Brand consistency is a vital part of building a professional and trusting relationship with your clients. How can they know what to expect from your brand if you keep changing it all the time?
Why You Need Brand Consistency
Don’t make it a struggle for consumers to remember your brand. There is so much digital information in the marketplace currently, and with all this noise, you only have short window of your client’s attention that you can use. They need help to remember your brand. If you are inconsistent, then something else shiny will catch their eye and you will be forgotten.
You should be providing your clients with a consistent experience across all areas of your business. Whether they stumble across your website, your social media pages, online advertising, television commercials, or even an ad in the local paper – it should all appear as the same look and message.
The rise of device use has seen people engage with brands on a digital level, far more than in person. Make sure that your branding and customer experience is mobile friendly. Your clients should be able to recognise your brand across many devices without it being skewed or distorted.
Choose Wisely
The key to brand consistency is having a brand that you love. The reason is, if you love your branding, then you won’t be tempted to change it all the time.
Make sure that you pick a logo, design and colour scheme that fits with your business. You may choose to engage a branding expert, a graphic designer, or do it yourself. Regardless of who works on your branding, ask yourself these questions before giving the green light on the final product…
- Is the image/symbol relevant your brand?
- Does it convey the right message?
- Is the colour scheme appropriate?
- Will it present well across all my platforms?
Make sure you have a brand identity guideline document / brand standards for your business, outlining your logo, fonts, colours and brand imagery. Engaging with a professional graphic designer on a branding package should include this (but make sure you check that it does).
If you need a variant of your logo or branding, stick within your guidelines. Do not attempt to stretch, crop or change your logo to suit. Just imagine if you got into your new luxury Porsche and they couldn’t fit the logo on the steering wheel so they had to make it out of proportion. You would start to feel a little bit sceptical on the brand you had just bought into? Is this a real Porsche?
Why Does Brand Consistency Matter?
Your brand is who you are: It is an outward representation of your business to your clients. It showcases your unique characteristics, and how your business differentiates from your competitors. If your brand messaging is inconsistent, then it is hard for people to distinguish you from the competition. They won’t know how to tell the difference between your fantastic business, and the mediocre one down the street.
Trust: Brand consistency reinforces your business identity. Your audience will see a consistent message and know what to expect from you. This builds a relationship of trust, and encourages the transformation from prospect to buyer.
Getting back into your Porsche, that logo brings with it so much more than “just a logo” it has become a symbol of luxury, quality, German engineering that you can rely on. People have grown to love it and become fierce advocates for it. Porsche would never dream of putting one once of doubt in their client’s minds about their brand. It represents all that they stand for.
As you can see, you don’t want to be changing the colour of your logo to match with a background colour, or stretch it out of shape to fit within an image frame. Messing with the consistency of your brand can break the relationship of trust you have worked so hard to build with your clients. So, for the sake of your business growth, stay consistent!