When I say the words “car insurance,” what is the first thing that pops into your head?
If you’re like me, it was a little green lizard with a Cockney accent telling you that 15 minutes could save you 15 percent or more.
But it could have been Jake from State Farm at 3 in the morning or a deep voice asking “Are you in good hands?”
Odds are your brain didn’t go straight to concepts like paperwork, policies, or coverage. It probably first went to a brand.
To become synonymous with the product or service that a brand provides, that brand has to do a lot of work. It has to be a strong. A strong brand stands for something and repeatedly and consistently delivers that message to its consumers across all mediums. Consistently, here, being the key word.
In the world of marketing and brand management, it is often said that the difference between good branding and great branding is consistency. If an audience gets different messages every time they interact with your brand, their perception will likely be negative.
Beth Pop-Nikolov explains this idea well in her recent article on Venveo.com saying:
“When you're getting to know a person, you start to develop opinions, ideas and assumptions about them based on your interactions. If they are dressed in a business suit one day, bermuda shorts and a ratty T-shirt the next and then a scuba diving suit another time, it may be hard to nail down exactly who they are and what they are all about.
Now imagine this same person is someone you are considering doing business with. Wouldn't you be concerned about their consistency in their work based on their inconsistent appearance? You may think twice before bringing them into your business because they're unpredictable.
Your consumers can feel the same about your brand if you aren't careful. If your social media voice is whimsical and silly but your product packaging is sterile and plain, you're sending mixed signals that will confuse consumers and leave them feeling like your brand can't be trusted.”
Your organization needs a reliable and consistent voice, and everyone (and I mean everyone from the CEO down to the associates, not just your marketing and communications team) needs to be speaking the same language. The more uniform, consistent, and steady your messaging and flow of content, the stronger your brand will be. And whether your goal is selling a product or raising money for a cause, you need a solid brand to do it.
By now, you should be convinced to revisit your organization’s brand for consistency. But where do you start?
Here are my top three things your organization can do today to establish (or improve) your brand consistency.
Conduct a Brand Audit
You can’t effectively plan a path forward until you know where exactly you’re at now, right?
You need to understand where your brand stands in its current state which is why you need to begin with a brand audit.
It’s completely normal (and desired) that your brand shifts and evolves over time. So it’s in your organization’s best interest to occasionally be conducting broad scans of your brand and where it is positioned in the market.
The team at Miles Herndon did a great job compiling an outline of all of the elements to consider when performing a comprehensive brand audit. Here’s what they came up with:
Internal Branding
Positioning
Brand Values
Unique Selling Proposition (USP), brand promise, or brand essence
Voice
Culture
Product / Service positioning
External Branding
Corporate Identity - logos and other brand elements
Collateral-brochures, print materials, trade show displays, etc.
Advertising
Website
SEO
Social Media
Sponsorships/civic-involvement/memberships
News/PR
Content Marketing and other assets - blogs, white papers, case studies, articles, books, etc.
Testimonials
Videos
Systems and Infrastructure
Corporate identity/brand standards
HR policies/on-boarding process
Sales processes/touchpoints
Internal systems
Customer service systems
Solidify and Articulate a Brand Style Guide (+ Cheat Sheet)
Once you’ve done all of the researching and gathering of all of your organization’s different assets you need to analyze it and codify it. That is: write it down in one place!
I don’t know how many times I’ve talked to organizations that didn’t have a one-stop-shop for questions and rules related to their brand. For a marketing and communications team, this resource becomes their Bible. For the rest of the organization, it becomes an invaluable resource to answer questions they may have without having to ask the marketing and communications team about simple things like logo use, proper capitalization of a phrase, or specific brand color codes.
Here’s an example of a digital Style Guide that ensures that brand assets are at the fingertips of each employee.
Credit: Atrómitos
Whether your brand style guide is online or you print out hard copies for every employee similar to an employee handbook (we’d recommend this!), there are common elements that you’ll need to make sure you define and have all in one spot. We’ve detailed those below and included thinks to consider within each element. These include:
Color palette
Define your organization’s color palette, including each color’s specific RGB, CMYK, and HEX codes.
