Brand Consistency
By now, you’re well aware that a brand is more than a catchy tagline or snazzy logo (and if you aren’t, read why here). However, one of the biggest challenges business owners face is maintaining brand consistency. In this article, we’ll explore brand consistency and how to use it to get ahead of your competition as you grow your business.
Definition of Brand Consistency
For a brand to succeed, it needs to build a clear connection with its audience. Brand consistency is the act of delivering messages that align with your brand identity. A truly consistent brand has a message that aligns with its vision, purpose, mission and values across all touchpoints. This alignment is clear in the brand’s visual elements, messaging and customer interactions, creating a unified experience for your audience.
Importance of Brand Consistency
Brand consistency is one of the main factors driving customer loyalty and trust. People look for patterns and create routines – anything that goes against that is immediately regarded with suspicion. That’s why an inconsistent brand experience causes people to lose trust in the brand and look elsewhere.
Consistency in branding shows reliability and helps differentiate you from your competition – essential components of long-term client relationships.
The Warrior’s Code – A Guide to Brand Consistency
To help you, I’ve created a set of rules that will help you build a consistent brand to stand strong in any circumstance. This ‘Warrior’s Code’ is a set of guidelines that have all been proven by the adventurers who have come before you – a handy guide to keep your brand fighting fit.
- Know Your Brand Inside Out: Understand your brand’s core values, mission, and vision. This strategic knowledge is crucial for maintaining consistency – and you should live these authentically.
- Develop Clear Brand Guidelines: Create a comprehensive brand style guide that covers visual elements, messaging, and tone of voice. This document should be accessible to all team members and collaborators
- Stay True to Your Visual Identity: Use consistent colours, fonts, logos, photography and design elements across all marketing materials and platforms.
- Maintain a Unified Tone of Voice: Whether your brand is formal, casual, sassy or classic, ensure your tone remains consistent.
- Align Your Messaging: Ensure your key messages and value propositions are communicated consistently across all channels.
- Deliver a Consistent Customer Experience: Every customer interaction should maintain the same level of quality, in person and digitally.
- Train Your Team: If your team doesn’t understand your brand, they can’t reflect it. Make sure they understand and embody your brand in their interactions with customers.
- Monitor Your Brand’s Presence: Regularly review your brand’s presence to ensure consistency. Correct any deviations by reeling them with your central strategy.
- Collect and Act on Feedback: Your customers and employees will tell you when something is wrong – so listen to them. Use feedback to make informed adjustments.
- Adapt Without Losing Identity: While it’s important to evolve, ensure any changes are in line with your brand’s core values and visual identity.
- Stay Authentic: Always remain true to what your brand stands for. Authenticity builds trust and long-term loyalty.
These 11 principles form the core of building a consistent brand. Without them, all of your efforts are effectively random – and success becomes a game of chance. Following the Warrior’s Code gives your brand the best chance at survival – and success.
Implementing “The Warrior’s Code” to build Brand Consistency
A strong strategy only works when properly implemented – this is where your brand starts to come into contact with the wider world! It’s also where you’ll start noticing potential issues and can begin to tweak and iterate your brand.
Visual elements
The most obvious place to begin when building consistency is with your visual elements. This includes your logo, colour palette, typography and overall aesthetic. It’s remarkable the number of brands that don’t have a consistent visual identity – so getting yours aligned immediately puts you ahead.
Implementing a clear and defined visual identity helps create recognition in your audience’s mind. Most clients need between 8-12 interactions with a brand before they are ready to buy, so consistent visuals make you more easily recognised and remembered.
Tone of voice and messaging
A consistent personality for your brand helps set the tone of conversation. Understand how your brand comes across and build a tone of voice that can be used in communications. For example, is your brand more formal or casual? Funny or serious? Friendly or authoritative? Creating a character for your brand helps maintain consistency in your interactions.
Additionally, your messaging should all be aligned to convey your unique selling points, values and mission. Keeping your key messages aligned makes it easier for customers to understand what you are offering – and clarity helps them choose your products and services.
Customer experience
Your brand’s promises and values should be evident in every interaction. Creating a seamless customer experience shows consistency and builds trust.
If you’re struggling, look at your customer journey through their eyes – are there holes in the journey that may confuse or annoy them? If there are, smooth over these cracks to make the journey more simple and enjoyable.
Strategies for Achieving Brand Consistency
Knowing the Brand
First and foremost, you need to know the brand, inside out. Better than that, you need to live it. Customers can smell an inauthentic brand and will stay clear. It’s also far easier to be consistent if you’re also being honest. Knowing your brand on a deep level – your values, mission, vision and purpose – gives you something to align all the other elements too.
The central strategy in your brand is CRUCIAL to alignment. If it’s not right, everything else is going to be wrong too.
Brand guidelines
It’s hard to overstate the importance of brand guidelines. While it’s fun to be creative and experimental, it’s boundaries that build consistency. Your brand guidelines should create a set of boundaries so that your team (or outsourced help) know what is and isn’t ok to do with the brand identity.
Develop a strong set of brand guidelines to cover everything about the brand – from how to use the various visuals (logo, typography, colours, patterns etc) to the voice, tone and key messaging. This ensures your visuals and messaging are always aligned.
Employee training
Even with a great brand handbook, employees still need training about how to be ambassadors for your brand. Regular training helps your team confidently represent the brand and enhances the customer experience.
Feedback, presence and customer experience
These three points loop into one another so we’ll tackle them together. Customer experience can be measured through feedback – both from customers and employees. Pay attention to what is said here as this will be where you find ways to fix errors before they become bigger problems.
Your brand’s presence can also use feedback to create a better customer experience. Ask your audience if there are any gaps and what they want to see – they’ll be happy to tell you. Then, strategically adjust your brand to better match expectations.
The Impact of Brand Consistency
Customer trust and loyalty
Consistency is the big trust-builder for your brand. Without it, your clients don’t know what to expect from your brand – and that causes them to be wary of it.
Consistency helps clients understand what kind of experience and service they should expect and are more likely to become loyal advocates.
Competitive advantage
Consistent brands stand out in crowded markets making them more likely to make sales. Reinforcing what makes you unique makes it easier for your customers to choose you over the competition.
Brand recognition and recall
Consistency makes your brand more recognisable and memorable, increasing brand recall and putting you front of mind when customers need your service. When you remember that most customers don’t buy at the first interaction, it becomes even more important to be remembered for the right reasons.
Conclusion – why brand consistency isn’t just a corporate buzzword
Your brand is only as strong as its ability to connect with your audience. That’s why I talk about the three C’s of branding – consistency, clarity and communication. Consistency is literally the first step here. If you’re not being consistent, your brand will not work.
This is why it’s so important to remain consistent in your brand and your marketing efforts. If you take a scattershot approach and hope for success, you’re unlikely to build a lasting presence.
Maintaining brand consistency has many benefits vital to your business’s success. Consistency builds a stronger, more recognisable brand that resonates with your ideal customer and drives growth.
The Warrior’s Code above is a great place to start when thinking about your brand consistency. Test your brand against it regularly to find cracks in your brand before they can cause problems.
If you’re still struggling to remain consistent, consider bringing in outside help to ensure your branding efforts are effective and cohesive. The results of a consistent brand are huge – and investing in consistency is one of the best investments you can make for your brand.
Feel your brand is inconsistent? Book a meeting below and we’ll discuss how to create a more consistent brand.
