How to maintain brand consistency with a DAM platform

Maintaining brand consistency is a constant challenge for marketers. Managing consistency across multiple channels can feel like an uphill battle, especially when team members stray from established branding guidelines. Often, these guidelines are incomplete or unclear, adding to the confusion.

To make matters worse, they may not be readily accessible on-demand or globally, and they rarely reside in the same place as your organization’s brand assets. A lack of available or up-to-date guidelines could mean marketers go to market with off-brand content, diluting brand identity and impacting overall business success.

If this sounds familiar, it’s time to refresh your brand guidelines and learn the best ways to align your team around your brand.

In this guide, you’ll learn practical solutions to ensure your brand remains consistent and strong across all touchpoints.

What is brand consistency?

Brand consistency refers to the uniform presentation of a brand across all platforms and touchpoints. It involves maintaining a cohesive and recognizable brand identity through visual elements, messaging, and overall experience.

Consistent branding ensures that every customer interaction with the brand reinforces its identity, values, and promises.

Why is brand consistency important?

Companies with consistent branding can see up to a 20% or more increase in revenue. But beyond an increase in revenue, there are other compelling reasons for maintaining consistency.

From building a powerful brand identity to making your marketing operations more efficient, there are five reasons why brand consistency is critical:

1. Improve brand recognition

Using consistent logos, colors, and messaging reinforces your brand identity across all touchpoints. When your brand is more recognizable and memorable, you stand out in a crowded market.

Plus, when your target audiences see a cohesive look and feel, they can instantly identify your brand, leading to stronger brand recall and loyalty.

2. Build customer trust

Consistent branding showcases your organization’s personality and helps your audience get to know your brand more personally.

A reliable and familiar brand encourages customers to trust and interact with it. Trust fosters deeper connections and increased loyalty, as customers feel confident in what to expect from your brand.

3. Align content with strategic goals

Brand consistency helps align content with your organization’s strategic goals. When you maintain clear brand guidelines, you ensure clear and cohesive communication across channels of the brand’s core values, mission, and vision. As the company’s strategic messaging is reinforced across digital touchpoints, it becomes stronger and more effective.

4. Differentiate your brand from competitors

Maintaining a consistent brand image ensures your business stands out in a competitive market. When you use the same color scheme, logos, and typography, your target audience can recognize your brand more easily and understand what makes your brand unique.

5. Increase marketing efficiency

An organization that has the right tools for brand management in place can align teams and channels around their brand.

Training internal teams on brand and messaging strategies ensures a unified brand presence, making it easier to create on-brand marketing materials.

When marketing teams are aligned around your brand identity, it’s easier for them to create assets that line up with expectations, reducing content approval cycles and increasing speed to market.

Plus, team members can then quickly reuse or repurpose these on-brand assets in other campaigns, further increasing content ROI.

What are the essential components of a consistent brand?

From typography guidelines to your brand color palette, there are six essential components of every consistent brand. All six items should be consolidated in your brand guidelines for one source of truth for your brand’s identity.

1. Logo

Consistent brands have a distinct and recognizable logo that aligns with the organization’s values and aesthetics. The logo is also versatile enough to be effective across various mediums and sizes. In your brand guidelines, share details on the logo’s sizing and dimensions.

Starbucks’ green siren logo is instantly recognizable worldwide without the brand’s name.

2. Color palette

To stay consistent, you should use a specific color set across all materials. These colors should reflect the brand’s personality, making it easily identifiable and memorable. A well-defined color palette creates a cohesive and recognizable look across all platforms and mediums, reinforcing brand identity.

Coca-Cola’s red, white, and black palette has helped the brand maintain a strong brand identity over the last century.

3. Typography

Consistent brands also use a select set of typefaces or fonts that complement the brand’s character. Ensure your typography is readable and performs well in print and digital formats. Having the right fonts helps convey the brand’s tone and style, maintaining a unified look across all branded materials.

The consistent use of Lego’s typography makes the brand easily recognizable in a crowded mall or an ad.

4. Tone of voice

Confirm your guidelines highlight how the brand’s voice should be distinctive and yet consistent across all written and spoken communication. Whether the tone is professional, friendly, authoritative, or playful, maintaining this consistency helps build a strong and recognizable brand identity.

Documenting tone of voice might include adding guidelines around word choice, punctuation, and how you speak about your brand.

Creating and maintaining effective guidelines will help ensure all messaging reflects the brand’s personality and values.

Dove maintains a compassionate, empowering, and authentic tone, focusing on real beauty and self-esteem.

5. Imagery style

To keep the visual side of your branding consistent, include guidelines on the imagery style of your brand. Define the type of photos, illustrations, and graphics that team members can use across different assets. You might want to include guidelines on a specific style of photography, a set of filters, or a particular approach to illustrations.

