The Importance of Brand Consistency In Building Trust With Your Audience

As a business, your reputation depends on one thing:

Trust – that intangible proposition to your customers that your business will deliver a service that matches the value perceived.

So, how do you earn your audience’s trust?

Well, it all starts with a consistent brand.

In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at the important role that brand consistency plays when it comes to building trust.

We’ll also discuss what happens when that brand consistency falters, before showing you how you can build a consistent and flexible brand to support your business’ success, create an impactful corporate identity and achieve brand dominance.

Fact: Consistency is absolutely fundamental to your business

To build a genuine connection with your customers, you first need to ensure that every element of your brand is well-aligned and consistent.

From your identity, personality and messaging to your digital media channels, website, imagery, and your colours
and fonts, each of these brand elements plays a pivotal role in positioning your business as a consistent and cohesive brand.

Once you’ve got this consistency in your brand, you then have the building blocks for your tone of voice from which you can begin to build a sense of relatability with your audience – and when it comes down to it, people always put their trust in the brands that they can relate to.

Consistency also helps to build brand awareness and create an emotional connection with your audience, helping to foster loyalty and advocacy for your business over time.

This consistency then flows through to create an effective corporate identity (the way you articulate the foundational purpose of your organisation in a way your team and customers can identify with) – helping to drive better engagement and communication with your audience AND your team.

But what happens if this brand consistency is broken?

A break in consistency can lead to a potential break in trust

Every time your brand’s elements are not consistent and well-aligned, you run the risk of resetting your customers’ trust clock and buying cycle.

In doing so, all the time, money and effort you’ve invested into building your brand recognition and boosting customer recall has potentially been wasted – and your brand has possibly been degraded in the eyes of your audience.

That’s why it’s so important to maintain your brand consistency and create a holistic identity, relative to your business’ tone of voice and how you wish to engage with and be perceived by your customer base.

So, how can you do this?

Consistency starts with a strong brand

When it comes to building brand consistency, you need clear and well-articulated brand guidelines that outline the hierarchy of your brand and how to apply this when communicating with your audience.

These guidelines act as a framework that you can anchor your entire business to, and this is what creates a powerful voice and a powerful brand.

With clear brand guidelines, you’ll understand what elements you have at your disposal, when to use them, and what each one is saying about your brand.

This means you’ll know exactly when to use your primary colour palette and when to adopt your secondary palette.

Likewise, you’ll know exactly what imagery you should be using and how to adjust it to suit your audience each time.

For example, our Branding Agency worked with a medical company who were using quite confronting medical imagery with a washed blue tone, giving off a cold and distant feeling to their audience. We recognised this and immediately adjusted their imagery, giving it a slightly golden filter with a warmer tone.

From that point on, the brand instantly realigned itself to the emotional connection that it promised its audience. By adjusting the way its imagery was presented, the brand was able to regain its audience’s trust over time.

It’s little elements such as this that all come together to help create great brand consistency that leads to more audience engagement and an elevated corporate identity.

To learn more, check out Episode 11 of the Demand Drivers podcast to hear about the profound impact of emotions on audience behaviour and driving demand.

Remember: A powerful brand is consistent, but also flexible

Flexibility is an essential element of a strong brand.

When first creating or refreshing your brand identity, it’s important to ensure that you also build broad flexibility into your brand guidelines, allowing you to adopt specific voices and positions when necessary – while remaining consistent and aligned with the overarching masthead of your brand.

In doing so, you can ensure that your brand can express itself with the ebbs and flows of current trends and seasonal tastes while remaining consistent over time.

This means that you don’t need to refresh your brand every time you want to go slightly off-script or try something a little different. Rather, you can experiment at different times and give your audience something new while ensuring they still recognise and trust your brand.

Of course, if you try something too different and your customers don’t recognise your brand, they won’t relate and they won’t engage.

That’s why it’s important to find that balance with flexibility that allows you to remain fresh and adaptive to trends while staying consistent and recognisable to those who matter most.

As an example, our Branding Agency recently refreshed the brand guidelines for Melotti Content Media, ensuring we built flexibility into each of their elements.

When it came time for them to post on Halloween, Melotti were able to experiment slightly with their colours and logo whilst staying true to their overarching brand value proposition and tone of voice, all of which are accommodated in their brand guidelines.

This led to strong audience engagement without risking their brand consistency and customer trust.

At its core, brand trust is built into our subconscious

Your audience’s subconscious is highly tuned to recognise consistency when looking to build trust.

This means that when you start to break away from that consistency, then your audience’s subconscious is going to start working against you.

That’s why it’s so important to ensure your brand remains consistent so your customers can always recognise you, relate to you, and clearly understand and engage with your value proposition and corporate identity.

So, is your brand finding it difficult to maintain that trust with your customers?

At Font & Swatch Branding Agency, we’re branding artisans. We can assess how your audience perceives your brand and how much they trust you, then help to create greater brand consistency to earn you the trust and brand dominance you’re after.

Font & Swatch Branding Agency creates consistent, flexible yet powerful brand guidelines and corporate identities to help build trust with your audience

To achieve business success today and tomorrow, you need a reliable brand marketing partner that you can trust, with the expertise you can depend on.

If your business is ready to evolve and transform into a powerful corporate identity, give us a call, send us an email, follow us on our socials or come and see us at our Sydney Branding Agency.

An initial discussion is exactly what you need to help forge a brand that leaves a resounding impact and stands the test of time.  

mailto:create@fontandswatch.com