Have you ever met a person with an inconsistent personality? Has anyone told you someone’s description that goes something like: “Yeah, he’s a jerk among many friends, but when you’re alone with him or her, they’re a completely different person.”
While that person might be insecure or feel they must put on a show to get people to like them, they are achieving quite the opposite. In time, people will start to lose trust in this type of person and, at least unconsciously, drift apart from them.
With brand consistency, we can apply the same logic. Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s one thing to act differently when you’re on a stand-up show as opposed to attending a funeral, but the point is – you’re still the same person. That’s the key. The same thing goes for a brand.
Just as with a person, people can like, prefer, and trust a brand more. There’s a paved gateway to achieving those things. I suppose you’re guessing already – that gateway is called Brand consistency.
Brand Consistency: What is it?
So, what is brand consistency? In this day and age, it’s nothing unusual to see a new marketing channel invented. While that enables marketers new ways of reaching their audience, maintaining brand consistency is a bit harder. A good thing is that you can always limit your communication to only some channels, which means you might miss out on reaching some of your audience. Also, if you’re a good marketer, you probably know that even if you managed to reach everyone on the channels you do use, it might not be enough. Frequency is key to communicating your message and ensuring it sticks with the target audience. In other words, the formula is frequency + brand consistency = success.
Why would it be so simple?
The things I listed until this part might be pretty straightforward to some, but in addition to the fact that brand consistency is easier said than done, brand features are not so straightforward. That is because it’s not only about HOW you communicate, but also WHAT. The emerging media channels do not pose the biggest challenge for marketers, but somewhat harshly scrutinizing audience and the lightspeed information flow is. What do I mean by that? Well:
- Scrutinizing audience: The bigger your brand, the stronger your audience’s emotional connection with it, and the more scrutiny you need to surpass. You must be consistent with your communication and values, identity, positioning, and even reacting or not reacting to the issues relevant to your industry and your target audience.
- The lightspeed information flow: Yesterday, it was Instagram; today, it’s TikTok; and tomorrow – who knows? Nowadays, it’s nothing unusual to see a person, who doesn’t even have to be an influencer, get the point about a brand going viral, which can directly influence the company’s share value.
Why is it essential?
The keyword here is trust. With a growing number of media channels and an ever-increasing saturation in almost every industry, customers are asking more and more out of brands. This is especially true in industries such as retail and FMCG, but also with some services. The common thing here is the cost of change.
Porter’s five forces and the cost of change
As we can read in the article by Investopedia, Porter’s Five Forces is a unique concept, and it implies:
- Competitive Rivals – When discussing our competition, we usually mean the first force. For McDonald’s, that’s Burger King; for Apple, that’s Samsung or PC; and for Nescaffe, that’s Jacobs.
- Potential New Entrants in an Industry – The second force is all about how easy it is to enter the industry; for example, you can easily open an agency, but a bank, not so much
- Supplier Power – If your company depends on a single supplier, and the supplier knows you cannot substitute it quickly, they might raise their price
- Customer Power – This one is maybe the simplest, and it means that a customer’s power is reciprocally by customers’ demands
- Threat of Substitute – Last but not least, we call it “the cost of change” in Kontra. It essentially describes how easily your customer can substitute your company for a substitute.
The Threat of Substitution, or the cost of change, is one of the most substantial reasons why brand consistency is essential. For instance, if your company is selling an ERP system, the cost of its change is high. If a company needs an ERP to conduct business, it’s pretty reliant on it. The company that’s not perfectly satisfied with its ERP will probably avoid changing it because it knows that its cost is higher than bearing the imperfections of the existing ERP. As opposed to that, if a customer wants to change an FMCG product they buy regularly – for instance, coffee, the cost of change for that customer is (almost) zero. All they have to do is reach out for the product a little to the side of the coffee they were putting in their cart until that moment. This is precisely why brand consistency is essential. Also, do you think the B2B segment is spared from the cost of change? In fact, it’s probably even worse. Especially if your sales process is more prolonged (which, in B2b, is usually the case). For example, it’s easy for most companies to change their marketing agencies.
Competitive Rivals, Potential New entrants in your industry, and customer power are all also relevant reasons to look after your brand consistency. It is precisely brand consistency that might safeguard you from these forces’ harmful effects on your business. Following the brand’s consistency leads to building a relationship with your customers, which might help preserve your profits in the long run.
The consistency principle & the concept of familiarity
I’m no psychologist, but I love studying the psychological effects tied to marketing. Observing these phenomena of the human mind and nature enables us to understand how an average person’s mind works. These mechanisms provide a scientific background for market communication, and are a rare way to ensure your campaign will work and bring results. These two mechanisms explain, or even empower, if you will, the importance of brand consistency. They tell us why that’s a real thing with real impact and not just something proclaimed necessary by people who want to keep their jobs or something similar.
