3 crucial tips to maintain brand consistency

As brands continue to digitalize, the increasing number of brand touchpoints means that brand consistency is more important than ever. The impact of a consistent brand cannot be underestimated as a means to build trust and loyalty amongst your consumers or clients. In this article, we discuss three simple tips to ensure brand consistency across your organization.

1. Centralize your brand repository

Never underestimate the importance of having a one-stop shop where team members can go to find brand materials. This should be the place where all employees can find the most up-to-date version of the brand guidelines, logos and colors, making it easy for everyone to access and repurpose these assets while reducing the risk of old, out-of-date or incorrect assets being used.

Many brands also rely on third party imagery for social media, blogs and presentations. Having a repository of images to pull from means that your overall brand ‘look and feel’ will stay the same across channels and markets. Similarly, an extensive guide on how assets should be used across multiple touchpoints – from customer-facing presentations to social media presence to email signatures – will leave less room for individual interpretation, and therefore, less room for error or inconsistency.

2. Refine and simplify your brand guidelines

How do you distill your entire brand essence into a few pages? Whether building a new brand, undergoing a rebrand or simply ensuring new joiners and current employees alike are representing your brand in the correct way, brand guidelines are imperative. Your brand guidelines should act as your single source of truth as to how employees can use your brand – and all its assets (colors, images, logos, tone of voice etc.) – across various collaterals and in their day-to-day jobs.

While brand guidelines need to be extensive in terms of covering all relevant touchpoints, it’s important to keep them simple, too. Avoid the use of jargon and speak in a language and tone that employees across all markets and functions will understand. It’s important to make it easy for employees to action the guidelines, so consider using step-by-step guides or including templates and examples to not only ensure consistency but also increase productivity by reducing time wasted on creating these things from scratch.

3. Train your team members

While branding may come easy for you, remember that not everyone in your organization is a marketer. Any brand refresh should be accompanied by training for all employees to familiarize them with the new branding, run through brand guidelines and open the floor for questions. More in-depth training sessions may be needed for particular functions, such as the sales team, who may be using the brand collaterals on a more frequent basis.

Don’t forget to account for your team members across the globe, either. To ensure everyone in your organization understands fully how to use your brand assets, you may want to consider publishing guidelines and rolling out training in different languages. In doing this you can also test your brand in multiple cultures and consider any local-market nuances you may not have previously known about.

At Tag, we act as guardians to some of the world’s most well-respected brands. We safeguard brand identity across all internal and external touchpoints, while ensuring brand consistency doesn’t come at the expense of creativity. We simplify the brand management process with our best-in-class digital asset management tools, equipping stakeholders with real-time access to the most up-to-date brand assets.

Schedule a call to discuss your brand management needs with us.