Keep Things Consistent - Basic Brand Management

Having worked for several years with small-to-mid size companies on a daily basis, the most common issue I find is lack of consistency in their visual identity. These businesses all have reasons for not developing consistent brand marketing ranging from belief that doing so would be cost prohibitive, to not believing the scope of their business is large enough for consistency to matter.

The truth is that keeping your visuals consistent across media is one of the most effective and most basic brand management techniques a company can use to manage their perception in the marketplace. Through simple, consistent use of color, iconography, fonts, layouts, and graphical elements, a company can tie their visual elements into an overall brand feeling and reinforce additional marketing efforts, making that marketing dollar stretch farther by building on existing design structure.

For example, Target Corporation uses consistency to create assets out of unexpected elements. These assets serve to bring Target Corporation to front of mind without even seeing the company’s name. Their recent TV ads don’t even show a logo until the end of the spot, but even before reaching that point, several elements have already told the viewer that they are watching a Target advertisement. Some visual cues utilized by Target include the consistent font used to display text on the screen, and the frequent use of the colors red and white.

Target Corporation has used these and other visual cues consistently enough to bring the Target brand to front of mind before a viewer has been shown a logo or is directly informed that the ad belongs to Target. This opens up more space for developing a message and attitude for the viewer to tie into the brand rather than directly selling the brand itself. It places their brand management on the level of perception management, and in turn uses those simple visuals as symbols for the messages you’ve received from their marketing efforts; a viewer who is shown a Target logo has already been given prior experience with the brand’s message and attitude, and the simple icon brings all of that to the front of his or her mind.

Are you looking to develop consistency with your company’s brand? A good way to start is to gather samples of all of your company’s collateral, the brochures, business cards, letterhead, print advertisements, your website (anything that serves as a method of external communication) and see what common threads exist. Ask yourself these questions:

• Is your company’s logo identical across all of these pieces, or is it presented with different colors and inconsistent shading?

• Do your website and your brochure share similar visual components, imagery, colors, and layout, or does your website have a white background while your brochure is printed on a patterned paper?

• Do your print advertisements use similar placing and fonts, or do they look like they’ve come from very different sources?

By doing this visual identity audit and seeing how your brand’s image is presented across media, it will give you a good idea where to start, and where you might be able to update and improve.

Every brand should make it a marketing goal to keep their visuals consistent. The costs of creating consistency can be minimized, particularly if it is planned and executed over time as a company’s visuals are updated. Consistent brand management improves perceived value resulting in consumers having a clear picture of a brand and becoming more willing to participate. This will make the cost upfront of updating materials absorbed by the more focused marketing and potential for an easier sell. And by keeping a brand’s visuals consistent, it’s much easier to focus on faster message communication with potential customers instead of having to establish and build brand in customers’ minds with every external communication a company makes.