Brand Compliance: How To Ensure Brand Consistency | Compliant

The best brands don’t become the best by accident. Of course, offering a quality product or service is key. But, there is a bit more to the equation.

The most successful brands understand who they are and what they’re about. They know how to tell their story, and they do so consistently. In other words, they adopt a strong stance on brand compliance.

Brand compliance ensures all messaging, from logos for a visual identity to social media, remains consistent across all channels, whether written or mere imagery.

But, brand consistency takes hard work.

What Is Brand Compliance?

Every brand has a story. Unfortunately, that story can easily get lost in the digital sea of the online world if care is not taken to own the story; and present it to customers consistently—consistency matters for brand success.

Essentially, brand compliance is a process that seeks to ensure all brand elements, presented in all mediums, strictly adhere to your brand guidelines.

That means the look and the feel of all your messaging and content stay true to your distinctive brand personality or identity. It applies to marketing campaigns, taglines, social media practices, and even during product development.  

Here are some key elements to ensure brand compliance:

• Consistent communication and messaging across all mediums and platforms.
• Ensuring visuals, imagery, and aesthetics (iconography) look and feel consistent across all channels.
• Adopting a consistent tone of voice across all platforms, one that’s true to brand personality.
• Using consistent color palettes, paint standards, and fonts across platforms.

Why Is Brand Consistency Important?

In one sense, brand consistency is essential for building brand recognition. But, it doesn’t stop there. It ends at the purchase. So, brand consistency is a means, not an end. Unfortunately, a common misconception is that the product or service speaks for itself. This is true in a sense.

But, in an age where most purchasing decisions are emotional rather than practical, the brand story and emotional appeal are equally as important as the product.

This is why brand consistency is so important. Successful brands are built through the consistent delivery of their messaging. Content marketers know that high-quality content must be delivered with a consistent tone to be effective; otherwise, it simply gets lost in the digital ocean.

It also builds consumer trust and keeps them coming back. But authenticity is also key. In fact, according to marketing statistics, 90 percent of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding which brands to support.

In short, brand consistency builds brand recognition and consumer trust. Every brand is telling a story, but the way in which it is told matters.

What Is Needed for Brand Consistency?

Whether a company is in the midst of a rebranding project or in the initial creative process phase of creating a new brand identity, there must be a roadmap. Typically, this takes the form of brand and usage guidelines.

These guidelines help create brand consistency across the entire organization. The usage guidelines provide rules for messaging and communication and cover everything from brand tone of voice to brand assets such as fonts, taglines, and colors. This consistency must be maintained throughout the wide range of touchpoints where brands and customers intersect.

Scope of brand guidelines could include:

• The brand story, including the vision, mission, and core values.
• Messaging, which includes tone, voice, and personality.
• Visual identity, such as typography, iconography, web design, and more.

Brand assets (elements that help identify the brand) should be accessible to all employees. This involves digital asset management and organizing various asset categories for company use to maintain brand consistency.

Brand and usage guidelines should also include actionable information on how these elements are to be incorporated. It doesn’t matter if it’s a simple social media post or a design for brochures.

Branding guidelines and preferences must be clear for all those working with digital assets, from the version control of the design team to the tone for content writers. It should cover procedures for both local use and global implementation.  

Maintaining a system of quality brand management is essential. Typically, organizations employ brand managers for this task. Also, companies like Intelligence Bank feature digital asset management software and brand compliance software (BrandHub). This software allows you to streamline brand consistency efforts for organizations to maintain brand governance.

Patents

Part of brand compliance involves brand protection. Companies must make efforts to protect their brand from counterfeiting, rogue websites, and overall impersonation. They must protect the brand’s product and the brand’s intellectual property. Patents offer legal protection when it comes to a brand’s inventive products. ISO / IEC 27001 also affords brands with an opportunity for information security.

Trademarks

Trademarking is another way to ensure brand identity. Contrary to popular belief, a trademark is not limited to a logo. It can be a word, letter, phrase, symbol, and even a sound. Trademarking is one way to protect brand design assets.

Trademarks are closely tied to messaging and can be an effective communication tool to help build brand reputation. On the other hand, brand compliance can help organizations avoid trademark infringements.

Trademarking is carried out by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Franchises

Brand compliance is essential for franchises. Success hinges on how well a franchise stays true to the branding guidelines that are set by the parent organization and the original vision. Of course, the further you get away from the center, the more difficult brand consistency can be. The most successful franchises succeed because they do not waiver from the brand identity.

Dealerships

Dealerships provide a nice case study in brand compliance and consistency. Regardless of the different types of vehicles or the variety of sizes, the brand still sits above it all. Of course, every dealership has a brand, but not all have a brand strategy.

Even though dealerships have an entire fleet of different vehicle types, brand compliance guidelines are still essential to maintain. In most cases, dealerships must work closely with parent organizations to ensure brand compliance is met, whether it’s the proper use of logos and decals or the messaging for marketing campaigns.

Non-Disclosure Agreements

Another important element to include in your brand compliance repertoire is non-disclosure agreements (NDA). Essentially, this is a legal, binding contract that establishes confidentiality between two parties. But what does that have to do with branding compliance?

An NDA essentially offers a way to protect the brand, especially when it comes to sensitive information and intellectual property. This can apply to the employer-employee relationship between organizations and suppliers or any other business relationship.

Local Strategies

Most brands operate locally, nationally, and even globally. This can make it difficult to maintain brand consistency across diverse locations. A centralized set of brand usage and compliance guidelines can help alleviate some of the headaches.

That is not to say that local strategies cannot be utilized. Adopting a local perspective is key to understanding local markets. But maintaining the scope of brand guidelines is still essential.  

The key is to maintain brand compliance and consistency in communication, especially when dealing with local marketers. Compliance practices and insights should be shared regularly.

How Can We Perform a Brand Consistency Audit?

One of the most crucial actions an organization can take to help measure its brand compliance is by performing a brand consistency audit. This can help you determine if messaging is staying on brand. Audits can be performed on all messaging types, from content to advertising and more.

Brand consistency audits should cover three important areas:

• Internal branding – Values, mission, and company culture.
• External branding – Messaging across platforms, including advertising and content, logos, imagery, tone, voice, etc.
• Customer relationship – This includes customer experience and overall brand reputation among consumers.

You need to know what you are measuring, so establishing metrics is key. Surveys (both employee and customer) are also helpful. The main, underlying question to be answered is simple: Does your brand truly align with the reputation you are seeking to create?

A simple brand SWOT analysis is helpful too:

• Strengths: What does the brand do well in terms of consistency and compliance?
• Weaknesses: Which of these areas need improvement?
• Opportunities: What can be done at present to elevate brand consistency?
• Threats: Which competitor is applying these principles better? How?

Conclusion

The most successful brands don’t become the best by sheer luck. They have a clear understanding of who they are and what they’re about. Brand compliance is their cornerstone.

Brand compliance ensures the brand’s story is told in the right way across all platforms and messaging types. But, developing brand consistency takes work. It requires actionable guidelines from the top of the organization to the bottom.

Brand consistency audits can help. They can give brands an idea of how effective their messaging is among consumers and show if their reputation and efforts align with the story they are looking to create.