What is Brand Consistency?
Brand consistency is how your brand delivers its messaging to your audience. This messaging includes your brand identity, core values, and brand ‘personality’.
Brand consistency, and ensuring identical messaging is coming across on all platforms, builds brand recognition and brand trust. When brands are more reliable from a marketing perspective, including logos, colors and fonts, customers believe that the brand is more dependable. When a brand is more dependable and trustworthy, consumers will choose that brand over its competitors.
Why is Brand Consistency Important?
Every business should strive to be recognized and loved by their target audience. Branding allows your business to stand out from competitors and build a strong association between your target market’s core values and the imagery of your brand.
Brand consistency assures your consumers that they’ll have a consistent and unique experience. One of the most well-known brands in the world, Coca-Cola, uses brand recognition to sell their customers a consistent experience. People don’t buy a random cola, they buy Coca-Cola, because they know what to expect.
With that being said, here are our Top 10 tips for keeping your brand consistent.
1. Logo and Formatting
A good logo feels appropriate for your brand. For example, if you are a professional accounting firm, having a simplistic logo, with muted or neutral colors, will be more appropriate than bright colors and a handwritten font.
Logos differentiate your brand from competitors. Having a strong and bold logo, which uses your company colors and fonts, ensures that your brand has a consistent and reliable feeling across all platforms.
If your logo looks unprofessional, people will naturally question the quality of your product, or service. Competing brands may look more ‘legit’, and hence be trusted more by your target market.
Tip: Logos should be able to ‘translate’ into different shapes and sizes. For example, into a square, for profile pictures, rectangles for email marketing, and social media posts watermarks.
2. Color
Colors are used by brands to subconsciously evoke emotions in their customers’ minds and ensure that they have appropriate brand association.
Brand colors are very important because they will be used across your:
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- Logo
- Website
- Storefront
- Product packaging
- Advertisements and,
- Social media
Color theory, and using appropriate colors, is very important for your business. Here are some colors and their associations:
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- – Blue: stability, loyalty, confidence.
- – Red: romance, sensitivity, leadership, danger
- – Green: nature, life, safety, jealousy
- – Orange: abundance, warmth, determination, success
- – Purple: luxury, ambition, independence, mystery
- – Gold: compassion, courage, magic, wisdom
- – Silver: glamour, grace, modern technology
- – Black: elegance, power, mystery, evil, death
- – White: innocence, safety, illumination, perfection
Using three or less colors is best for brand recognition, as more colors can lead to confusion and obstacle your branding.
3. Font
Brand font is crucial for your brand, as it is used across all platforms. Your brand font needs to be recognizable and resonate with your audience.
Great brand fonts should:
- Be unique and recognizable
- Be readable
- Work on every platform
- Communicate your brand personality
There are different font classifications, which each represent different meanings for your brand.
- Serif: classic, traditional, trustworthy. For example, Times New Roman
- Sans-serif: modern, minimal, clean. For example, Roboto
- Slab serif: bold, quirky, confident. For example, Courier New
- Script: elegant, unique. For example, Brush Script
- Handwritten: informal, artistic. For example, Caveat
- Decorative: stylized, distinctive, dramatic. For example, Lobster
Choosing an appropriate font is important because it exhibits the qualities of your business. If you are an artist, you may use your own handwritten font. However, if you are a lawyer, it would be best to use a more traditional font.
4. Tone
Tone of voice is essential for communicating your brand personality. It is about how you communicate to your audience, not necessarily what. Tone reveals the ‘personality’ of your brand in a written format.
For example, if you are a quirky beauty salon, you would want to speak in a relaxed, ‘friendly’ tone. But, if you are a professional accounting firm, you would want to speak with a more professional tone.
Tone consistency is important across all platforms. Having a professional tone over email, but a relaxed tone on social media, may confuse your customer.
5. Copy
Copy is written content that aims to sell your product/service, or persuade your audience to take action. There are many different types of copy, such as:
- Web content: includes any content that you may have on a website. This type of content includes staff biographies, blogs, service descriptions or product descriptions
- Social media: this type of content includes posts on social networks designed to promote a product or service. These posts often include links to purchase as a call-to-action
- Public relations: this type of copy is designed for platforms that are directly facing the public. This includes press releases and company statements
Ensuring copy is consistent is important for maintaining a consistent brand across all mediums. You should also ensure that your copy has:
- A clear call-to-action: which is typically featured at the end of the work
- Easy-to-read sentences and tone
- Solutions to your target market’s problems
- Your brand persona
6. Photograph Consistency
Product images, company news photos and social media images infer quality about your products and help create your brand image.
Here are some tips to ensure your product photography is consistent:
- Color palette
- Models: appropriate models for your brand identity. For example, if you are a body positive company, your models should have different body types
- Costumes: ensure they align with your brand persona
- Use photo filters or editing techniques: ensure they are consistent so that your audience associates the editing with your brand when they come across your social media networks.
7. Brand name
Brand name is extremely important for brand recognition and allows your target audience to associate your brand with a product.
Here are some tips if you are looking to name (or re-name) your brand:
- Less is more: to be more recognizable, brands’ names should be a maximum of four syllables long
- Think long-term: how is your brand going to change over time? You should not limit your brand to a time or place! You should also consider being culturally sensitive if you’re wanting to expand into different nations
Brand names should remain consistent across all platforms, including social media.
8. Scheduling posts
Scheduling posts is a great way to save time and ensure that you are creating connections with your audience.
Scheduling posts also ensures that you are posting at appropriate times for your target market, and that they are seeing the content at the right time. For example, if the majority of your target market gets paid on Tuesday afternoon, you will want to advertise to them when they have money to spend
9. Brand Guidelines
Brand guidelines are essential for ensuring your team is working under the same standards.
For example, the following should be included in your brand guidelines:
- Color palette
- Fonts and text sizes
- Tone of voice
- Grammar
- Spacing
- Usage permissions: where it should and shouldn’t appear
10. Make approved branding materials easily accessible to your team
Brand consistency is extremely important and needs to stay consistent across your team. Using a content resource management software, Digital Asset Management, such as IntelligenceBank, allows businesses to store and manage assets in a secure location. This system allows your team to find marketing materials easily, and share them between each other to create brand consistency.
IntelligenceBank’s BrandHub portal is a great system for ensuring your team is keeping on brand. This software allows businesses to create brand guides, find brand assets easily (including logos, colors, fonts, and other creative features), and instant updates to approved assets from the top-down.