Brand Consistency and the Cost of Going Off-Brand

You’ve heard it before, your brand is the sum of every customer interaction with your product, organization, and people. But it’s easy to underestimate the financial impact of a disjointed brand experience. From your website experience, packaging, and social media posts to the products and services you sell and your in-person presence, every brand touchpoint contributes to how your brand is perceived. When these touchpoints don’t align, or worse, tell conflicting stories, you’re looking at a costly problem: brand inconsistency.

Too often, organizations concentrate on quick sales and short-term campaigns, overlooking how an inconsistent brand identity affects them in the long run.

The truth is that brand inconsistency can damage your brand’s reputation and silently erode your profits.

Beyond Visuals: The True Scope of Brand Consistency

Think about Apple, a leader in high-tech innovation. Imagine its clean, modern website and beautifully designed products. Now, imagine if Apple replaced its sleek, iconic packaging with plastic clamshells. That one change would drastically alter the purchase experience — even with the same product inside — making it less appealing and undermining the brand’s image. It would be akin to brand suicide.

Now, imagine a company that announces a big rebrand, but two years later is still using its old logo on signage and packaging. Or how about a brand that promotes itself as eco-friendly but uses excessive, non-recyclable packaging. And it’s especially unnerving when a brand is known for high-quality products and exceptional customer service, yet delivers a subpar product and leaves you on hold for what feels like forever.

These examples highlight a crucial point: brand consistency is about so much more than whether everyone is using the right logo, color palette or presentation template. Those things absolutely matter, but it goes so very far beyond that and includes everything in your customer’s experience.

Brand consistency is about ensuring that every interaction a customer has — whether it’s with your product, a person, chat bot, or AI agent — is living up to your brand’s promise.

The Impact of Brand Chaos

So, how does brand inconsistency affect the bottom line? Here are a few ways it can impact your organization:

1. Lost Customer Trust and Loyalty:
   • Good relationships are based on consistency, people showing up for each other in consistent ways. Inconsistency causes confusion and distrust. Think of your brand as a relationship with your end users and customers. When they experience conflicting messages or experiences, they’re less likely to trust your brand and remain loyal.
   • This translates to lost repeat business, decreased customer lifetime value, and the need to find new customers to replace the ones you lost. Depending on your industry, this can be extremely costly.
2. Diminished Brand Credibility and Reputation:
   • In the age of social media, negative experiences spread like wildfire. Brand inconsistency can quickly lead to negative reviews and online backlash, damaging your reputation and deterring potential customers.
   • This is especially true when product performance or customer service fails to deliver the expected experience.
3. Weakened Marketing Effectiveness:
   • A disjointed brand presence negatively impacts brand recognition and diminishes the impact of marketing campaigns. When your brand lacks a clear and consistent identity, your marketing efforts risk not connecting with your target audience.
   • This leads to wasted marketing spend and lower ROI.
4. Increased Customer Acquisition Costs:
   • Building a strong brand takes time and consistent investment. Brand inconsistency forces you to constantly rebuild trust and credibility, increasing your customer acquisition costs.
5. Decreased Employee Morale:
   • Internal and external brand inconsistency can also negatively impact employee morale. When customer trust erodes, or employees are unclear about the brand’s values and messaging, it can lead to confusion and disengagement.
   • This can lead to higher turnover and a decrease in productivity.

Calculating the Cost

While it’s difficult to quantify all of the items noted above, there’s a cost associated with each of them. When a brand experience doesn’t live up to a customer’s expectations (aka it’s inconsistent), they’re more likely to walk away, which means lost revenue and higher costs to replace them.

To get a sense of the magnitude, and understand the potential financial impact, let’s consider just two key metrics that are relatively easy to quantify:

1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): what it costs to acquire a new customer
2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): the total revenue you earn from a customer over time

Across industries, CAC can range from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands, and CLV is often many times higher. So, losing even a small number of loyal customers can quickly add up to millions in lost revenue and replacement costs.

The key takeaway is that maintaining a consistent, well-managed brand is far more cost-effective than continually replacing customers lost due to brand confusion or disengagement.

The remedy? Build a consistent brand identity focused on your desired customer experience, and manage all components diligently.

The good news is that brand inconsistency is preventable. Here are a few key steps you can take to build and maintain a consistent brand image:

Step 1: Establish Clear Brand Guidelines. Create easy-to-use brand guidelines and ensure all employees and partners understand and adhere to them. Make them engaging so people want to reference them. Over the years, we’ve encountered unwieldy guidelines that are unapproachable and difficult to understand; and some so brief that too much is left open to interpretation.

Step 2: Articulate On-Brand Behaviors. Be clear about what that looks like, sounds like and feels like for the customer and end user.

Step 3: Invest in Employee Training. Educate your employees on your brand guidelines, values, and messaging. Empower them to deliver consistent brand experiences. And find ways to continue to keep your brand front and center for everyone.

Step 4: Brand Governance. Establish a team tasked with the responsibility of monitoring and enforcing your brand guidelines by identifying opportunities to provide guidance and further training. Use tools, templates and systems to streamline brand management and ensure consistency across all platforms and experiences.

Step 5: Conduct Regular Brand Audits. Periodically review your brand’s presence across all channels to identify inconsistencies.

Step 6: Ensure Your Designers Understand and Value Brand Consistency. Creativity should happen within the bounds of your guidelines. In fact, numerous studies show that people are more creative when boundaries are imposed.^2,3

By prioritizing brand consistency throughout the organization, you can build a stronger, more cohesive brand image that forges deeper emotional connections with your target audience, fosters customer loyalty, adds value to your bottom line, and drives growth. Effective brand management requires ongoing investment and oversight. Do it and you’ll benefit from a unified and powerful brand presence.

Sources

¹ LucidPress (now Marq), “The Impact of Brand Consistency”
https://www.marq.com/blog/brand-consistency-benchmark-report, 2018 and 2021

² Dr. Patricia D. Stokes, Creativity from Constraints: The Psychology of Breakthrough, Springer Publishing Company, 2005

³ Rosso, B. D. (2014). Creativity and Constraints: Exploring the Role of Constraints in the Creative Processes of Research and Development Teams. Organization Studies, 35 (4), 551-585. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840613517600 (Original work published 2014)