Exploring the Importance of Brand Consistency
Whether there’s purpose behind it or not, your blog has a distinct brand. But if you aren’t careful, this brand will become too malleable and, ultimately, unreliable. The key is to understand what your brand stands for so that you can instill a greater degree of consistency.
Why Brand Consistency Matters
Brand consistency is important for numerous reasons. But most importantly, it paves the way for dependability to create trust.
Think about someone you know and like – such as a neighbor down the street. When you see that neighbor, you know what to expect. Regardless of whether he’s doing chores around the house, out running errands, or eating dinner with his wife at a nearby restaurant, you’re going to get the same guy. Sure, he might be wearing shorts and a t-shirt in one scenario and a polo and slacks in another, but they’re all part of his “brand.” They’re consistent with who he is and this consistency breeds trust.
“It’s a long-standing concept that purchasing is more an emotional decision than a practical one,” marketing expert Beth Pop-Nikolov writes. “Part of engaging the right emotions with your consumers is making them feel like they know your brand and that your brand can be trusted. Brand consistency is part of building trust.”
Consistency is what sets successful brands apart from the pack. When you finally reach a point where your brand voice and aesthetic is consistent, you’ll notice an increase in engagement and loyalty across the board.
3 Tips for Greater Brand Consistency
Consistency is hard to achieve. It takes a purpose-driven strategy, discipline, patience, and discretion. At times, it’ll feel repetitive, but don’t let your desire for excitement lead you to abandon your brand’s identity. There’s something powerful about staying grounded in your brand’s identity and letting concrete principles push you forward.
With all of that being said, here are some helpful steps you can take to establish and maintain a greater degree of consistency in your branding:
1. Use the Right Colors
You have to get your brand’s colors right. While you might think all red is red or all blue is blue, the fact is that there are hundreds of different tones and hues under each basic color category. If your colors aren’t consistent across branding, your readers will notice.
There are a number of different color designations and strategies for ensuring consistency. The Pantone system is the easiest and most convenient.
“Pantone is a corporation that created a proprietary Pantone Matching System (PMS) color space,” creative professional Janet Odgis writes. “This is a color matching system that designates the formulas for mixing inks to match swatches or color chips; it allows for uniformity when discussing and producing color. Pantone colors are printed as spot colors, made of pigment, which means the color is printed as a pure laydown of ink by the printer; this is most efficient in controlling color.”
Know your Pantone values and use them whenever you create any sort of marketing or branding material or design. This will help you stay on track.
2. Put Your Logo Everywhere
Branding shouldn’t differ from one platform to the next. In other words, it should maintain the same consistent image and expression from Facebook to your home page to email.
For example, the branding you use on your website should easily feed into your branding at a trade show (and vice versa). If there’s a gap or misalignment between the two, your customers will wonder whether they’re interacting with a brand of integrity and reliability. If there’s congruency, it’s much easier to establish trust.
3. Utilize the Right Voice
Your blog or business brand voice is best described as its flavor. It’s comprised of a confluence of factors – including vocabulary, word length, sentence length, tempo, grammar, jargon, and style. In order to maintain brand consistency, you have to use the same voice regardless of the medium. The best way to accomplish this is by imagining you’re talking to the same person every time you write. (Try creating content marketing personas to make this easier.)
Give Your Brand a Boost
Maintaining brand consistency in a dynamic marketplace that’s marked by hundreds of independent and uncontrollable factors is nothing short of challenging. Let the tips and techniques highlighted in this article marinate and focus on one that you can implement over the course of the next 30 to 45 days. Little by little, you’ll mold your brand into a model of consistency.