A brand sets your business apart from your competitors. It is the foundation of your company’s reputation and directly influences buying decisions. Well-managed brands are quickly accessible, consistent brands.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to overlook brand consistency in today’s world of multiple media outlets and the plethora of marketing materials available to promote your business. There are many reasons why your brand is an important asset to protect and keep consistent – here are our top three:
Differentiation
Your brand is who you are and needs to be the first thing that springs to customers’ minds when they need a product or service in your industry. This can be hard to achieve if you do not have a consistent brand identity. If, for example, you continually change your logo or colour scheme, it can make your business difficult to identify, remember, and differentiate from the competition.
Increase customer recognition
Consistent branding will lead to customers being able to recognise your brand even when it’s broken into its constituent parts. Think of the Apple half-eaten apple emblem, Google’s spontaneous doodles to celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous artists, pioneers, and scientists or even McDonald’s “I’m loving it” tagline with its omnipotent jingle.
Reinforce your identity
When customers see and hear a consistent message from your brand, it reinforces your unique selling proposition in their minds. By knowing what they can expect from your brand, and hearing it multiple times, they will begin to assign a higher value and trust in your business.
How do you build a consistent brand?
Brand consistency can be a difficult beast to tame, it’s not just about coming up with a snazzy logo and catchy tagline – it’s about creating a set of design rules that tie together the ethos of your business. Sounds easy, right?
The breadth and depth of brand standards can vary wildly, depending on your needs. If you are too strict then you may stifle creativity and if you’re too loose then design anarchy could reign. Try to focus on strategy and consistency in the following five areas:
Logo
Probably the most important component of your brand, a logo should never change and its placement and sizing must also remain consistent across all media and marketing materials.
Graphics
Use distinctive symbols, shapes, borders and backgrounds consistently in terms of sizing and weight.
Colours
A colour scheme will have an immediate impression on your audience and plays a large role in memory retrieval and brand perception. For example, green is viewed as healthy and fresh whereas gold, silver and burgundy are perceived as upscale hues.
Fonts
Pick a couple of fonts and select at least one serif (which have ‘feet’ at the bottom of the characters and are good for paragraphs of copy) and one sans serif font (without ‘feet’ and great for titles, numbers or small text).
Illustrative and photographic style
Keep visuals consistent in style and colour.
How can Imagen help?
At Imagen, we’re lucky enough to work with a range of businesses to improve their video management solutions, but we also understand the importance of brand consistency. That’s why our video hosting software Imagen allows you to create and edit your own website to showcase your video content with your branding. As well as add and search your own specific metadata and annotations. It’s also a darn sight better than just putting your videos up on YouTube.
There’s flexibility in the way we work too. Some clients prefer to design their own website from scratch through our easy to use content management system. Others ask our web team to custom design a site that matches an existing website exactly.
And if you do decide to change your logo or branding in the future, it’s also easy to update your site through the content management system – which means there’s no more squabbling with expensive design companies to change a logo.
In fact, you’ll find we’re a very friendly bunch that take the time to understand our clients’ wider business needs within the specialism of video management software. Contact Imagen today and see what we can do for you.
