The Importance Of Brand Consistency For All Businesses

Throughout my entire career, I have always advocated the importance of brand consistency.

But across multiple communications and design positions working for startups, nonprofits, and small businesses, there’s one conversation I find myself having over and over again that frustrates me like no other.

Picture this. It’s somewhere around 11:45 on a Wednesday, and you’re in the third meeting of the day for a major upcoming client deliverable.

Everyone is a little frustrated and exhausted from going over the minutiae of the task at hand, making sure all of the important stuff works perfectly and that everyone’s happy.

Then, someone (usually me) starts to point out some problems with the design and presentation of the project, and gets shot down. “I see what you’re saying, but that’s not a priority right now. We’ll figure that out at some point. Let’s stick to the more critical stuff first.”

By the time enough quote-unquote “priority” deliverables are achieved to working on the presentation a priority, far too little time is budgeted, and the final product comes across as rushed and sloppy.

Design and branding is too often shuffled down the list of priorities and considered nice-to-have-but-ultimately-not-necessary window dressing that doesn’t really effect the core value proposition of a project.

To me, this mindset is completely baffling. Imagine if someone tried to convince you showing up to a job interview in pajamas was OK as your interview skills were solid. Presentation absolutely matters as much as anything else, especially a professional context.

That’s why it’s frustrating to see so many brands, from the largest multinational corporations to the smallest mom-and-pop businesses, treat the quality and consistency of their brand communications as a second thought (if they’re even considered at all).

So spend the time upfront to create the right resources. Then creating and maintaining consistent branding won’t be too time-consuming or resource-intensive.

Across teams of any size, the proper brand documentation can enable communications to be extremely consistent. Plus it’ll contribute to a highly valuable relationship with your consumers which converts into sales. Investing just a little extra time on each individual task can actually make a really huge difference for your brand.

However, creating this valuable relationship is only possible when you know what elements of your brand to make consistent, and how to know when they’re not.

Fortunately, that’s what this article is for.

I’ll be reflecting on my years of professional design and branding experience to explain not only what elements of your brand you can immediately change to improve your brand’s consistency. But also the thought process behind those changes that can help you make calculated long-term decisions as well.

Brand Consistency 101

1. How To Think About Consistent Branding

Maximizing the consistency of branded communications can be a little tricky. Not because any of the individual steps involved are all that challenging on their own.

The problem area tends to be the relationship between your business’s offer and the way that plays  out in your branding.

A perfectly consistent brand is probably always going to be more trustworthy and intriguing to consumers than an inconsistent one. But that trust and intrigue is only useful if what your business offers is something customers want.

That’s why the all-important “step zero” to making any key branding decisions is to deeply interrogate your place in the market and your relationship with your consumers.

As a business leader, understand that creating a brand is about more than having a dope logo for your company tee shirts.

In the same way that your products or services are calculated attempts to provide value and address the needs of your consumers in a way that is also beneficial to you, your brand should be a calculated attempt to create an emotional relationship with your consumers that benefits you.

I’ll lift an example from this previous post that drives this point home.

Say the business is a restaurant who serves healthy and inexpensive food. The way in which your brand enacts its relationship to consumers through elements like logos, brand color palette, typography, and decor can change whether or not that value proposition feels relevant to your audience.

Imagine two companies with this exact same business model where one has “healthy” branding and the other “inexpensive/fast”. These two business will see dramatically different responses from the market based on their unique messaging.

And it isn’t hard to imagine that a third brand with an identical business model, but inconsistent branding that doesn’t help consumers form a meaningful relationship with the business, would quickly fall behind.

So, with this in mind:

• What emotional response from your audience might best communicate the value of your business model?
• Have other brands in your industry tried to forge a similar relationship, and were they successful?
• How would you describe the character of the brands you’ll be competing with? And how can you differentiate in a meaningful and productive way?
• What are a few concise adjectives you’d hope everyone who interacts with your brand would be able to use to describe it?

These questions might not seem super relevant to brand consistency at first. But in reality, they undergird the value that a consistent brand provides.

Once you feel confident that you know exactly the kind of emotional response that works best for your business, consistency is the key to making that response real.

