8 strategies to leverage the power of brand consistency

“Women belong in the kitchen.” That’s what Burger King’s United Kingdom division posted on X (then Twitter) on International Women’s Day back in 2021. 

Seriously.

As the first in a series of tweets that promoted a scholarship program for female BK employees, the tweet was meant to be cheeky.

The next tweet added some context: “If they want to, of course. Yet only 20% of chefs are women. We're on a mission to change the gender ratio.”

Unfortunately, many users couldn’t overlook the first tweet’s sexist trope. After a day of explaining and apologizing, Burger King removed the tweet.

And yet fast food competitor Wendy’s routinely gets away with plenty of cheeky behavior.

Sometimes they even roast followers directly.

So what’s the difference? 

Branding. Burger King’s tweet was a serious departure from their food photos, silly memes, and pleasant commentary, whereas fans are accustomed to Wendy’s cutting humor.

Consistent branding makes you recognizable

Brand consistency is the practice of presenting standard messaging, visuals, and tone across every platform, touchpoint, and customer interaction. It’s about making people recognize your brand instantly, no matter where they’re exposed to it. This is key to reinforcing your brand identity and building a seamless customer experience.

Furthermore, customers expect personalized experiences these days, but personalization widens the variety of branded assets you’ll need to produce. Instead of a single asset for a campaign, you may have to design numerous versions, all with specific imagery and messaging.

With consistent branding, you become more recognizable, which, in turn, makes people more comfortable buying. This leads to stronger customer trust, customer loyalty, and revenue.

Yet consistent branding is a big challenge, especially for decentralized digital marketing teams that work in silos or even across regions. When multiple people produce content (including graphics) without communicating, brand consistency is immediately at risk. Unfortunate consequences often include: 

• Unclear or subjective brand guidelines
• Time-intensive manual processes
• Little or no validation before publishing
• Poor organization of brand assets
• Vague messaging or customer targeting

What happens if you break consistency? At best, your audience is simply confused. At worst, like Burger King, you have to eat crow and apologize. Profusely. 

Actionable brand consistency strategies

Brand consistency is more of a management problem than a creative problem: It’s a matter of implementing and enforcing brand consistency strategies that keep everyone aligned, often right within your workflow.

Strategy #1: Determine your brand architecture

Brand architecture is the first question to answer in your brand strategy. This refers to the way a company organizes its brands, products, and services. Customers rely on this to understand what the company offers and how everything connects. 

Architecture is also an important tool to keep your digital marketing team on the same page so they can craft accurate messaging.

There are three typical forms of brand architecture:

Branded house

This is the most common type of brand architecture and the one you think of whenever we say “brand.” In this structure, the company has a single brand that encompasses everything. The brand elements are the same throughout the entire organization.

Google, for example, uses their signature red, yellow, green, and blue colors for every product and service.

House of brands

In this case, the parent company’s brand is less important (or not as important at all). A host of sub-brands are put in the front row. Each brand has autonomy on its own and a team who only has to worry about a single, strong brand identity.

In some cases, the brands even compete with each other. Gain, Febreeze, and Dawn all stand out as individual brands even though they’re owned by Procter & Gamble. Another example is Gap, which owns Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta. 

Hybrid brand

In some cases, a single product or product line is allowed to shine as its own brand, even within the confines of another branded entity. The smaller brand is typically more recognizable, but the primary brand is still relevant.

PlayStation, for example, is a well-known brand, even though it’s just one of Sony’s many products.

Strategy #2: Perform a brand audit

If your brand has been around for a while, you probably have a lot of content out in the world. 

Before you can tighten up your brand consistency, you need to see the full picture. What marketing materials exist? What campaigns are in play? Where's your brand mentioned online?

A content audit helps you track what’s out there, spot inconsistent branding, and decide what needs to change. It helps you prevent off-brand content from causing confusion and keeps your entire organization working toward the same goal.

Ideally, you would scrape every piece of content you can find: every blog, video, slide deck, social post, document, and image available. You should even check internal files and all those inconsistent PDFs you sent out. (We just dealt with this one ourselves!) 

But a total audit like that usually isn’t realistic. If you can’t audit everything, focus on the materials that are seen the most or have the greatest impact. 

Sort them by content type, campaign (if any), where it lives (your site, third-party site, etc.), audience, and performance.

Once everything is accounted for, you can decide what to keep, update, or toss. Some pieces might need a simple refresh. Others may no longer serve your brand identity and should be removed.

We built Brand Consistency, an AI-powered content governance tool, to give you a holistic view of your content, complete with content oversight across your organization, so your brand messaging aligns across new and old content.

Strategy #3: Create buyer personas

If you haven’t crafted buyer personas (sometimes called ideal customer profiles or audience personas), don’t delay: Sound buyer personas are prerequisites to building and maintaining a consistent brand that appeals to all of the subsets of your customers and audience.

When you’re crafting your buyer’s personas, articulate their job responsibilities (assuming you’re working in B2B), what they need, what challenges they face, and what drives their decisions. These insights help you understand their motivations, which, in turn, shapes your messaging.

What should you include in a buyer persona?

• Demographics: Age, gender, income, job title, education level, and lifestyle traits
• Role and authority: What they do, their seniority, and their decision-making power
• Daily activities: How they spend their time and what matters most in their routine
• Pain points: The problems they need to solve and how your brand can help
• Objections: The concerns they might have before making a decision
• Affiliations and influences: The groups they trust, the sources they follow, and the causes they care about

If, like most brands, you have multiple customer groups, it’s normal to have a buyer persona for each segment.

