A brand is more than a company’s logo or tagline. It is the personality and soul of an organization. It’s the promise a company makes to its customers. A brand is everything an organization stands for and everything it delivers. Maintaining consistency in branding across all channels and in all marketing collateral is crucial to building trust and relationships.

Trust is integral to customer retention. For an organization, trust is created through consistent branding (Lucidpress). Equipping a company with the visual and verbal standards to support a brand’s strategy and positioning enables company employees and marketers to present a unified voice to both prospective and existing customers.

Brand standards guides run the gamut from very basic to extremely detailed and descriptive. The more fleshed out a standards guide is, the less chance there is for designers and marketers to produce messaging and collateral that is warped and disjointed. Brand guidelines should be easy to understand, readily available, usable and up-to-date. The minimum requirements for a standards guide should be the following:

• Approved colors (PMS, CMYK, RGB and Hexadecimal breakdowns)
• Approved typography (both digital and printed applications)
• Logo usage (full color and black/white treatments, clear zone, usage restrictions)

What’s better, a more detailed standards guide helps designers and marketers stay on the right track when producing branded collateral:

• Brand voice
• Brand positioning
• Verbal identity
• Core idea
• Company mission statement
• Core values
• Photography usage (custom/stock photography, usage restrictions, internal versus external usage)
• Details on co-branding and sub-branding
• Sample layouts

All designers and marketers should be trained on how to use the standards guide for their company to ensure that all content producers are fully versed in both the approved visual and verbal messaging for the brand. All content — websites, brochures, packaging, business cards, social content — and the rest — should adhere to the company’s brand standards.

• Consistency in branding builds recognition, awareness and equity.
• Consumers buy from brands they recognize and trust.
• Consistent branding shapes customer perception.
• Consistency in branding differentiates a company product and service in an over saturated marketplace.

According to Lucid Press’ publication The State of Brand Consistency (2019), marketers and company owners feel that inconsistencies in branding have the following negative impacts:

• Inconsistently branded content creates confusion in the market.
• An inconsistent brand prevents customers from fully recognizing a company and its messaging, which in turn impacts
• sales conversions and lead generation.
• Inconsistency in branding damages a company’s reputation and credibility.
• Inconsistency in branding lowers company morale. Each and every employee in an organization must an advocate for the brand; inconsistently branded materials take away the power of brand advocacy.

The entire purpose of branding an organization is to build trust and loyalty through recognition. Branding creates credibility. And in order to be credible, a brand must be consistent in their messaging and visuals. (Lucidpress)

Remember, a brand only exists in the consumer’s mind; it is the sum total of impressions a customer has based on every experience and interaction they have had with your company products and services. (Lucidpress)

It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

We are a team of nimble creatives and developers in Reno, Nevada. We design, create, code and produce effective work that gets our clients noticed and produces measurable results.

We approach all of our projects and client relationships with a set of guiding principles; these are the core values that help to make us different and better.

• We listen
• We learn
• We are honest, transparent and unpretentious
• We are adaptable
• We are passionate
• We are lean
• We offer big agency quality without the big agency BS