Anyways, the Consistency principle teaches us that people have a deep psychological need to be consistent with what they have previously said or done. Once we choose or take a stand, we tend to behave in ways aligned with that decision. Why? Because consistency is generally associated with personal and intellectual strength, while inconsistency can be seen as flaky or untrustworthy.
The Concept of familiarity, or “mere exposure effect,” is a powerful psychological driver discussed in the context of liking and social proof. The idea is simple: The more we are exposed to something, the more we tend to like it. Familiar things feel safe, trustworthy, and comfortable. Unfamiliar things? Not so much.
And now you know why you keep seeing so many Coca-Cola ads, despite everyone knowing about it. Not to mention during Christmas
Establishing Brand Consistency
The first thing that comes to mind when discussing establishing brand consistency is probably the brandbook. At Kontra, when we’re creating a brandbook for a client, the first thing we do is establish the scope of that brandbook. A basic branding system is enough for some brands, while others need a more complex brandbook, with more elements included. We used the classification made by HDD (Hrvatsko dizajnersko društvo), or the Croatian designer association, the official organization of designers in Croatia:
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Basic system:
- Symbol and/or logo
- Sub-logo, derived from the primary symbol and/or logo
- Typography
- Colors
- Expanded system:
- Symbol and/or logo
- Sub-logo, derived from the primary symbol and/or logo
- Typography
- Colors
- Letterhead (memorandum)
- Email signature
- Electronic presentation (up to 4 characteristic slides)
- Social media identifiers (profile photo, cover photo, etc.)
- Complex system
- Symbol and/or logo
- Sub-logo, derived from the primary symbol and/or logo
- Typography
- Colors
- Letterhead (memorandum)
- Email signature
- Electronic presentation (up to 8 characteristic slides)
- Social media identifiers (profile photo, cover photo, etc.)
- Template (for fax, invoice, delivery note, or purchase order)
Graphic preparation for the production of physical brand materials:
- Business card (basic)
- Business card (derived from the basic one)
- Envelope
- Signage for mounting on a building
- Banner/flag
- Accreditation card
- Bag
As you can see, each system is more complex than the previous one. Not every brand is equally complex. It depends on the brand size, communication channels, industry, and similar factors.
Branding Guidelines
Now, a brandbook is one of the things we can classify among the brand guidelines. Still, brand guidelines are a more comprehensive “document” or a list of directions on how to use the branding elements on various channels. It’s understandable that, to maintain brand consistency, global brands must have more elaborate guidelines. In our experience collaborating with some of the top international brands, we sometimes have seminars on following brand guidelines. If following brand guidelines weren’t necessary, companies behind these brands wouldn’t waste time organizing such seminars. So, which elements might not be covered in a classic brand book when a designer makes it?
- Imagery – Does a brand use illustrations, or only real-life photographs? How does a brand structure information for an infographic? What are the limits of imagery? All of these are questions brand guidelines can answer. The challenge with imagery is that it’s visual, and people are visual beings. If your customers recognize something that doesn’t fit within your brand, they will notice it much sooner than if a brand didn’t precisely express their tone of voice perfectly.
- Tone of voice—Although I just said it’s more complex to notice than imagery, tone is also pretty important. Remember, at the beginning of this post, when I compared a brand to a person? If you like a person and how they talk, you will expect them to always speak the same way you’re accustomed to. If a person changes that style, you might find that weird and maybe even doubt the person’s personality. It’s almost the same with the tone of voice of a brand.
- Audience – This one might be slightly odd because it’s something on a brand’s “outer” side. But in reality, a brand’s audience is an intricate part of a brand. This one is similar to football clubs. They wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t had any fans. It’s the same with brands. If a brand doesn’t have any fans, it means its customers are choosing it for the lower price or a similar, convenient reason, and that will, at the same time, stop the brand’s growth and irreplaceability.
- Values & Mission—As I already mentioned, with growing competition, customers tend to ask more and more from brands. To achieve that ultimate “brand-love” state with your customers, you must align your values with theirs. Be mindful that customers will also recognize if a specific campaign is not aligned with brand values, and they might realize it and punish you for it. This happened to some brands, so that situation is not something that only “can happen”.
Presence on social media & digital
Social media channels were utterly different when I entered the marketing field. Facebook was a dominant social network. Meta didn’t own Instagram, and if you said “TikTok” to someone, their first thought was to hurry up (because the currently fastest-growing social network didn’t even exist). Back then, when you managed a social media profile of a brand, you could use a stock photo of a cup of coffee, write a caption such as “Did you drink your morning coffee?”, and the post would probably have a fantastic reach and the engagement would be one you would kill for today. Nowadays, if you did that, your audience would either mean you’re joking (with a reasonably lousy joke at that) or that you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the last 5+ years. I’m writing about all of this because, as social media becomes more and more challenging, it’s harder to establish brand consistency on social media. Video production alone is a challenge for many brands, let alone achieving brand consistency on social media.
