Neal Kwatra Reveals How Consistency Is Key for Powerful Branding

As all savvy marketers know, the importance of branding can never be underestimated. A powerful brand benefits a business in many compelling ways.

• It increases customer trust to boost conversion rates.
• It boosts the impact of marketing campaigns, as the familiarity hurdle has already been overcome.
• Powerful brands are more likely to receive free media attention.
• Strong branding provides a point of difference from your competition.
• Brand recognition increases long-term loyalty, and so helps protect market share from newcomers.

However, brand-building is a complex mixture of art and science, with no fixed route toward success. But one thing is clear: you need to be consistent in your branding activities, or your identity will become blurred and diluted.

How can you maintain this essential consistency? Here, Founder and CEO of Metropolitan Public Strategies, Neal Kwatra, gives advice on how to keep your branding consistent:

1) Define Your Message

A strong brand needs to be built on solid foundations. You need to know exactly what your branding aims to convey. Ask yourself what your brand stands for, and how you'll communicate this through your marketing.

Then make sure that this central theme is reflected and reinforced in every aspect of your campaigns.

2) Style Guide

To help with this reinforcement, draw up a detailed style guide covering the design and tone of all your brand's marketing output.

Importantly, don't just focus on visual design aspects such as colors, fonts, and so on. Lay down the emotions and impressions that your branding is aiming to generate. Draw up a list of words and phrases to use, and just as importantly, ones to avoid.

In a small operation, a style guide works as a useful reminder to keep your marketing on track. But in a larger marketing department, it's vital for keeping every team member working to the same goals.

3) Consistent Logo

Make sure you use the same logo design across all media and all campaigns. You may need to tweak it slightly for different formats, but your logo is the focus of your branding. It needs to be instantly recognizable.

Make the original design files available for use in every campaign across all channels to minimize any variation. Also, make sure that any design changes are reflected immediately across the entire operation.

4) Consistent Colors

Every document you produce in your business should use the brand's house colors to strengthen the recognition of your logo.

Make sure your letterheads, invoices, internal memos, product packaging, and all other materials follow the same recognizable theme.

Incessant repetition may seem like overkill when many documents won't even be seen by the public, but it's important to ingrain the branding habit across the whole organization.

5) Leadership Is Crucial

Lastly, make sure one person has overall responsibility for branding coordination. This could be through a dedicated role, or by duties folded into another post.

However you approach it, someone needs to take charge of this essential part of marketing. It's too important to let it happen organically, risking drift and confusion between different campaign strands.

Strong branding makes almost every aspect of business easier. Acute attention to consistency is key to building a brand that stands apart from your competition.