Brand consistency entails the repeated exposure of your customers to your brand’s core messaging, visual branding, as well as other brand-related elements, delivering them with a consistent messaging that aligns with the company’s values, brand identity, and strategy. The perpetual delivery of all of these elements works in tandem to help promote the solidification of brand recognition.
It is crucial to find a reliable, reputable, and experienced branding design agency that will not only supply the necessary branding services but help you comprehend the key notions and concepts of brand identity by guiding you through the process. You will find it highly valuable to understand what brand consistency is and how to cope with it when working with a branding company.
Defining Brand Consistency
The practice of aligning delivered messages consistent with brand values is called brand consistency. Presenting these messages repeatedly with the same visual elements in terms of tone, colors, and similar brand logo, over time gets the brand to be recognized and trusted by consumers, making it more easily recognizable via every marketing channel.
The visual aspect, however, is only one of the critical brand consistency areas, the consistent delivery of which promotes customer loyalty. These include:
- Elements of Brand Identity: The visual components of a brand that distinguish it from competing brands.
- Value: The brand’s actions must back up its advertised promises.
- Customer Experience: By consistently putting the customer experience at the forefront, a brand fosters trust in its name and corporate image.
Advantages of Brand Consistency
Brand recognition is the clear primary benefit of brand recognition, a goal every business must strive for. It doesn’t just help link a brand to its visual elements and core message but sets it apart from competitors. Being distinct in consumer recognition, especially in saturated, competitive markets, is a pivotal advantage. Brand consistency carries several other benefits.
- Formulating Brand Perception: It is when your brand introduces consistent brand elements, the ability to build a brand perception in the minds of the consumer becomes simpler.
- Triggering A Positive Emotional Response: Through crafted imagery and wording weaved into an alliance with the brand, the audience will start to draw an association between the brand and positive emotions. When executed correctly, after repeated exposure, the emotional reactions become tied to just seeing the logo. These associations of happiness and positivity are likely to then remind the consumer about a brand they associated with trust, making them more likely to get more of the brand’s products.
- Trust and Loyalty Building: As trust is built, consumers begin to expect satisfaction when they choose to engage with a brand. Consider the worldwide juggernaut of a brand, Coca-Cola. Brand consistency of the company’s product assures that consumers will always get a bottle of Coke that tastes the same as any other, meaning that the approach is tied to the customer experience just as much as it is to the visuals.
- Making A Brand Distinct: Brand consistency is vital in competitive markets. If consumers recognize and trust a brand, they are more likely to buy that brand’s products rather than forego them, purchasing a similar product from a litany of similar or comparable products. For this reason, brand consistency is a pivotal tool for a brand to communicate what makes it stand out from its competition.
Brand Consistency Best Practices
The world’s most recognizable branding establish and keep their brand consistency by following a number of practices that keep them aligned with consumer expectations.
Be Cautious When Rebranding
It is easy to get excited about the rebranding idea, but the impact such a move would have on the consistency of the brand should never be overlooked. Brand recognition is tough to earn, so once it is, one must weigh the worth of sacrificing some of that with a rebranding effort. If a brand’s visual elements and other distinctive assets have already established a strong brand association for consumers, rebranding successfully is harder but still possible. It should, however, be approached with caution and done only out of necessity. The key is to maintain the core elements of the successful brand in order for the rebranding transition to be smooth.
There’s Nothing Bad About Getting Bored
It’s perfectly natural to feel bored as someone involved with a brand when exposed to the same color schemes, layouts, etc., on a daily basis. Marketers may feel the brand is stale, but it’s important to keep in mind that this boredom is due to brand consistency, which in turn drives brand recognition for the target audience.
Take Advantage of Your Brand Styling Guide
A brand is so multi-faceted that ensuring consistency on all levels can be a daunting task. To stay consistent, it helps to set up a brand’s own style guide that ensures that all brand aspects are on the same page, the brand’s unique elements are consistent, and that brand messaging is on-point. Most importantly, the brand’s style guide should include the company’s mission, voice and copy guidelines, fonts (how they are used in plain text and headings), the brand’s specific color palette, image and photo styling rules, and any other consistency driving information.
Make Easily Accessible On-Brand Materials
The creations of most brands involve contributions from groups of professionals, from all walks of life, with varying backgrounds, and coming from a wide array of backgrounds. It is important to allow for them all to have easy access to the latest & greatest, brand-approved materials. These include specific templates, images, as well as logos, as these will go a long way in consistency assurance.
To make these available, it helps to set up a centralized DAM (digital asset management) repository solution. This will be a place where any team member can easily access to get the same information, no matter what their brand involvement is. If there is no central DAM to pull this information from, teams are likely wasting a lot of time searching for these approved assets, or worse, trying to recreate them, potentially violating brand consistency. Teams who have access to a specific location where they can get all of the materials they need can bypass the tediousness and time-wasting of searching for them, making them more efficient and better equipped to meet deadlines.
Conclusion
Every business that is looking to establish brand recognition and foster consumer trust must strive to achieve brand consistency. If the target audience does not recognize a brand, that brand will not trigger the intended positive emotions, nor will they receive the feel-good messages from it. If they cannot emotionally connect to the brand, it will be far tougher to build confidence in repeatedly engaging with this brand, ultimately hurting the brand’s consistency efforts.
When you first hire a branding agency, they will start designing your brand from scratch. Just make sure the team understands your business, your message, values, and objectives. This is the only way for them to design a brand identity that will properly represent your business to your target audience. And when everything is in place, you can consult with your branding design firm on the matters of brand consistency. Considering its team members are reliable specialists, you will be able to get a lot of valuable insights.