Ensuring consistent brand messaging across all advertising platforms creates a clear and believable message in customers’ minds, so they remember and relate to the original brand value.
In this age of distributed content, brands are focused on standing out with differentiated values to the audiences. Across unique experiential spaces, social channels, and on new iterations of print media and websites, brands are investing hugely to maintain consistency. They also focus on ensuring that their iconography and logos are instantly recognizable among the pool of competitors.
Surveys have revealed that brands with iconic branding and long-standing brand visibility on social channels win the race. The brand must be shiny enough to stick in the minds of the audience. The new branding is feted with celebratory rollouts across social media platforms, press releases, and traditional advertising.
However, the drive to stand out can lead to potential problems, particularly for brands whose teams are spread thin across all those channels. There is a risk of internal stakeholders messing with a brief, or dependence on freelancers leading to a lack of effective oversight.
The dynamic need to tailor branding, adapting to new channels or environment often leads to situations that branding guidelines cannot account for or justify. Firms should realize the need to conform to the set of rules on a platform to issue licensing of fonts. This issue is aggravated by the speed with which brands adapt or react to new trends. The reality is that even with clear guidelines; multiple factors can lead to continuous re-branding warping and changing with every new iteration.
Currently, strong branding is more important than ever, especially as brands cannot completely control the context in which that branding appears, giving a competitive advantage to other brands.
Consequently, the often overlooked and least heeded -“need for branding consistency” is steadily increasing in priority for brands and agencies alike. Everything from the color to font has to be consistent to assure that every person with the responsibility of deploying the brand has access to the accurate marketing materials.
Many tools like Monotype have been designed to improve or completely mitigate these issues, simplifying the complex processes of managing the licenses for fonts globally. Top brands in the US and UK are tendering globally, seeking international expansion, with the ease of licensing a solution.
All companies are looking forward to adopting best practices for deploying branding across an array of channels, with the aid of tools that simplify the process making it as smooth as possible. All advertisements floated or campaigns run irrespective of the channels or platforms, need to be consistent in terms of color, text, font, brand vision. Lack of consistency would erode brand recognition and eventually, deplete customer retention.
