Maintaining brand consistency across teams and markets

Companies invest a lot of time and resources into developing their brand. Logos, color palettes, writing style, values, and key messaging contribute to your brand personality. This is why brand consistency is top of mind for many marketers. To reap the rewards of branding efforts, you must apply branding consistently across channels and touchpoints while enabling teams to tailor branded content to different audiences and regions. 

Brand consistency helps people get to know your brand’s personality, building trust and loyalty that can drive revenue. In a survey by marq, formerly Lucidpress, 68% of professionals said that brand consistency contributed to revenue growth, with 32% saying it increased brand revenue by 20% or more.

If brand consistency is challenging for you, like most brands, then keep reading. You’ll learn how to assess brand consistency, find tips on overcoming common challenges, and learn what steps you can take to maintain brand consistency across platforms.

What is brand consistency?

Brand consistency is how companies create a recognizable brand identity by weaving their brand message, visual identity, and brand promise into every touchpoint across marketing channels. This creates connected customer experiences that increase engagement and build brand loyalty. 

Brand consistency involves every aspect of your business, regardless of which team is responsible for individual touchpoints. From the customer's perspective, every interaction is part of one brand experience. To meet customer expectations, you must maintain brand consistency across channels, on every device, throughout the customer journey, and on a global scale. You want to be recognizable anywhere a customer can find you.

Why is brand consistency important?

Customers engage with hundreds of brands every day. They’re bombarded with ads, emails, text messages, and other marketing techniques. To stand out, brands need to build strong brand recognition through consistent, memorable experiences. You want customers to know it's you at a glance and to trust that your message is worth their attention.

Brand trust comes from consistently providing value to your customers from the awareness stage through post-purchase support. Brand consistency signals to the customer that, regardless of where they are on their journey or how they interact with your brand, they can trust you to provide the experience they expect. 

Brand consistency is how French DIY and home improvement retailer Leroy Merlin won me over. During a recent home remodel, I visited the Leroy Merlin website to learn about painting, tools, electricity, etc. All the FAQs, tutorials, DIY advice, and information on tools were very helpful. But what impressed me was how that added value carried through to my in-store experience, where the salesperson shared tips and knowledge that matched what I had learned on the website. 

So many shops sell paint and hardware, but the web and in-store experiences are not as good. I go back to Leroy Merlin because they provide a consistent brand experience that adds value for their customers. I’m not just buying paint; I’m buying the brand’s value and the inspirational content that is consistent from online to in-store.

How brand consistency creates better customer experiences

Better customer experiences lead to more loyal customers. Loyalty increases engagement, boosts conversion rates, and increases purchase size, contributing to higher lifetime value. 

How brand consistency contributes to better customer experiences:

• Removes friction: Brand consistency eliminates the dissonance customers feel when prices don’t match online and in-store, FAQs differ from what customer support says, or they think an email is fake because an old logo slipped through. It prevents those frustrating moments that make potential customers click away to a competitor. 

• Builds trust and loyalty: Consistent experiences establish trust. People are busy; they want brands to anticipate their needs and consistently meet those needs with personalized content and experiences that work seamlessly as they jump from laptop to mobile app and back again. 

• Adds value: Creating a foundation of consistent, reusable brand content gives teams more time to focus on assembling that content into end-to-end experiences that bring value to the customer through personalization, loyalty programs, and curated content.

• Improves product recommendations: Connecting different parts of your business enables you to use more data across channels to tailor recommendations, increasing sales and customer value. See how Pets Deli increased conversion rates by 51% with personalized product recommendations and pricing. 

• Increases accessibility: Unified content and design systems make it easier to identify places where you can extend the customer experience to more audiences, whether that means a new region or making your site more inclusive. See how Contentful helps build accessible experiences at scale. 

More benefits of brand consistency

In addition to better customer experiences and all the revenue-generating goodness those bring, ensuring brand consistency also:

• Increases recognition and brand awareness: Brand consistency makes your brand instantly recognizable, whether someone is skimming emails, surfing the web, or stopping for coffee at a truck wrapped in your logo. 

• Streamlines operations: Consistent, reusable content and design elements increase efficiency and extend the reach of your content. Spin up on-brand pages in minutes and enter new markets faster. See how Costa Coffee builds region-specific sites in just 15 minutes.

• Enables more sophisticated personalization and localization: Starting with consistent, unified content and design allows you to tailor experiences that work seamlessly across touchpoints.

• Improves B2B and B2C marketing: Consistency makes content more reusable, which includes using B2C content to humanize the B2B buying experience.

• Makes AI integration easier: Consistent backend processes and structured content are the foundation of effective AI integrations. See how you can generate on-brand content with contextual AI.