Define which colors primary and secondary colors (Ex: Certain colors that you want to use more than others).
Typography
Define your brand-approved fonts, which fonts are used for headers, subheaders, and body text, and what size font is appropriate for each.
Define if any fonts are for use only online or only in print (If those fonts are not automatically included on everyone’s computer, include links to where they can be downloaded for free).
Logos
Include all approved versions of your logo (Ex: dark, light/white, horizontal, vertical).
Include proper and improper usages of your logo (The amount of space that should always surround it, not to stretch or distort the logo, not to put it on a busy background where it is hard to read, etc.).
Icons and word-marks
Include any icons or wordmarks that can stand in for your logo as well as proper use of each.
Mission Statement/Brand Philosophy/Brand Idea
Define your brand succinctly. What words define your brand presence? What ideas drive your work? Write it all down.
Editorial Style Guide
Define your organization’s editorial style (whether that adheres to a mainstream Stylebook like Associated Press or Chicago, or pulls from pieces of each).
Define things like the use of the Oxford comma, extra spaces after sentences, etc.
This list is by no means extensive and is certainly dependent upon your particular organization’s brand and identity, but it’s a good place to start.
When you’re finished with the all-encompassing style guide, we’d recommend creating a truncated, one-page version of the most important, most-used aspects (think: fonts, color codes, etc.) that your staff members can print and hang at their desks for quick reference. And finally, if you’d like to see what some other brand’s style guides look like, you can check out this Hubspot blog article.
Start With the Small Stuff!
You’ve audited your brand and you’ve codified everything into a brand style guide. Congratulations! That’s a lot of hard work. Now it’s time to implement. But you might find yourself staring at your wealth of different marketing materials, pamphlets, flyers, banners, and website and feeling overwhelmed. We totally get it.
Start small.
The logistical part of refreshing your brand will take time and will likely require a transition period. It can help to even create a concrete plan for that period and dates for when you will aim to have certain deliverables transferred over by. But in the meantime, here are three small brand items you can do that’ll give your new, improved brand a wide presence:
1. UNIFORM E-MAIL SIGNATURES
It might seem like a minuscule detail but with so much professional communication occurring online, a clean, professional e-mail signature across your organization is a must. So get it out of the way early so everyone external to your organization that gets an email gets a glimpse of your brand.
In terms of the actual implementation of the signature across the organization, I’m a big fan of Email Signature Rescue, a paid online resource that offers professional, responsive signature templates and then helps you deploy that signature to everyone in your organization with the click of a button. Much easier than lengthy, complicated instructions telling people the exact menu items to click to get their new signature up and running.
2. NEW BUSINESS CARDS
Much like your new e-signature, a new branded business card is a small tool that can make a big impression while getting your updated brand out there. Make sure that they’re clean, modern, and contain all important information including contact information and social media handles. Take advantage of double-sided printing, making one side all of the information and the other side colorfully branded. Another rec: Check out Moo.com for your business card needs. Moo also has a wealth of tried and true templates to work from (work smarter, not harder people!) and extras like foil, rounded corners, or unique business card sizes that can bring your cards to life!
3. LETTERHEAD AND POWERPOINT TEMPLATES
Get your professional business letterhead together first thing so that any letters (proposals, acknowledgments, etc.) that start going out can bear the new look. Creating a full toolkit of branded templates including a powerpoint template that staff members can easily edit to create their own presentations is key to brand consistency! It’s when people across the organization are creating their own letterhead and things on the fly that brand inconsistencies spring up.
If you’ve read this far and you’re still thinking, “This might be a little out of my wheelhouse,” or “I have more specific questions and I could use some help thinking through how this applies to my organization’s brand,” feel free to reach out to me directly.
This article was originally written by me for Atromitos’ Ideas blog and has been slighted edited for publishing here.