Red Bull’s imagery is consistently vibrant and energetic. Their branding often features extreme sports and adventure, aligning with their adventurous and daring spirit.

6. Content themes

Finally, include a section on the recurring themes and messages that align with the brand’s values and goals. Your themes should be evident in all content to reinforce the brand’s position and messaging.

What is the most important tool for brand consistency?

You’ll need one central source of truth to keep all your team members across multiple geographic locations aligned on your brand identity. Digital asset management (DAM) platforms like Canto provide a centralized repository to organize, find, and share all digital assets. By managing assets efficiently, DAM platforms help brands present a unified image, reinforcing their brand identity and messaging.

How to maintain brand consistency

To maintain brand consistency across all digital touchpoints, you need to implement specific tools, workflows, and documentation. Here are five steps to build and maintain a powerful brand identity across channels:

1. Develop and enforce brand guidelines

Create, disseminate, and maintain detailed brand guidelines that cover all aspects of your brand, including logo usage, color schemes, typography, imagery, tone of voice, and messaging. Ensure the brand guidelines are accessible on-demand to all internal and external brand collaborators and that everyone has been trained on all aspects of your brand identity.

2. Implement a digital asset management (DAM) platform

You need a single place to organize and manage your brand assets and brand identity to truly maintain brand consistency. DAM software makes it easy to organize, find, use, and control your digital content from one source of truth. Best-in-class DAM platforms like Canto include enhanced AI search and instant asset retrieval, no matter the size of your library. Canto also includes:

• Built-in and accessible Style Guides to enforce brand identity across teams
• Brand controls like version controls, approval statuses, and expiration dates to control your content from one place
• Digital rights management tools to track content and enforce brand compliance policies

In short, DAMs include everything you need to protect your brand identity at scale.

3. Implement quality control and approval workflows

Establish workflows to run content consistently through brand QA approval processes. When you use a DAM platform, your content, DAM workflows, and guidelines are in the same platform. Now, stakeholders can ensure all content and materials align with their strategic vision and your brand guidelines before distribution.

DAMs also include workflow templates to run any content project type through, ensuring brand consistency and stakeholder approval across content mediums.

4. Align teams with efficient collaboration tools

Use collaboration features and integrations with your favorite tools to work efficiently on brand-related materials with team members. DAM platforms like Canto have collaboration tools like Workspaces, upload links, and integrations to 40+ popular tools like monday.com, Adobe CC, WordPress, Slack, and Hootsuite, to name a few.

5. Deliver on-brand content faster and measure brand sentiment

Streamline brand asset distribution to deliver content and value to your audiences faster. Digital asset management platforms include sharing tools like portals, share links, and integrations to popular social media platforms.

Additionally, ensure you measure customer and audience sentiment to gauge the effectiveness of your brand’s communication and make necessary adjustments. DAM platforms like Canto include built-in reporting and analytics to help inform future content strategies.

What are examples of consistent brands?

When you think of your favorite brands, they probably all have something in common –– a consistent brand identity across all platforms and messaging. Why? Consistent branding makes businesses more memorable.

Here are three examples of consistent brands:

1. IKEA

The blue and yellow color scheme, consistent store layouts, and clear, minimalist product designs make IKEA easily identifiable.

2. Apple

Apple’s clean, minimalist design, distinctive logo, and consistent product aesthetics and packaging make it one of the most recognizable brands globally.

3. Nike

The Nike swoosh logo, “Just Do It” slogan, and consistent use of bold, motivational messaging make Nike a highly recognizable brand.

Canto is the DAM leader for brand management

Canto is the market-leading DAM for brand management. With Canto, you can organize, find, and share your brand content and strengthen your brand presence easily. Canto includes advanced on-demand brand collaboration tools, access controls, and digital rights management tools to maintain, control, and protect your brand across all touchpoints.

Ready to build and maintain a memorable brand? Download our Essential Guide to Brand Management now.

Brand consistency frequently asked questions

What are the challenges in maintaining brand consistency?

There are numerous challenges to maintaining brand consistency. Top challenges include:

• Miscommunication across teams about brand identity
• Access to the correct assets and messaging for all brand collaborators
• Tailoring materials across markets while retaining core brand elements

What tools do I need for brand consistency?

A few essential tools will help your team create, manage, and distribute brand assets in a coordinated manner, ensuring a consistent brand experience across every touchpoint. The most important tools for brand management are:

• A digital asset management platform to organize, manage, and distribute brand assets
• Brand guidelines that outline visual and messaging standards to enforce brand identity
• Design software like Adobe CC can ensure high-quality, on-brand content creation

How does a DAM platform help with brand consistency?

A digital asset management (DAM) platform organizes your brand identity and brand assets in one place, ensuring that all brand collaborators have access to the most up-to-date and approved materials.