In today’s blog I want to go through what design consistency is and why it is so important to strengthen your brand. We will also run through the benefits of making sure your brand is consistently executed throughout all your marketing, advertising and sales execution. In addition to design consistency, we’ll be addressing content and marketing consistency as critical components of your brand.
What is Design Consistency?
Design consistency is the intentional practice of putting your brand’s elements, the design look and feel being consistent in the utilization of these elements throughout all your marketing and sales mediums. Let’s take a look at how do you create this consistency:
A. Design strategy: We like to build our design strategy as an extension of our company’s business and brand strategy. This helpful strategy document is a design guideline of how the brand should be designed and developed throughout the brand design elements as well as content and copy components well. Having developed this strategy it makes it helpful for your internal and external teams to be able to design the brand and make it consistent.
B. Creative development: This next step in developing design consistency you go to work on crafting and creating the design of your brand and its elements.
C. Design execution: In this step of creating design consistency you are finalizing the creative and your design execution is your forming it into what your brand is becoming from a look, feel, voice, tone and holistic brand form.
D. Design/brand architecture/guidelines: Once your brand has been crafted, created and designed into your desired brand that effectively communicates how you are, what you do, how and why you are better and you put it into a brand architecture, design guidelines document that helps to ensure the desired design consistency you are striving for.
E. Design evolution: No brand or design never changes. Good brands evolve and grow with time to stay ahead of the competition and maintain their hard earned brand position and value.
Why Design Consistency Matters for Brand Identity?
Design consistency is a huge component of your brand identity. We’ve seen companies use numerous different iterations of the brand logo design or pitch decks with a dozen or more looks and feel. A company has to stay consistent in their design in order for your customers and target audiences to gain a familiarity with your brand. Let’s take a look at a few other critical items in regard to your design consistency:
A. Brand consistency importance: As the statistics say below, brand consistency has a whole bunch of benefits for your company, brand, sales and revenue. It makes your brand recognizable, connects with your target audience and that consistency makes them feel comfortable and drives them to take action with your brand.
B. Brand consistency statistics: Statistics say that companies who are consistent in their branding added 10% hike to 20% of their revenue that comes from brand marketing. Another interesting fact is that 26.32% of brands stated that consistent messaging increased brand revenue by 20%.*
Key Elements of Design Consistency
Let’s take a look at the elements that will help you to develop design consistency for your brand:
A. Brand consistency Theory: Brand consistency theory is the practice of building and maintaining a unified and holistic brand identity, messaging, positioning, packaging and implementation throughout all marketing channels. Your brand consistency helps to build trust and familiarity with your customers and target audience and thus builds brand awareness and recognition, which will drive results.
How to create a consistent brand identity
A. Brand Architecture: This first starts with a brand architecture/brand guidelines document that spell out utilization of brand assets, usage and guidelines on how to use and keep the brand consistent.
B. Brand Champions: The top brands have what I like to call Brand Champions that ensure the brand is consistent, the company and its employees are fulfilling their brand promise, these people are invaluable for making your brand become real, valued and consistent.
Content Consistency
A hand and hand component of design consistency, content consistency helps to make your brand complete, read well and be part of a holistic strategy.
A. Content strategy: This usually starts with how does your brand want to read, sound like to make your brand strategy and creative come to life.
B. Messaging platform: This helps you develop your messaging platform that spell out your differences, value points, value proposition and how and why we are better and how do you develop consumable content from this strategy document.
Challenges in Maintaining Design Consistency
Here are a few typical challenges you might encounter in maintaining your brand consistency.
A. No architecture/guidelines: Very common mistake, companies and brands of all sizes need to have well documented brand and design standards to keep your brand and design consistency.
B. No Brand Champions: As stated above, companies need to have Brand Champions that hold a brand to standards, execute on that brand and make that brand come to life.
C. No using and sticking to brand guidelines: In addition to having brand/design guidelines, you have to follow and execute on your brand guidelines.
D. Bad Execution: You can have brand guidelines, but if you aren’t executing on your brand standards and guidelines, and not executing and fulfilling on your brand standards and experiences, it is all for not and you’ll have brand failures.
Tools and Best Practices for Design Consistency
Here are a few ideas, tools and best practices leading branding agencies use to ensure design and brand consistency:
A. Communication tool: We highly recommend utilizing a communication tool where an internal team or client management team communicates about projects, timelines, etc. to make sure you have a plan to keep your brand consistent.
B. Project management tool: Another invaluable tool is your project management tool to assign tasks, timelines, responsibilities to keep your brand on track, on time as well as assign who owns what components of keeping your brand consistent.
C. Final sign-off: At the end of the day you need one person internal and externally or both to have final sign-off on all brand design activities to ensure the brand assets and elements or correct and on brand.
The Impact of Design Consistency on Business Growth
Here are several impacts of a consistent brand:
A. A well recognized brand: Brands that are consistent in design and their branding are more recognized and produce better results and growth than those that aren’t recognized.
B. Increased sales and revenue: Consumers love brands that are consistent in their design and brand consistency, which will help you to achieve increased sales and revenue.
C. Increased brand equity and value: An added benefit to a consistent brand is the increase in your brand equity and value, you and your investors will love that!
D. Strong brands get higher valuations: And to top all of these benefits off these ways to keep your brand and design consistent, your company value and valuations will get a lot higher and more valuable.
E. Brand consistency examples: Whether you are Nike and you keep your swoosh consistent or the golden arches of Mc Donald’s golden, brand consistency is key. Make sure you keep your brand, image, logo, tagline consistent for the best recognition and brand equity.
Consistency in marketing examples
As mentioned above, keeping your brand, image, logo, tagline consistent produces the best results for your design efforts and bottom line. Also keeping your social media, ads, blogs and pitch deck/sales deck are essential. You may want to consider utilizing a branding agency or a pitch deck expert to help and keep your brand and design consistent.
Examples of poor brand consistency
Brand and design consistency is key and here are a few examples of poor consistency:
A. Different logos/color palette: We’ve seen a company have as many as 20+ logo options/color combo’s, can you say crazy brand inconsistency.
B. Different pitch deck templates: If you’re a company with a marketing team, sales team, executive team, these sometimes seem to have their own pitch decks, this is another bad sign of poor brand consistency.
C. Off the wall social media posts: Another example of poor brand consistency is to have your social media posts that don’t look like your brand. This is a consistent pet peeve of ours to not follow an approved brand look and feel even on your social media posts, this is a huge mistake and lost opportunity for brand consistency.
Conclusion
Your brand needs you to be consistent with your design and brand standards and execution. Being consistent brings a whole host of valuable benefits from better brand recognition and equity to increase sales and revenue to increase your company’s valuation. Grab the big benefits of having a design consistency of your brand, let’s get started today, if you need help or assistance, please let us know.
