Brand consistency: why your website, social media and decks don’t look like the same brand

Many founders know the moment. You are preparing an important meeting, you copy the link to the website, attach the sales deck, glance at the latest post. And you notice, perhaps for the first time, that these three things don’t seem to come from the same company. The website is calm and airy. The deck is dense, built on a template inherited years ago. Social media has found an aesthetic of its own, louder, one post at a time.

None of these assets is bad. That is exactly what makes the problem hard to see, and even harder to fix.

Why don’t your channels look alike, when each one is good?

Because they look like the people who made them.

In the late 1960s, the computer scientist Melvin Conway made an observation that became famous in software: organisations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. Brands are no exception. The website was designed by an agency, in a project with a beginning and an end. Social media is run by the marketing team, day to day. Decks are put together by sales, often the night before the meeting. Each asset carries the mark of its team, its tool and its schedule.

Your brand ends up shaped like your org chart. As long as inconsistency is treated as a matter of taste, it won’t be fixed, because it isn’t one. It is a matter of organisation.

What is brand image, if it isn’t the logo?

Brand image isn’t what the company designs, it is what people remember. It builds up from everything they see: a post, an email signature, a product page, a quote, a slide on a screen in a meeting room. Nobody reads your brand guidelines. Everybody sees your assets.

That has an uncomfortable consequence: a brand is often judged on its weakest asset, not its best one. A prospect who liked the website and then receives a thrown-together proposal doesn’t average the two. They wonder which one tells the truth about the company.

The asset that matters most is rarely the one that gets the most care, either: it is the one people see most often. For the X Games, the iconic brand of action sports culture, modernisation was largely played out on social media, because that is where the brand is seen every day. It was in the social visuals, post after post, that the new image had to hold.

Where does inconsistency across channels really come from?

The same four causes come up almost every time. They compound, and none of them is a talent problem.

Rules that describe the logo, not the work. Most brand guidelines explain the logo’s clear space and the colour values very well. Very few explain how to build a slide with a chart, a table and three messages, or how to announce a new hire. Yet that is what teams produce every week. When the rules stop where the work begins, everyone makes up the rest.

One supplier per channel. The web agency, the freelancer running social, the designer who did the trade-show stand, the printer who “adapted” the brochure. Each is competent, and that is precisely the problem: a good designer has a handwriting, and without a shared direction, they use it. Four good suppliers with no common point of view produce four good brands.

Tools that decide for you. Whatever a brand hasn’t decided, the software decides for it: the presentation tool’s default template, the fonts suggested by the online design app, the website theme, the photo app’s filters. Without templates, every tool imposes its own settings, and a brand that works with five tools ends up wearing five aesthetics.

Nobody looking at everything at once. In many companies every asset gets approved, but separately, by whoever owns that channel. Nobody ever puts the website, the posts and the decks side by side. It isn’t a lack of goodwill: the role simply doesn’t exist on the org chart. The only person who sees all your channels one after the other is, in the end, your customer.

Does brand consistency mean everything has to look the same?

No, and that is the mistake that often follows the realisation. To restore order, the same banner, the same photo and the same block of colour get imposed everywhere. The result is uniform, not consistent. A story doesn’t have the grammar of a deck, and an interface isn’t read like a poster. Forcing every channel to look alike makes each one worse without making any of them more recognisable.

Consistency rests on a few decisions that never change, applied to assets that are allowed to be very different.

For GUD, a platform promoting blockchain in the video game industry, we designed the identity, but also the web interfaces, the icons and the ads. An interface has to be used, an icon has to read at a few pixels, an ad has to stop the eye: these assets don’t look alike. They obey the same rule, the pixel, which structures the logo and everything that follows from it. That rule is what people recognise, not a repeated layout.

For Trace, which makes sensors that measure athletic performance, the system runs from the product to sales materials, and from the website to campaign visuals. What ties it together isn’t a single template, but a small number of elements that each have a job: a symbol, a typeface, and a signal green that expresses the precision of the data. A sensor and a sales brochure have little in common. That green, they share.

The fewer constants a brand has, the more it has to rely on repetition to be recognised. The more precise its constants, the more it can afford to vary.

How do you diagnose the consistency of your brand image?

You don’t need an audit to start. Five questions are enough, as long as you answer them by looking at what was actually published, not at what is in the guidelines.

1. If you lay out your latest assets side by side, across every channel, do you see a brand or a catalogue? Really do it, on a wall or a single screen: the website, a few posts, a deck, a quote, an email signature.
2. If you hide the logo, can you still tell it’s you? If all the recognition rests on the logo, the rest of the system isn’t doing its job.
3. Can you guess who made an asset just by looking at it? If so, the person who made it is more visible than the brand. It is the most reliable sign that direction is missing.
4. Where did the last person who created a new format start from? A template made for it, an old file duplicated, or a blank page? The last two answers explain most of the drift.
5. Who in the company has seen everything that was published this month? If you have to think about it, the answer is probably nobody.

Two uncomfortable answers don’t mean the brand needs redoing. They mean the problem lies in how things are produced. That is rather good news, because it is the part you can fix without starting over.

Why isn’t a rebrand enough?

Faced with scattered assets, the reflex is to commission a new identity. The project goes well, and the new files go back to the same teams, the same suppliers and the same tools. A few months later the new brand is drifting exactly like the old one, because nothing changed in the way it is produced.

A brand identity project solves a deep problem: what the brand says, and the system that says it. By nature it can’t solve a continuity problem, because it ends. Inconsistency, on the other hand, is produced continuously, one asset after another, long after delivery. When the identity is still right, what you need isn’t a new design, it is someone to hold it.

What does ongoing art direction change?

The role missing from the org chart has a name: art direction. Not one more approval at the end of the line, but a single point of view that runs through every channel, before anything is produced.

That is what Initial’s monthly art direction offers. In practice, it changes four things.

• One queue for every request. The post, the deck, the web page and the trade-show stand land in the same place and go past the same eyes. Priorities are set together, but no asset is designed in isolation anymore.
• A team behind the direction. Designers, developers and creative technologists step in as needed, along the same line. You no longer brief four suppliers, you brief one.
• Templates and tools that come from real needs. Every format that comes back becomes a template, and when volume calls for it, a tool. For House of Backbone, a Dubai-based marketing agency running campaign after campaign, the direction covers the identity, the motion system and the tools that let the team produce its own visuals without leaving the system.
• A system that learns. New cases stop being forgotten exceptions and start enriching the rules. The brand gets sharper instead of drifting.

The plan adjusts from one month to the next: up for a launch, down when things slow. The details are on the Pricing page.

One brand, not three

A consistent brand isn’t one where everything looks the same. It is one where someone decided once and for all what doesn’t change, and where someone makes sure those decisions reach the last asset produced, including the one finished the night before a meeting.

If your channels no longer seem to come from the same company, try the wall exercise. Then let’s talk.