Choose brand consistency for 2010

Choose brand consistency for 2010

The best way to increase profitability through your investment in design and marketing is for you to be consistent. There’s nothing worse for your bottom line than your image chopping and changing. The trouble is the damage from inconsistency is so subtle that many business owners are blissfully unaware of the negative effects on their target audiences. Brand irregularity includes conscious and subconscious confusion, distrust and irritation and can result in customers going elsewhere.  

Here are our top five tips for achieving brand consistency:

1. Firstly, invest in a quality well designed logo (and if your budget can accommodate it, some simple brand guidelines). This should then form the basis for every piece of marketing material that follows.
2. Following on from here ensure your marketing material looks like it belongs to the same family! If there is no clear link between your business card, website and brochure for example, then your customers’ journey is disjointed and your message becomes unclear.
3. The biggest and most obvious blunder is to randomly change colours from one piece of marketing communication to the next. Don’t do this! Decide on your brand colours which should be specifically chosen to communicate key messages and then stick to them.
4. Select every aspect of your brand carefully. Understand that these brand characteristics all mean something and effect the people that experience your brand. These characteristics should include (but are not limited to) things like fonts, colours, logos, design elements and language style.
5. The best way to achieve the above is to establish a long term working relationship with the right designer who can help build that unswerving, dependable and loved brand that will actually have a positive affect on your businesses profitability. 

This blog post by Sara Brown originally appeared at sarabrown.co.uk

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