If we decide to interview someone from our team, it’s not because we are conceited, but for the reason, we have something very important to communicate. This is the case of Justyna Dorman, our Brand Governance Specialist & Team Manager, who will talk about why it is important for a brand to be consistent and what, as a branding agency, we can do for you in this field.
Let’s start with the basics: why brand consistency is important?
Justyna Dorman: Brand consistency is a practice ensuring that everyone who prepares the materials in your company has a common vision of the visual appearance. It is helping to establish a company’s voice within the market and to communicate its capabilities and brand values clearly, so it makes the brand reliable. Going further, a consistent brand allows businesses to take care of brand identity and increase their brand’s value. The importance of brand consistency is reflected in the statistics. According to market research by Lucidpress (2019), maintaining a consistent brand strategy can increase revenues by up to 33%.
Why is it worth working on brand consistency with a company like Admind?
Justyna Dorman: In Admind we have years of experience in the brand governance area. Our team is working for a variety of clients with different company sizes and scopes. We can adjust the team to a particular company’s requirements. For ABB, we have created a dedicated team that takes care of brand consistency and advises on the usage of branding materials on a daily basis. For another client, Tooploox, we have recently run a workshop in which we introduced the brand governance concept and our brand advisory service. It was a good start to advise them on how they could look after brand consistency themselves.
We can support you in all 3 steps leading to brand consistency. In Admind we are starting by creating a set of principles, that clearly communicates how a brand can be used. As a next step, we design them in a form of an online service for every creator. It is helping to access them any time and from any place. Then we create and maintain a database of brand assets. It’s a collection of ready-to-use resources that we organize and ensure that every creator can easily find, download and use. The perfect place to store them all and make sure that your brand is always consistent is a brand portal, an ultimate guardian to your brand consistency. Finally, we support the brand’s community, educating about principles and teaching how to use them.
How does the team you lead work in that area?
Justyna Dorman: We measure and collect data to develop principles and spread their reach across companies. Everyday we are in touch with employees and agencies that create branding materials. We’re guiding them to keep consistency within the brand. We also do training sessions to raise awareness of how brands are used and how they should be perceived.
What are the most useful tools to help maintain consistency?
Justyna Dorman: We really use a lot of tools. I can tell you that one of them is a set of principles, more commonly known as a brand book. It is basically all the brand guidelines explaining how the brand looks and how it communicates.
We also maintain a database of brand assets, ensuring the workflow goes smoothly. According to research by Glenster, the average marketer without brand management technology will spend 35% of their time, searching for assets. With our help, this can be avoided.
Should designers treat a brand book like a set of guidelines or rather like a Bible?
Justyna Dorman: Brand principles are one thing, the second are client’s, market, and cultural needs. For example, brand assets may be used differently in the US market and differently in Asia. This is due to cultural differences or market needs. Therefore, we try to work out with the client the compromise that will work for the one’s needs but will be at the same time aligned with visual identity. Our task is to gain an understanding of the brand’s needs, then tailor the brand book to them, and create principles that are valuable to everyone.
Can you name any successful brand consistency project? Perhaps you have participated in one yourself?
Justyna Dorman: Yes, indeed. Our main client, ABB, received together with us two Transform Awards last year, in Best implementation of a brand development project and Best internal communication during a brand development project categories. The goal of the ABB project was to increase brand awareness and knowledge among employees (around 140 000 employees in over 100 countries). The program combines and connects all factors that create internal and external brand awareness: knowledge sharing with the community, brand support, and involvement in principles development. Due to the program, we managed to reduce the amount of brand support-related requests – the number of requests decreased around 40% comparing the first halves of 2019 (3778) and 2020 (2245). With greater knowledge of brand usage, brand consistency has improved. It was a huge success.
If you want to know more about how our team can help you with increasing brand consistency, we invite you to watch the webinar on Brand Advisory.
