Protect your Brand
What is Brand Consistency?
Brand consistency is the practice of always delivering messages aligned with the core brand values in the same tone, presenting the brand logo in a similar way, and repeating the same colours throughout your visual brand elements. Over time, these elements become ingrained in the minds of consumers, and they’re more likely to remember your brand.
It’s not just about visual elements of a brand, customer thoughts identifies three critical areas where brands must be consistent to drive customer loyalty:
- Customer Experience – Providing a consistent customer experience fosters trust and confidence in your brand.
- Values – Back up your words with actions.
- Brand Identity Assets – These are the visual brand components that make your brand recognisable and help you stand out from the competition.
Brand Identity Assets
Centralise your Assets, Making Brand Materials Easily Accessible
If you’re like most brands, you have a variety of professionals who are creating brand materials in some way or another. Providing easy access to the most up-to-date, approved brand materials and assets – such as logos, templates, images, and even copy – goes a long way in ensuring brand consistency.
To do so, bring your assets together into a single, centralised platform of your choice such as dropbox or google drive, where every team member has easy access to all necessary assets. Centralising your assets, means your marketing and sales teams will save time searching for approved assets – creating on brand and consistent collateral. With all the approved assets together it helps teams to meet deadlines more efficiently.
If you want to build brand recognition for your business and foster trust among your target audience, then brand consistency is essential for your business. This way your target audience will recognise your brand, associate with your brand with feel-good messages and positive emotions, and will have confidence that they’ll have a consistent experience if they choose to engage with your brand.
For next level organisation, use brand templates
InDesign, Powerpoint and Canva
123 Create have been designing across all three platforms for many years, I thought it would be useful to share some of our insights and acknowledge each has a purpose, however understanding the design compromises or risks is also necessary.
InDesign V Powerpoint
Most graphic designers are trained to create documents in InDesign as it is industry standard for creating professionally designed documents, to name a few, flyers, brochures, training manuals, books, company reports. There are benefits with using Adobe InDesign over Microsoft PowerPoint, however, resources, software, budget, quality of output, document use (online or print) and project deadlines are all factors in determining which software package to use.
123 Create have saved our clients money by creating branded templates in PowerPoint giving them the control to make content changes, saving the expense to hire a graphic designer to do it or the time to have the changes made.
PowerPoint has traditionally been used for presentations, however can now be used for some print collateral and digital marketing designs.
Upside
- Most organisations have access to PowerPoint and therefore can amend content without the need for a designer
- Templates can be created and styles locked down to assist your organisation’s staff to stay on brand.
- Good solution when a template or style remains consistent throughout presentation.
- Good for tailored presentations for a topic or event.
Canva Branding
It doesn’t matter how smart or driven of a marketer you are, without the right tools, it’s impossible to effectively market your business and get the word out about your products and services to your ideal customers.
Luckily for you, you don’t have to blow your entire budget on building your marketing tool belt. In fact, some of the best marketing tools in the business are completely free! Including Canva.
123 Create can set up your Canva account with your branding to make it easier for you to design online social media marketing on brand every time.