Brands aren’t just corporations or businesses with logos. They are an entity with identities that people connect with. In recent times, brand identity has become of critical importance as political and personal opinions establish clear boundaries and preferences for consumer behavior. You have to look beyond the scope of just having a business profile.
You need to decide how you appear in the eyes of your customers. And every professional brand identity agency agrees that to establish a credible and authentic identity, you need to develop consistency.
An identity that has loopholes or discrepancies will be highlighted and mocked by the current generation of users who spend most of their time on social media platforms.
So, if you say something on one platform and contradict yourself in an ad you post, you can be sure that some or most of your audience will point it out and you’ll have to face the backlash.
How do you go about establishing a cohesive and consistent brand identity? Let’s find out!
Establish and Communicate Clear Brand Guidelines
The common misconception that most people have is that you can always fix this stuff later. Sure, this strategy might work in several aspects of your business, but not when it comes to brand identity.
You need to consolidate your data and this is especially true for each design element or communication instruction that is encapsulated in what’s referred to as branding guidelines.
You need to ensure that your branding guidelines are perfected before you hand them out to your team and anyone that you want representing your brand in any capacity.
Centralized Access for All Branded Efforts
When things get busy, it’s easy for your graphic designers, social media executives or marketing personnel to require brand elements like your logo or company information, or design elements like the correct fonts, color codes, etc. that they don’t have access to. This can lead to them causing discrepancies in your brand identity.
The only way to avoid this is again, consolidation of your branding guidelines and every element associated with it. You need a single database that contains everything, is password protected, and shared with each individual member that requires it. Think of spaces like Dropbox, Google Drive, Figma, etc.
Ten Ideas, One Approver
Too many cooks spoil the broth. This saying couldn’t be truer when it comes to brand identities. You can’t have several people representing your brand without having a proper approval process. More importantly, you can’t have several authorities approving public representations every day.
Even with clear guidelines, it’s easy to get mixed up with interpretations or personal preferences, meaning two approvers may give the go ahead for two contrastingly opposite ideas.
This is why you need a single authority that can be held accountable for approving everything that shows up in public view from your brand.
Whether it’s providing or approving an idea, an asset, a direction, a format, a color theme, a font, etc., this single entity will be responsible for ensuring nothing gets past their eyes without their go ahead.
Not only does it make for a comfortable and easy hierarchy that ensures approvals, but it also is a sure way to retain consistency.
Logs Are Helpful!
Keeping a log of every change you make in your brand identity is crucial as it allows new employees or contractors to figure out how things got to be where they are. It also allows for easy modifications and rollbacks if something gets done without going through the proper channels.
Create Branded Templates Early On
Another benefit of having such an organized system is being able to make templates for content management systems, design platforms, social posts, emails, memos, letters, etc. However, it’s important that you do this from the start and ensure that all the steps above are followed when creating templates as you won’t be able to make changes across several different platforms whenever needed. If you have everything in one drive, it’ll be easy to create, edit and remove things from the system completely.
Track Brand Assets
Brand assets can be tracked via brand management tools, making it easy to pinpoint a strategy that works and taking educated expansion decisions without compromising on brand identity consistency.
Brand assets are easily replaced along the way, making it difficult to replicate, edit out or eliminate certain changes, especially when more than a few people are actively trying to add/remove several assets simultaneously.
Takeaway
It’s difficult to get started as a business, focus on getting it off the ground, and remain consistent across all fronts with a carefully crafted brand identity. Which is why we recommend getting in touch with FOR, Finland’s best next-gen branding and marketing agency. We’re eager to help businesses with their branding and rebranding efforts.
