Six Root Causes of Model Inconsistency (And How You Can Repair Them) | Creed Tech

Even the most carefully designed brands are damaged by simple mistakes and inconsistencies. These can turn off both your loyal and potential customers. By being aware of common pitfalls, putting systems in place, and using the right software, you can ensure that customers see only the best content.

Whether in the form of logos, typography, images, or color palettes, branding defines your product, builds brand recognition, shapes your reputation, and connects you with customers.

These three things do not come together by accident or good fortune. To establish a brand, the whole process requires a lot of refinement and many years of work. What’s more, even after you have a strong brand, inconsistencies can derail your best efforts, even if they occur internally.

A brand is the perceived value, the personality of your company. Once you’ve settled on the right colors, fonts, images, tone, and messaging, you can create a unified look, which will eventually build familiarity and trust.

However, a Demand Metric study found that less than 10% of respondents said their brand presentation remained consistent. Nearly 90% said brand consistency was important, but less than half are achieving it. Additionally, 60% of respondents said that although they had brand guidelines, their materials did not always conform to them.

When brand inconsistencies occur, winning new customers can be a real challenge. But brand inconsistency doesn’t just hurt potential customers; If an existing customer searches for your product but can’t easily find or recognize it, they’ll move on.

The world’s biggest brands like Amazon, Coca-Cola and Netflix spend huge amounts of money on brand building. So do start-ups and other smaller, more ambitious companies as a proportion of their revenue. If you have invested so much in your brand, you need to maintain it.

Few brand managers intentionally allow the brand to drift off course, yet it happens regularly. Your creatives and copywriters tend to be more attuned to your brand identity and brand narrative, but for the people who own the campaigns and channels, it can get lost in the day-to-day work.

One of the most common examples of brand management inconsistency is when someone in your company uses the wrong asset. This can happen for all kinds of reasons. They could end up using an outdated asset, the wrong brand colors, or the wrong font, tone, or tagline.

When you run into errors like these, they usually come back to the following universal issues:

1. Lack of communication: You may have a large core collection of brand assets, but as more people get involved, new content can start to deviate from established rules and standards due to poor communication.
2. Lack of processes: Small businesses often have simple processes to maintain their brand identity, but as the number of employees and locations grow, these same procedures fall apart or worse, become unnecessarily complicated.
3. Asset volume: Maintaining your brand consistency is no easy feat when you think about all the different assets at stake, from videos to photos to presentations to sales collateral. Multiply that across different departments, third parties, and franchisees, and you can see how mistakes happen.
4. Inability to find assets: When you work with resellers, vendors, or partners, you don’t always provide the correct access to logos or color palettes. As a result, people could simply Google your name and pick whatever logo they can find, which might not be an approved asset, or the right color or resolution.
5. Obstructed access to assets: Your marketers may know the right assets exist, but can’t access them, often because they’re stored on individual employee computers or emails. Even if they are saved to Dropbox or Google shares, without any process to organize them, accessing the right file can be like finding a needle in a haystack.
6. Barriers to collaboration: The hybrid work environment has highlighted the challenges for companies to maintain brand consistency, demonstrating the need for a single source of information. In the past, they usually sat next to each other in an office, where everyone could talk. Now your team members could be working at home on individual systems.

Although brand managers are frustrated by inconsistencies, they may not know what solutions exist.

Digital asset management software like Canto is perfectly placed to help. As digital transformation continues to accelerate, managing your assets efficiently and seamlessly is critical. You have to keep customers happy, keep your brand consistent, and keep your teams working smarter.