This is how you can tell that you lack Brand Consistency

Without brand consistency, your customers may have difficulty recognizing your brand. In addition, brand consistency builds trust with your target audience. Our checklist will help you recognize when your company does not have consistent brand communication. 

Brand consistency can increase sales by 23% on average

(Source: Bench Report: "The Impact of Brand Consistency" by Demand Metric) 

Customers choose the brand that seems strongest to them and with which they can best identify. A strong brand has a clear message, and a clear purpose, and provides answers to their problem. Ideally, people associate a specific product category directly with your product.  

What happens if there is no brand consistency in your company?

What happens is, that customers have a hard time recognizing your brand and that prevents them from building trust in you. Inconsistency can also be confusing for internal teams (marketing departments, sales departments, and production units) that create content. Brand inconsistency arises from employees using the wrong logos, colors, images, or language that does not match the brand identity. 

(source: Benchreport: “The Impact of Brand Consistency” from Demand Metric)

Checklist brand consistency: How to recognize what is missing 

• Different fonts
  It looks messy and confusing to customers if you keep using different fonts, font sizes, and spacing in your documents, graphics, and advertising. 
  
  
• Incorrect colors
  Clashing color variations in advertising materials are unprofessional and make your brand look inconsistent. 
  
  
• Images or icons that do not match the brand identity
  Professional brand identity and amateur photo shoots do not align. That can negatively affect the perception of your brand and show you in an unflattering light to customers.
  
  
• Wrong email signatures
  Every email represents your company and can strengthen your brand. Incorrect or outdated signatures do not represent your brand consistently to the outside world. 
  
  
• Outdated templates
  If PowerPoint templates or forms contain outdated metrics or logos, the wrong content will be introduced in important places and your brand will miss out on presenting itself in its most up-to-date form.
  
  
• Office document formatting variations
  When every presentation or other document looks different - logos placed incorrectly, etc –customers get confused, as well as employees when creating new presentations and documents. Your brand loses recognition value as a result. Besides, disorganized documents and presentations look unprofessional. 
  
  
• Language does not match the company
  Similar to point 3, your external communication must also match your brand's personality. A language that is too casual or too lofty can be inappropriate and off-putting to customers, depending on your brand identity.
  
  
• The brand is portrayed differently across platforms (social media, print, ads, office documents, etc.).
  Your recognition value unfortunately suffers greatly if you present your company differently in each area. On social media, for example, you should not use a red color scheme on Facebook and a green one on Instagram.   
  

To-do list for brand consistency

1. Clear brand identity
   Make sure your brand has a message and incorporates values. A clear brand identity helps build relationships with customers. When consumers feel like they know you and can trust you, they are more likely to buy from you. Your copywriting and verbal tone should be consistent. 
   
   
2. Defined brand guidelines 
   You should have a central document that sets the rules and regulations for your brand. For example, a brand style guide includes specifications on how your logo should look and be used. The same goes for fonts, colors, media, text formatting, photos, and graphic styles. The guidelines state how your brand should look in documents, on posters, ads, or on social media.
   
   
3. Consistency across all platforms 
   This may seem obvious, but some brands look completely different in documents than on social media and print ads. Even if different platforms have slightly different audiences, your brand should show consistency. That also applies to TV and radio ads. You must always adhere to your brand guidelines so that your visual and linguistic style comes across the same as it does on all platforms. The best way to do that is a brand style guide. Learn in our article, how to successfully implement your brand style guide company-wide!
   
   
4. Your MS Office documents are brand consistent 
   Make sure you present your brand consistently in Office as well. Here too, it is a good idea to continue the design principles of the company so that company presentations, Word documents, and email signatures are uniformly designed. MS Office often proves to be extremely labor-intensive regarding brand consistency.
    
   Only every second Office document corresponds to the corporate design of a company.
    
   
   With the help of the Office add-in from empower^®, you can ensure that Office applications like PowerPoint or Word are always brand-compliant. empower^® can check and apply corporate design to PowerPoint slides with just 2 mouse clicks. Outdated presentations can be easily converted into a new design with empower^®. In Outlook you can manage your signatures with empower^® and automatically create correct, up-to-date and corporate design-compliant signatures for each user. Learn more about the Office add-in empower^®.
   
   
5. Involve your entire team 
   Make sure every employee knows your brand's purpose, vision, and mission, ideally via employer management before they're even hired. Inform any subcontractors and freelancers you use about how to present your brand to the public. Conduct regular audits to ensure that nothing is published that is inconsistent.
   
   
6. Have "brand guardians" 
   If you have large teams, you should appoint one or more people as so-called brand guardians. They are responsible for making sure all branding and marketing materials comply with your brand guidelines and are fully "on-brand".

Brands change over time 

Brand consistency does not mean that a brand is static and never changes. All brands change over time, some brands are dynamic to begin with. The most important thing is that changes to your brand are strategically thought out and communicated within the organization so that everyone adheres to the guidelines. Brand consistency helps strengthen your identity and build trust with your customers. We hope you can use our checklist to see if your company is pursuing sufficient brand consistency. To expand your knowledge, check out our complete guide to successful brand management. 

A simple solution for brand consistency in Office 

You can save significant effort in MS Office when implementing your corporate design in presentations or documents. empower® Content Enablement includes a central library for all documents and templates, central email signature management, design-compliant formatting, and many productivity tools that are available both online and offline for your employees. With empower^®, your style guide is translated directly into MS Office and your design guidelines are integrated into the ribbon. So you need not worry about using the right colors, fonts and layouts anymore.  

Get to know empower^® and start your free demo version.