This guide outlines several strategies to ensure brand consistency for any retail business, no matter how large or small.
Do you operate across a range of sites, stores or facilities? If so, ensuring brand consistency at all locations is of utmost importance. Keeping your brand consistent is important for multiple reasons. It makes the whole organisation look and feel more professional. It creates a sense of familiarity, which makes the customer comfortable and drives trust. It makes your brand feel dependable.
How to ensure brand consistency
The best way to ensure your brand remains consistent in the retail environment is to develop and adhere to brand standards. Here’s how to do it.
Step 1: Develop store brand guidelines
Most brands will already have brand consistency guidelines that cover fonts, colours and logos, but often those guidelines will stop short of specifications for the store or facility setting. Applying branding to a building is very different from digital or print settings. Having an all-inclusive, professional store or facility branding guideline will provide clear directions on how to represent your brand, no matter the location or channel.
A good store or facility branding guideline should include the following:
- The 2-dimensional brand guidelines as per the brand manual, which include the corporate choices and do’s and don’ts for fonts, colours and layouts
- A range of real-life photographic examples or artist’s impressions of how to incorporate branded elements in building formats
- Preferred building treatments
- Signage locations and designs
- Other elements including joinery, furniture, lighting, carpeting, vehicles, and uniforms
It is important for brand consistency to ensure that each element is incredibly detailed, including images of the final product for reference, along with noting any stock which must be ordered. Construction drawings for any design elements which need to be manufactured should also be included, along with instructions on how to source each element.
Step 2: Maximise adoption of the guidelines
With large companies having many stakeholders – sometimes hundreds – it may be challenging to ensure that each individual is aware of, and is adhering to the brand consistency guidelines.
Whilst brand managers tend to be responsible for establishing brand standards and the visuals of the stores and facilities, implementing the plan is often delegated to property managers, who then must work with the procurement team. Due to tight deadlines, budgetary pressures and risk management, brand guidelines can be deprioritised in an effort to get the job done on time and on budget.
To ensure the brand consistency guidelines are followed accurately, you can create a central point of approval for the work as well as ensure the brief is thorough and clear. For example, work to be completed can be clearly outlined in a site-specific design pack based off of the store branding guidelines. This reduces the chance of stakeholders misinterpreting the rules and allows for the appropriate sign off before any expensive work commences.
The person responsible for this final approval should be linked to the branding team, and given the authority to override any decisions which diverge from the brand consistency guidelines. This task could be given to the brand manager if they have sufficient technical knowledge, or alternatively, you may choose to employ a specialist consultant who holds the appropriate knowledge and awareness of the brand guidelines.
Step 3: Audit store branding regularly
Branding should be regularly audited across sites, to ensure that the correct brand consistency is being utilised and the guidelines are being adhered to in an appropriate and professional manner. Furthermore, audits will pick up any maintenance issues that will create an inconsistent brand experience across sites.
There are a variety of maintenance issues which may occur with signage, including broken lights, fading of colour and text, sun damage, water damage, mould, erosion and dirt. If these issues aren’t resolved quickly, the brand may be remembered for the wrong reasons. Maintenance is essential for brand integrity, as a lack of maintenance leads to poor signage, and poor signage leads to brand mistrust and negative impressions.
It’s also important to empower the entire team to report maintenance issues and create a structured process for reporting. Often, people onsite may realise a sign is broken or harmed, but won’t report it as they aren’t sure who to tell, or don’t believe it is their responsibility. Thus, engaging your National Safety or Occupational Health Manager through these stages is important. Where the signs are proactively audited and data is consistently tracked, appropriate maintenance can occur, and the brand will appear consistent and future-proof.
Conclusion
It is evident there are lots of moving parts that can be very difficult to manage internally. Engaging a specialist project manager or consultancy can deliver successful results, cost savings, and alleviate much of the time and stress that go into, not only completing branding programs, but ensuring their consistency and efficacy. Want to learn more? Check out our whitepaper on How To Ensure Brand Consistency Across Your Site Network.
Heather Ross is National Account Manager at SignManager, an award-winning signage solutions provider. They create, implement and manage comprehensive and intelligent signage solutions to more than 50 of Australia’s largest corporate organisations across 50,00 sites and 250,000 signage assets. Led by a team of industry experts, SignManager offers end-to-end signage management solutions that are innovative, streamlined and on-brand. With services suited to both small and large-scale businesses, SignManager is passionate about bringing consistent, captivating signage to life. In short – signs made easy.
Heather specialises in corporate signage with experience managing many well recognised and high profile national brands including ALDI, CBA, John Deere Hino, Bank of Melbourne, St George Bank & AMP. Heather has been in the industry for over 35 years and has spent the last 13 years with SignManager. She enjoys a fast paced environment and working with teams on national projects by building long standing relationships with her clients and colleagues.
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