Spring Cleaning for Brand Consistency
Blog / Article
Spring is the time of year for renewal, which makes it the perfect time to review and refine your brand to ensure consistency. With brand consistency comes brand recognition, which in turn, increases the likelihood that your business will be at the top of your customers’ minds when they require your services or products.
It’s easy to let guidelines slip or fall victim to urgency, to turn out materials without carefully crafting them to fit your brand. Whether your business is a few years old or just starting out, it’s never a bad idea to reconsider your brand consistency and ensure your style remains the same across the board.
Follow the process below to conduct your spring cleaning for brand consistency:
1. Grab your brand guidelines for reference.
Your brand guidelines act as the rule book or instruction manual for your brand. It should include your brand’s logo, font, colors, style of imagery, and any other defining characteristics of your look. If you don’t have brand guidelines, you’ll need to craft some.
Need help crafting your brand guidelines? Don’t know where to start? Here’s an article on crafting your brand guidelines.
2. Collect samples of all customer-facing materials.
You’ll want to collect all materials that face your audience, whether that be print materials–flyers, brochures, reports–or digital materials like your website, presentations, or social media banners. Only choose pieces that you currently use. If there are old materials that are no longer in circulation, you can omit them from the collection.
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3. Check each piece for brand consistency.
You will have to review each piece to ensure that the style (fonts, colors, logo application, artwork, etc.) are in line with your brand guidelines. Consider organizing the materials into two piles or folders: one for pieces that are consistent to your brand and another for materials that will need to be revised.
4. Revise to match your brand guidelines.
This will be the most time-consuming portion of the process, as you will need to revise the pieces that do not follow your brand guidelines. During this phase, be sure to have your brand guidelines and a few brand-consistent samples on hand to refer back to, this will help keep your updates on track. Depending on how many materials require revision, you may want to bring in a designer to help alleviate the workload and speed up the process.
5. Replace your old materials with new.
Now that you’ve created brand consistency across all of your audience facing materials, you’re ready to release them into the world. Be sure to remove all instances of the old, inconsistent materials and replace them with the new versions.
By following this simple process, you will be able to create brand consistency and begin building brand recognition. If you’d like some help creating consistency across your entire brand, send us an email. We’re happy to help!