Besides content, you should also look after social media elements (i.e., profile picture, cover image, page naming, etc.). Sometimes, brands make the stupidest of mistakes, and don’t follow the same logic for assigning email addresses or use different logic for naming on various social media. All of these things that came with social media and digital make maintaining brand consistency a bit more challenging, but are necessary, and are the reality of doing that in modern times.
Maintaining brand consistency
Enter the brand manager. A brand manager’s primary purpose and idea was to conduct and maintain brand consistency, manage marketing agencies, ensure that all brand guidelines are followed consistently and precisely, look after a brand’s values, and steer it (the brand) in the right direction. I purposely said “was” because today we see more and more of the work not described in the previous sentence keeps being shoved towards brand managers. This decision could be dangerous because a brand manager might overlook something due to the work overload. Essentially, a brand manager has to be the embodiment of a brand in a way. To know every brand guideline and transfer them to other departments. Not just marketing, but to other departments as well. We often see brand managers in companies that own multiple brands. Each of those brands has a different place in the market and has different brand values and guidelines. So, it’s generally a good idea to have 30 brand managers if you have 30 brands in your company.
To conclude, when discussing maintaining brand consistency, we’re not just talking about slapping the same logo on everything and calling it a day. It’s way more profound than that. It’s about creating a unified experience for anyone who interacts with the brand – whether a customer, a supplier, a new employee, or even a random visitor to your social media profile.
Inconsistency is the fastest way to confuse your audience. And when people are confused, they bounce. They lose trust. They forget you. Consistency, on the other hand, breeds familiarity. Familiarity leads to trust. And trust? That’s the holy grail. That’s when people start choosing your brand not because it’s the cheapest or flashiest, but because they feel something when they see it.
Keep in mind; maintaining brand consistency isn’t about being rigid or robotic either. It’s about flexibility within a framework. A strong brand should have clearly defined guidelines (visual identity, tone of voice, core messaging, etc.), leaving enough room for creativity to keep things fresh and human. Your brand guidelines shouldn’t be treated like a sacred stone tablet. They should be a living, breathing reference that evolves when the brand grows.
When done right, brand consistency doesn’t just support marketing efforts—it amplifies them. It aligns internal teams. It makes decision-making easier. And it sets the foundation for brand loyalty, which is something money can’t just buy.
Good examples of brand consistency
To conclude this topic, I think it is necessary to provide some examples that transfer the plain words from a page to the real world. These examples are listed in no particular order. They are just straight, amazing brand consistency.
#1 McDonald’s
McDonald’s is a textbook example of global brand consistency. No matter where you are—from New York to Tokyo—you’ll instantly recognize the golden arches, the red-and-yellow color palette, and the familiar menu items like the Big Mac or fries. But the consistency goes beyond visuals; it’s in the experience. The tone of voice in their advertising, the layout of the restaurants, the uniforms, the packaging, even the smell—all reinforce the same brand promise: fast, reliable, familiar food at an affordable price. McDonald’s doesn’t just sell burgers; it sells predictability. And in a world full of variables, that kind of brand consistency creates a sense of comfort that keeps people returning.
In recent years, McDonald’s has become famous for its “no-logo” ads. Their products are so recognizable, they’ve done several similar campaigns with different topics and in different styles.
#2 Apple
When you see something from Apple, you immediately know which brand it is, whether it’s an ad, a product, or their official point of sale. Apple maintains a minimalist design and a focus on innovation across all platforms. Whether an iPhone advertisement or a social media post, the brand’s messaging is always clear and cohesive, fostering trust among its users. And, as if all of that wasn’t enough, Apple added that recognizable “i” to all of its product names.
#3 IKEA
Establishing a unique brand presence in the furniture industry can be challenging, but IKEA does it amazingly. The company’s brand consistency is rooted in its Scandinavian design principles and affordable furniture offerings. The company provides functional and stylish home furnishings at competitive prices, maintaining a uniform brand identity that appeals to a broad audience. It’s pretty amazing how a company with such a massive amount of products manages to maintain a respectable brand consistency.
Now, you might say, “Yeah, these companies are huge. They have the money and infrastructure to maintain this level of brand consistency, but I beg to differ. I would rather say these companies are huge and have the infrastructure because they successfully found, created, and maintained their brand consistency. So, in a way, brand consistency is, in fact, one of the reasons why companies become huge, such as these ones in my examples. Better yet, try to think of a company this big and successful without this level of brand consistency. You probably can’t because even if there is any, they are probably just a successful company, but not a successful brand. And the fact is, it’s always easier to maintain brand consistency when you’re a smaller company. So there’s really no excuse.
