Successful marketing encompasses a variety of crucial parts. These parts need to work together in unison to turn out visibly good results for brands and businesses.
One of those crucial parts is branding – consistent branding.
In this blog, we go into everything about consistent branding and the dire need for it across all marketing ventures. We will even look at some examples of big brands that flopped with inconsistent branding.
First, let’s take a look at what branding is all about.
Simply put, branding is the outlook of a company’s unique identity and narrative.
Branding is made up of different parts that mold and differentiate a company from another company.
Some of the key parts include:
Good branding uses all of these key parts and delivers them in the highest quality possible. Not only so, good branding when done consistently offers a myriad of benefits.
Consistent branding means making sure that you present your company in the same way across all marketing channels. This includes everything from your website and social media to your advertisements and packaging designs.
Consistent branding is the vehicle that carries the goals you set for your branding at the start of your journey. Without consistent branding, those goals fall short.
Let’s look in detail at why you need consistent branding:
If you are a newcomer in your industry, you’ll find yourself competing against big names in your niche. While good branding design is the key to getting noted, good and consistent branding is the ultimate goal. Because long exposure to consistent, well-designed, and advertised products and services ensures that your target audience becomes aware of your existence.
Brand recognition is one of the biggest benefits of consistent branding.
Customers recognize your brand from the visual aspect of your brand’s identity. So being consistent in how you use your visual identity design is very important.
Look at companies like Apple and Coca-Cola. Despite the range of products and services they offer, they have consistently stuck to their branding over time.
The Coca-Cola logo is one of the most recognizable in the world, with 94% of the global population able to identify it. Similarly, the Apple logo is instantly recognizable anywhere.
These visual assets make these companies easily identifiable wherever you go.
Your target audience needs to trust you in order to purchase the products or services you offer. Without trust, there is a very slim chance of you running a successful business. According to statistics, 71% of consumers are more inclined to make a purchase from a brand they trust.
How consistent branding builds trust is that it ensures customers that they can rely on you to keep delivering what you promise.
Consistent branding conveys that you’re a serious business. Customers and consumers are your biggest scrutinizers and they notice how you pay attention to details. If you consistently design your products and creatively advertise your services, it shows that you’re resourceful and committed. And that goes to show you’re professionals in what you do.
It even extends so far as to help people trust other aspects of your business like customer service and product or service quality.
Finally, consistent branding builds loyalty ensuring that customers will keep returning to your brand for products and services. This loyalty in turn promotes referrals and helps accumulate more customers in the long run. Maybe this statistic will give you more incentive – A whopping 92% of consumers positively respond to referrals from friends and family more than any other form of advertising.
In this next segment, we’re going to take a look at how you can achieve consistent branding. Following these tips will guarantee you reap all the benefits we discussed above.
The no.1 way to stay on brand in terms of visual identity is to use a brand guideline. A brand guideline is a manual that exclusively contains the visual look and feel of your brand. It contains instructions and guidelines for your logo, color, font, and image usage among other things. A carefully designed brand guideline paired with a frequent use of it, ensures you’re consistent with your branding.
If you’re targeting a particular audience, it means that you did all your research surrounding their likes and dislikes. So stick to your audience. You must remain consistent with the content that’s targeted towards them. If you try to focus on a general audience you run the risk of being inconsistent with your branding and in turn, confusing your target audience.
This seems like a strange tip but hear us out. We can’t stress how important it is to have a strong knowledge of marketing and design. Even if you’re doing it alone, make sure you educate yourself on everything there is to know about marketing, designing, and keeping up with emerging trends.
Say your marketing campaign involves digital and print media. An expert marketer knows that you have to keep your branding consistent across all of these marketing channels. Furthermore, they would know where to run marketing and how to translate branding and designs from one marketing channel to another marketing channel without compromising on consistency in branding.
For example, if you showcase your logo, fonts, and colors in a certain way on a billboard advertisement, the same way might not work for a social media post. An excellent marketer paired with an expert designer would know how to translate the design while keeping the brand look intact.
Your visual outlook is the first point of contact with your customers. That’s how they get to know you. Whatever the design types they encounter it needs to be designed properly. Now to do that you need a good designer. And not just any designer a dedicated designer or dedicated design team who can learn your style, follow your brand guidelines, and create consistent branded designs.
Design agencies can be useful but even with a brand guideline, there are instances that they can mess up because they’re not exactly dedicated to your work alone.
In-house designers are a great alternative because you can work closely with them but there’s one problem – they’re costly! According to Glassdoor statistics, an in-house designer in the US makes about $72,951 a year on average as of June 2024. Sadly, that’s coming out of your pocket.
The best solution to this is to use a flat-rate design team. That way you have the benefits of working with an in-house-like dedicated designer but none of the contractual commitment and financial burden.
Most flat-rate/on-demand graphic design services offer a dedicated design team and almost all types of design services for as low as $599/month on average.
But don’t just take our word for it, find out the benefits of using unlimited graphic design services for yourself.
Next up, we’re going to peruse through some branding blunders that well-known brands made because they were either sloppy, negligent, or untrue to their core branding.
The Coca-Cola and Pepsi feud has been fizzing since the 1800s when both brands were founded. They have been rivaling each other in look and taste for quite some time but by the 1960s both brands landed on the core look of their visual identity. Coca-Cola with its iconic flowy typography and Pepsi with bold sans-serif typography.
Coca-Cola was still the leading choice over Pepsi but that changed when Pepsi organized blind taste testing where it was proven that Pepsi was sweeter than Coca-Cola. Sales started shifting in favor of Pepsi. So in response, Coca-Cola changed its formula and introduced a new drink called New Coke.
There were 2 problems here. One was that customers were dissatisfied with the new taste, two, they went for a complete overhaul of their unique logo design.
As you can see, it’s nothing like the logo we know and love. While the colors of Coca-Cola’s visual identity remain intact, the logo is a poor attempt at competing with Pepsi. This inconsistent branding led to so much scrutiny that they had to revert to their previous logo.
The takeaway here is that your logo carries a great deal of weight for your brand and unless there’s a major design flaw in your logo it’s best not to make out-of-character changes like this. Both to the visual identity and the essence of the product. Stick to consistent branding.
The bottom line is don’t be inconsistent with your branding for the sake of keeping up with your competitors.
Kiehl’s is a luxury brand of skincare that’s been around for more than 170 years. Their products are highly recommended by users and they thrive in the industry.
But in terms of visual identity, we think that they’ve missed the mark and are not consistent in their branding.
Here’s a lineup of their products for example:
If you isolate each product you can see that they’re unique on their own. From the use of logos to the colors and the overall look there are many changes in the identity of each of these products. For a new customer, it would be confusing if they saw these products spread out. This is a very good example of inconsistent branding.
Even if your products are different and you want to introduce new lines, it’s crucial to ensure that there’s a coherence between the visual identity of each product.
Here’s an example of consistent branding across a range of products seen in the famous skincare brand, The Ordinary:
Even with such a diverse range, the branding remains consistent and there is no problem recognizing these products and attributing them as products by The Ordinary brand.
Let’s bring things to a close.
Consistent Branding is a must for businesses to flourish. This consistency must be seen across all the different parts we spoke of previously. Your visual identity, your brand voice, your brand image, and all things related to your brand need to appear across all marketing channels in the very same way.
With consistent branding, you won’t look like a weak brand or face financial losses. As a matter of fact, statistics show that you can expect a 10-20% growth in revenue with consistent branding.
So make sure you follow the tips we presented to ensure that your brand appears cohesive wherever it appears.
