Consistency.
It’s a word many marketers struggle with. In particular, the way in which, little by little – through cuts, or edits, a little design tweak here or there, a switch out of this or that, that marketers and creative noodlers erode the impact your #brand has in cementing itself in the minds of your target market or audience.
#BrandCodes otherwise known as #DistictiveBrandAssets are typically a very short list of elements that sit at the heart of your brand. Sometimes your brand colours, your logo, a recognisable character, or perhaps some graphic element or idea that can act as a visual shortcut to represent your brand, wherever it shows up. These few assets have to be used consistently and repeatedly, time and again, across every appropriate touchpont and channel, to ensure they are working as hard as the can to reduce the time and mental capacity needed for your audience to identify and associate what they are seeing – with your brand.
Only after years of consistent application of these codes, building mental association around your brand, should you consider (as Mark Ritson eloquently puts it), “fuck around” with your brand codes. But even then, you should be smart, creative and ‘on-brand’ with the way you apply this creative fuckery.
Of course, all this assumes you’ve got a solid set of brand codes in the first place, created from a brand that is built on research and a strategy that means you are positioning your brand (and whatever products or services you happen to be offering), in a way that helps you to communicate your special sauce to your target market, in as distinctive and memorable a way as is possible.
All too often I encounter brand teams fucking about with their brands (and brand assets), simply because they’re ‘a bit bored of the assets’ they have at their disposal. Don’t do it! Frankly you should be a bit flipping bored of your own brand assets. It means you’re applying them consistently, constantly in every communication or channel. Trust me, your audience won’t be bored of them, because they encounter them for about 3 bloody seconds (if you’re lucky). So the more they see your consistently applied brand codes, the more they’ll connect with the ideas and associations the assets are the shorthand for.
Here’s a great quote from an MarketingWeek article on the subject:
“If your brand is not quite there you need to put in the hard yards first by doing the fundamentals well, be ruthless in application, and drive consistency across touchpoints.”
So please, creative fiddlers and marketing noodlers, don’t be tempted to change stuff for the sake of it. You’re undermining the hard work that has gone into shaping your brand in the first place. And more importantly, undermining the connection and associations your audience will have with your brand – which in turn will end up damaging your brand equity.