Imagine that you’re looking for shoes online and discover a new brand. The website is sleek and modern, the shoes are well-photographed, and they seem to care about quality. These might be the shoes! Then you click over to their Instagram page, where you’re met with a zany logo, colors that didn’t appear anywhere on the website, and a feed full of shoe-related memes. Suddenly, you’re not so sure about these shoes.
The reason for this about-face boils down to brand inconsistency. Read on to learn why brand consistency is so important and how you can use technology to easily and perfectly achieve it.
First off, let’s define brand consistency. As the term implies, it relates to a brand presenting itself consistently to the world. Brand consistency means defining a brand’s identity, values, and strategy over time, and then creating brand messaging and visual assets that align with these core components.
Brand consistency is important for a variety of reasons, first and foremost being brand awareness. If your brand always looks or feels different, it’s as if it’s disguising itself in front of consumers — which is the exact opposite of what you want. By always reaching people with the same tone, colors, visual assets, and more, your brand will be more easily recognizable and memorable.
Want to build a consistent brand? Try our free template for creating a Brand Book!
Then there’s trust. Let’s go back to our shoe example: now that you’ve seen the Instagram page, you’re no longer interested in buying shoes from this brand, because you don’t know what to expect from them. In order for consumers to trust a brand with their hard-earned money, they need to believe that they’ll get a dependably good result. Every interaction with consumers should embody your brand’s promises in a way that consistently underscores who you are. This will build deep and long-lasting trust.
Unfortunately, maintaining brand consistency isn’t as simple as merely defining your brand identity and values. With social media and the ease of content creation tools these days, basically every employee has the opportunity to represent the brand to the public; and even if they have the best of intentions, their version of the brand doesn’t always fit the gold standard. That’s why it's so important to come up with a clear strategy for ensuring brand consistency at all levels.
To help illustrate what we mean when we talk about brand consistency, let’s look at a few examples. First, some brands who nailed it:
And now for a few companies with notable brand consistency fumbles:
All of these examples serve as a reminder that everything your brand does can either reinforce or undermine brand consistency, and this, in turn, informs your success.
Given the importance of brand consistency, and the countless points of contact between your brand and the public, it’s essential to have your brand consistency locked down. One way to do this is to have a VP of Brand who oversees everything, but this is time-consuming, expensive, and just not feasible once a company grows beyond a few employees. Thankfully, tech can help out.
There’s a ton of software that can streamline brand consistency, giving you confidence in how your brand is being presented to the world without needing to get your hands into everything. Here are some of our favorite tools for enforcing brand consistency:
You know who your brand is — now it’s your job to let the world know, too. Brand consistency is the way to do that, and these tools can help you make it happen. Would you like to learn more about managing your brand into a success? Join our free courses!
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