Like other branding assets, buyer personas are evolving documents. You should update them over time as your knowledge grows and your customers change.

Strategy #4: Define brand guidelines

Brand guidelines are the quintessential part of a strong branding strategy. After all, you can’t be consistent until you define what consistency means.

Some brands create simple one-page guides. Others, like Starbucks, create entire microsites.

Regardless of the format, your brand standards should include some key elements.

Logo

Your logo is often the first brand element people recognize. You want it to be easily identifiable and always used correctly.

Your brand style guide should include approved logo variations (full color, black, and white, icon-only, etc.), proper spacing and sizing rules, and detailed explanations on where and how it should be used.

Tone and brand voice

How does your brand sound? Playful? Professional? Friendly? Your voice should be consistent across all platforms, even if the tone shifts slightly for different platforms (emails versus social media, for example).

Your brand guidelines should define your core messaging principles, as well as words and phrases to use and avoid. Including sample copy is a good way to help readers understand.

Colors

A strong color palette creates powerful brand recognition. Think of Coca-Cola’s red or Tiffany’s blue.

Your guide should include hex, RGB, and CMYK codes for primary and secondary colors. It should also mention guidelines for background, text, and accents.

Describe when to use each type (headlines, body text, captions, etc.), and any rules for spacing and size.

Images

Every image should match your brand’s overall look and feel. Photos, graphics, illustrations, and any other brand asset should align with your tone and color scheme.

Your brand guide should cover your preferred photography style, image filters, or effects (if any), and logo placement on branded images.

Here’s an example of a color guide from our brand guidelines. Notice how we include specific hex codes along with detailed instructions. 

Strategy #5: Establish creative workflows

Review stages and approval processes can safeguard you from branding mistakes, but they can also create bottlenecks that delay campaigns

Your team needs a clear, focused creative workflow that maximizes productivity without causing branding snafus. This almost always requires a project management platform.

Your project planner is where your creative team plans, collaborates, and manages branded assets. This keeps all of your work in one place so confusion doesn’t break your brand consistency.

It also helps to have a single authority to manage your creative operations: a top dog who keeps things moving as creative and project requests come in. They understand the brand guidelines completely (maybe because they wrote the rules) and are the final line of defense against content that doesn’t reflect your brand.

Did Burger King use a workflow with a review process? It’s impossible to say, but one wonders if a brand monitor would have let the tweet slide by. 

Strategy #6: Create brand templates

Templates are a shortcut to consistent branding. Pre-saved assets can streamline the production of content, reduce the creative team’s workload, and keep your imagery and messaging on-brand at all times.

A brand template is just what it sounds like: an editable file that anyone can use to create an asset. All the details are in place, like colors, sizes, formats, and designs. The creative (or anyone in your organization) only needs to add the content.

For example, you might design a slide deck to use for customer-facing webinars. Anyone hosting the webinar would simply paste in their text and images into your saved file.

For example, we keep predesigned templates in our Canva account for our whitepapers and newsletters. 

With templates, you can lock in your designs by setting rules in your templates that prevent people from straying too far from the brand. You might limit the font selection to three options or make non-brand colors unavailable.

Templates aren't just visual assets. Sample text, preferred words, key phrases, or any other marketing material can help your team nail the brand voice

All this makes the review and approval process fast, as well. Pushing a brand asset out the door is a lot quicker when you don’t need to review most of the design.

And when it’s time to update your brand, you only need to update the template.

Strategy #7: Establish a single source of knowledge

Like many organizations, you may have brand assets scattered in a dozen locations that are hard to find and impossible to share. 

• Stored locally on someone’s device
• Stored in the wrong cloud folder
• Buried in someone’s email inbox or Slack messages
• Lost in one platform or another

This chaos is a barrier to efficiency and a consistent brand. Every moment you spend scouring your emails for that lost graphic is a moment you could be creating valuable content for your audience.

The solution is a central source of knowledge for all of your brand material. Once it’s in play, the time savings pours in (and the stress flows out).

The solution is a digital asset management (DAS) tool with features that store and organize content by teams, campaigns, asset type, audience, and other parameters. You can even tag a brand asset to make it findable and set levels of access for different stakeholders.

Furthermore, your DAS can be extended to external partners. For example, if you hire a contractor for a one-off project, you can give them temporary access to all of your brand assets. This can make their work easier, which will hopefully reduce your bill.

Strategy #8: Repurpose content across platforms

A simple and powerful way to keep your branding consistent is to simply reuse it across different platforms, usually with small tweaks for the audience.

Turn that slide deck into a series of social media posts. That podcast appearance could be a week’s work of TikToks! You already did the work. You might as well squeeze out every dollop of value.

Should these new assets go through the same branding process? Yes, but on an expedited track since the work is already done. Tack on your logo and ship it out.

Be vigilant to stay consistent

Your brand consistency strategies mostly take place at the planning and preparation stage of your brand strategy. Once your system is in place, maintaining consistency should be straightforward.

That said, your brand still needs to be monitored at all times, lest an eager social media manager decides to neglect the “don’t disparage women” rule. Fortunately, this is something you can automate now.