Branding is important, as it is how your consumers and potential consumers view your company in the wider world. The consistency of your branding is therefore vital to how successful your company is and the perception of your company to others. The more consistent you can be with the messaging surrounding your company, the more consistent your branding will be. This can be achieved through the words you use to describe your products and services, the design of your company logo and website, the promotions and discounts you offer and the customer service you provide to your customers. A branding audit is one of the best ways to ensure that you can see the wood from the trees and have a clear and coherent branding plan that allows for consistency and success.

Clear and consistent branding is one of the key components of a successful business. It is a way to build trust with your customers and develop a loyal, core customer base that all successful companies require to grow from. How do you go about creating and maintaining brand consistency?

First, it is important to create and develop brand guidelines for your company. Creating a brand style and usage guidelines is something that all large companies have done. Even if you are just starting out but you have a clear idea of what your brand should look and feel like, creating brand guidelines is a great way to ensure consistency once you begin to scale in size. They serve to not only assist a marketing department but also to serve employees and other departments in all types of brand messaging and brand asset use. It must be the same no matter where it comes from within your company to be deemed as an authentic part of your brand. If something looks slightly out of joint with the rest of the brand messaging your customers will notice the difference.

You may be under the impression that brand consistency is only about the customer-facing side of the business, but this is folly. The brand experience delivery must match the brand that your customers see for it to be valuable and have full integrity. Create a workplace that understands the reasons behind your brand message, creating training programmes with your HR department to ensure that the brand ideals and messaging become a part of every day life within your organisation. If your employees buy into your brand message they are more likely to deliver a service to your customers where that brand messaging shines through and remains consistent.

One way to ensure that the brand messaging you have developed and implemented is hitting the spot is to hire the services of an experienced brand audit company. This provides you with experience and industry know-how looking at all aspects of your brand, how it was created, developed, how it works in-house, and how it works forward facing towards your customers and potential customers. Regular brand audits help to keep your company moving forward at the right pace and with the correct level of consistency.