Brand consistency doesn't have to be controlling or restrictive

It’s important to note that modern solutions enable brands to balance consistency with creativity and individuality. After all, we want consistency, not redundancy. 

Look for solutions with governance features that allow you to control brand elements and core messaging while giving teams the right level of creative freedom. And make sure they support personalization, localization, and omnichannel delivery so you can tailor content while maintaining consistency. 

See how Contentful connects teams to improve consistency and streamline operations while allowing them to work their way with the tools they love. 

Governance enables creative freedom while staying on-brand

Granular permissions and role-based governance give brands the right mix of control and creative freedom. For example, BMW uses Contentful to provide global content to local dealerships, creating more brand consistency. At the same time, they use Contentful’s built-in governance features to give local teams the ability to customize some aspects of their sites.

“Where content gets fun, is when you can take something that’s ‘universal’ and spin it to speak to the local market. All 147 of our dealers are selling the same car and specifications but Contentful lets them inject their own personality and voice in the way they do that.”

Claire Ford, Events Manager, BMW Group

Localization and personalization make reusable content feel unique

To keep content fresh, relevant, and authentic, brands need to layer in personalization, localization, and content variants. A single source of truth, structured content, and reusable design elements help ensure consistency as you tailor content to different channels, locales, and audiences. 

See how Contentful empowers marketers to use data-driven personalization at scale.

Measuring brand consistency: 10 questions to ask yourself

Now that you understand brand consistency and why it matters, take a minute to consider how consistent your branding is. Ask yourself these questions:

1. How often do you find old brand messaging or design elements?

2. Are you using templates and reusable components to ensure consistency?

3. Is there a single source of truth for content and design elements?

4. Do teams ever create content and visual elements outside the approved process?

5. Are all of your agencies using the current style guides and visual elements?

6. When you audit content, does everything look and feel related across web, social media posts, email, and offline marketing channels? 

7. Do you manually update content across systems, or can you update in one place and systematically push that change out?

8. If you want to update your design system, can you do that from a central location, or are you changing multiple systems?

9. Do you have systems to manage global consistency while allowing for localization?

10. Does your audience recognize and describe your brand the way you intend across different channels and touchpoints?

Why do brands struggle to deliver consistent experiences?

Most marketing leaders want consistency across multiple websites, regions, and channels, but struggle to create consistent, seamless customer experiences with disconnected backend tools and siloed teams.

Common challenges include:

• Cumbersome suites and fragmented tech: Solutions not designed for multichannel delivery make connecting tools and maintaining brand consistency challenging. Copying and pasting between systems and communicating changes through email and other channels is less reliable than automating changes across integrated systems. 

• Disconnected digital channels: Using different content management systems (CMSes) for websites, knowledge bases, mobile apps, etc., makes it nearly impossible to provide seamless omnichannel experiences. You need a single source of truth to connect silos and unify content.

• Siloed functional teams: Many brands organize teams around different touch points or channels — campaigns, product, mobile, web, customer support, newsletters. Individual teams must work together on an integrated system to ensure a cohesive customer experience.

• Siloes between global and local teams: For international brands, it can be challenging to keep brand content consistent, while enabling local teams the freedom they need to tailor that content to local audiences. A shared platform with strong governance features can help balance these needs. 

Five steps to build and maintain brand consistency

1. Define a consistent brand identity that includes your mission, values, tone of voice, and style.

2. Create style guides, brand guidelines, and other shared resources to document the key messages, tone, and style that make your brand unique.

3. Use systems and automation to enforce brand consistency. Many platforms and tools can be customized to prompt users to follow brand guidelines and make finding and reusing approved content and visual elements easier. Look for platforms that support design systems, reusable components, governance, customized workflows, and in-app tips. 

4. Adopt a composable approach. Composable content structures and organizes content for reuse, managing different variants — such as local translations and personalized content — in one place. This means you can easily find, assemble, and update content and other components to keep everything consistent.

5. Experiment with AI tools. Try using AI tools that reference your style guide as an editing assistant. Experiment with advanced tools, like Contentful’s contextual AI, that reference your guidelines, content, and data to generate on-brand content. 

Contentful helps brands achieve brand consistency

Wherever you are on your quest for consistency across an ever-growing list of channels, regions, and devices, Contentful can help. Our platform is designed for omnichannel delivery and can support multiple regions and brands from one unified space. 

From multi-brand companies like Kraft Heinz to niche players like Yorck Kinogruppe, we’re helping organizations extend their reach with experiences that convert across channels. See how Contentful makes maintaining brand consistency easy for your teams. Set up a time to chat. 

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