UPDATED MARCH 5, 2024
Today, in this guide, we will mainly focus on how to maintain and reinforce brand consistency. If you have landed here, you certainly know what we are talking about but, if not, spend five minutes reading this guide and you will have much clearer ideas.
Thanks to branding, which has become a real art, we can manage to shape our brand identity, or the identity of our brand; this is fundamental in our business – whatever it is – and maintaining consistency represents the cornerstone in maintaining the recognisability and reliability of our brand; if the customer remains loyal to our brand and the products/services we offer, it is a certain result of the reliability of our brand. As a result, regardless of our brand and the industry we operate in, customers have clear, distinct and deep-rooted expectations. A very important factor, however, is maintaining brand consistency.
Let’s take a small example: would we be able to identify a McDonald’s from a series of shop windows in which we identify shops and brands with colors such as green or blue? Clearly not, given that the company has accustomed us to red and yellow; can we imagine purchasing an Apple product without the bitten apple? No. Here, repetition is the key to being able to impress our brand in the consumer’s mind.
This guide, which intends to help users maintain brand consistency and the advice within it, is intended both for those who intend to develop the brand’s style from scratch, and for those who intend to bring more coherence to an existing brand; the cornerstones on which the concept of brand coherence (or brand, if you prefer) stands:
- Identify and take ownership of your own value and vision
- Create a visual identity
- Establish clarity in messages
1 – Identify and take ownership of your own value and vision
We need to ask ourselves a couple of questions when we identify our values and our vision that, generally, every person behind us supports and supports, and they are:
- Who are we as a brand?
- What will we do to embody him and achieve our goals?
- What do we hope for the future of our brand?
If we already know the answer to the first question, we shouldn’t have any problems in trying to make users understand our values and our vision; we put aside any type of limitations such as shyness and share with them what we represent and who we are; only in this way will we create a connection with them and earn their respect. Clearly, values and identities will vary based on the sector in which we operate and our audience.
In order to maintain this consistency there are a series of guidelines to maintain and/or establish and which include specific wording to describe the brand values – such as a slogan – the same tone of voice and adopting a consistent aesthetic in the entire brand, advertising and marketing ecosystem.
2 – Create a visual identity
This is the simplest way to maintain brand consistency, and it’s all about establishing a cohesive and clear visual identity, which is where our brand style guide comes in, a guide to be used by all staff members, employees, etc. and that shapes the identity as a whole. Please note: in order to ensure that everything remains current, it will need to be constantly updated and re-updated. If we use an easily identifiable color palette, fonts or logo, this will lead the user to a sense of trust, so use them repeatedly across whatever advertising medium we’ve come to rely on.
Looking for a logo that fits our brand completely
The logo is the identity card of a brand and with the logo design, the definitive one is the one that identifies a brand in a few words. Dimensions, alternative backgrounds, color schemes, various details or text can be used to complement a brand’s logo. Our goal will be to be recognizable in any context (we use a scalable file, a vector, for our logo so we can resize it without affecting either proportions or quality.)
Color carries the message
We know very well, as consumers, of the importance that color has in emphasizing the identity of the brand (be it the example above, McDonald’s, with its yellow/red, or the bright red of Coca-Cola) so much so is that there are many companies (small, medium and large) that use color in order to improve the identity of their brand.
The characters to make us recognize
The choice of fonts is another very important aspect and let’s remember that this can always narrate the identity and purpose of the brand. It is a simple method but one that can elevate – and quite a bit in many cases – our brand to a luxury brand, making it feel recognizable and well-rooted in the market (not surprisingly, there are several luxury brands that have used the same character in recent years, such as Burberry or Yves Saint Laurent to name a couple.)
3 – Establish clarity in our messages
Our messaging, after identifying our values and establishing the visual identity, is very important to the coherence of our brand. Apparently, there is little or nothing in repetitiveness but this aspect is fundamental for our goal because repetitive and regular messages will help users get to know us better and relate to our brand in general.
By this term we mean a variety of things: copy on our website or a slogan on our packaging, for example. So, let’s imagine we have several stores and a customer goes from one to another: the last thing he would want to witness is a message – whatever it is – that is different from one center to another. So, in order to strengthen our brand identity and ensure that all our points of sale are consistent, we try to ensure that our messages speak with the same voice (but let’s remember one fundamental thing: the message must be short and to the point, because people don’t tend to pay too much attention 99% of the time.)
Keywords to maintain brand consistency
A great step in understanding our brand’s voice is establishing keywords that define it, regardless of the type of message our brand will use. To do this, we look at our brand, see what it has to offer, write down a dozen adjectives that describe it, and use them to influence our consistency, right down to messaging. Whatever messaging we adopt (sweet, direct, pretentious, provocative) we must always keep it consistent.
Let’s find the key to brand consistency
Let’s try to think about the brands we see around, whether large or small, and how they have achieved an element of coherence that has supported its growth overall. We can achieve brand consistency by identifying and owning our vision and values, building a visual identity and clear messaging. It’s not easy, quick and painless but it can be achieved.
Good luck!