Get in touch to chat through how we can help achieve this consistency for you.