Consistency: The key to successful branding
In an age of distributed content, brands are keener than ever to stand out to audiences. Across new social channels, at unique experiential spaces, and on new iterations of websites and print media, brands are investing in making sure their logos and associated iconography are instantly recognisable among a sea of competitors.
Register today for 'Your type: brand design in the modern age' webinar
Research has demonstrated that even for brands with long-standing, iconic branding, brand visibility on social channels especially can be an issue. Newspapers and magazines, for instance, struggle to differentiate themselves from the platforms on which they publish, with much of their output being attributed “to Facebook” rather than to the brand itself.
Consequently, ensuring that your brand is shiny enough to stick in audiences’ minds is imperative, and new branding is feted with celebratory roll-outs across social channels, any number of press releases and traditional advertising.
But that drive to stand out can lead to potential problems, however, particularly for brands whose teams are spread thin across all those channels, whose internal stakeholders can mess with a brief, or whose organisation relies on freelancers or has a lack of effective oversight.
The need to tailor branding to each new channel or environment often leads to situations that even the most comprehensive branding guidelines could not account for, from the need to conform to the rules on a platform to issues surrounding the licensing of fonts. That issue is exacerbated by the speed with which most brands need to react to new trends. The reality is that, even with guidelines, any number of factors can lead to that branding warping and changing ever so slightly with every new iteration.
At a time when strong branding is more important than ever, especially when brands can’t always control the context in which that branding appears, that gives competitor brands an advantage.
Consequently, the often-overlooked need for consistency of branding is climbing the priority lists for agencies and brands alike. Everything from consistency of colour to ensuring that every person with responsibility for deploying the brand has access to the correct font needs to be considered, but the reality is that it’s easier said than done.
The Drum, in collaboration with Monotype, is running a webinar on June 6th, designed to explore this topic and discover best practice for ensuring consistency. Monotype has extensive experience around the issue, having created a series of eBooks on the topic of the value of effective and consistent typography, including its most recent publication specifically on the topics that will be discussed during the webinar.
Monotype’s tools have been designed to ameliorate or completely mitigate those issues, with its new product Mosaic having been created with the express purpose of simplifying the often-complex process of managing the licenses for fonts globally. Given that many brands in the UK and US are at least tendering internationally if not actively seeking international expansion, that ease of licensing is a solution.
A senior member of The Drum team and an expert guest from Monotype will take the webinar attendees through the challenges of ensuring brand consistency, best practice for deploying branding across an array of channels, and the tools needed to make that process as smooth as possible.
UK attendees should sign up here for the webinar, taking place at 3pm BST.
US attendees should sign up here for the webinar, taking place at 3pm EST.