2. How To Measure Your Brand’s Consistency

Once you have a specific and nuanced understanding of how you want your brand to come across to consumers, you can start to get a sense of where inconsistencies might exist and how to correct them.

For everything your brand does, you should be asking two major questions. The first being: “does this showcase my brand’s ideals and personality as effectively as possible?”

From the tone of the caption accompanying your latest Instagram post to the colors of your logo to the order of information on your website, everything you make should build the emotional relationship we described in the section above.

Ideally, every single branded work should work together with another to present a clear and specific personality for your brand.

By being this consistent, you’ll ensure you have the greatest possible chance to make an emotional connection even with customers who only encounter one thing your brand produces. And you’ll maximize the odds that your brand relates strongly with their personal narrative about themselves.

This question can conjure up some challenging judgement calls (“is this particular shade of turquoise the best possible fit for my brand’s personality?”). But the good news is that once you’ve made them once, you should generally be able to rely on those choices again and again.

Speaking of which, we’re on to the second question: “how completely and effectively does every detail of this fit in with the other brand materials I have made?”

Part of painting a distinctive and clear vision about your brand is leaving as little room for confusion as possible.

This means once you’ve made judgement calls about the tone of your copy, your specific colors and typography, and everything else that make your brand distinctive. Then you should document your choices extensively and stray from them only when it’s absolutely necessary. (Otherwise you risk these awful brand consistency failures.)

The devil is in the details here. Even elements as minute as ensuring a minimum size for your logo, or denoting how much line spacing you prefer for paragraphs on external documents, or what types of photos look best can make a huge difference.

Upfront, this might sound like a pain, but think how easy and effective it will be to communicate your brand’s specific differentiators and value propositions once you have a clear set of brand guidelines composed and set in stone.

Another great thing about documenting your choices so extensively is how simple this guide will make delegation. An intern on their first day of work should theoretically be able to write copy that “sounds” like your company.

Done correctly, this level of consistency will make your brand look larger, more professional, and more expensive than it might actually be.

3. The Top Brand Consistency Changes To Make Right Now

At this point, I’ve explored a lot of high-level concepts and general best practices for ensuring brand consistency.

We haven’t really delved into detail on what the actual, tangible changes you should make might necessarily be.

Ideally, you’ll work through that challenging conceptual stuff first. Though for a quick-reference list of areas where brand inconsistencies can typically crop up, I’m happy to help there as well.

Typically, making major changes to how consistent your brand is doesn’t necessarily have to be extremely expensive or time consuming.

Run through this list and you’ll be more well off than most companies when it comes to their branding.

• Logo
  • Are high resolution versions of your logo widely available within your company? Vector logos?
  • Do guidelines exist for what size logos should be displayed? How much space is necessary between your logo and other graphic elements?
  • Do black-and-white or high-contrast versions of your logo exist? How and when should they be used?
  • What are inappropriate modifications to your logo? How can you ensure employees and partners don’t make inappropriate modifications?

• Copy
  • What is the tone of your brand’s writing? Is this tone consistent across all messaging?
  • What elements of writing would you consider inappropriate for your brand (punctuation, adjectives, emoji use)?
  • Are there certain phrases or ideas that should be emphasized in your written branding? Are they consistently applied?

• Colors & Typography
  • What colors and typography does your brand use? Are these consistent across all your branding (website, print documents, signage)?
  • What elements of your brand MUST be a specific color?
  • For brands with more than one branded typeface, when should one be used over the other?
  • For print documents, how are you going to handle titles, headers of multiple sizes, and captions?
  • Do employees who need them have easy access to these colors and typography?

• Photography & Iconography
  • In general, what adjectives would you use to describe the imagery your brand prefers to share?
  • How would you describe the types of photos that best fit your brand? How are they different than other photos? What styles of lighting, exposure settings, and color balance do they typically feature?
  • What kinds of icons does your brand typically use, if any?
  • How can employees get the icons and photos they need easily?

• Social Media Presences
  • Do you have branding across all your social media presences that is up-to-date and uses the same color scheme?
  • Are your bios and descriptions consistent across all platforms?
  • Do your platforms update with similar regularity?
  • Do your individual posts follow other tone, typography, color, and photography guidelines?

Need a helping hand as you improve your brand consistency? Contact us and we’ll get back to you ASAP for all of your brand development needs.