Brand Consistency and Creativity in Advertisements

Brand consistency is a term that gets used quite a lot in different fields of marketing, but it is not always clear what this specific term means. Consistency as a whole is the process of keeping something at the same level or in the same form for a long time period. Using that we can define brand consistency as the process of exposing your target audience to your brand and its elements.

There are multiple different subjects that can be attributed to a brand and treated as a part of the brand consistency process, such as a title, a slogan, a color scheme, a company's goals and ideals, and so on. It is also often recommended to avoid drastic changes to your branding elements since any change often makes it harder for the brand as a whole to become ingrained into the customer's memory.

The main goal of brand consistency as a process is easy to figure out - it is brand recognition so that your customers can instantly recognize your brand's elements no matter what kind of advertising they are facing. However, it is also fair to say that brand consistency is not always about the visual elements of your brand.

There are two other large parts of your brand identity that have to be kept in mind on the same level as all the visual elements - a customer experience and a company's values and actions.

A consistent customer experience is important for any company out there since most of the associations with the brand identity are usually taken from the personal customer experience. A company's core values are just as important - a company should not only declare its core values but also use actions on the subject to back up these declarations.

Brand recognition is extremely valuable when it comes to highly competitive markets since any company that stands out within an oversaturated market is worth considering in the eyes of the customer. The effect of brand recognition in situations like these is even more prominent when the visual identity of a brand is connected to a successful customer experience in the mind of said customer.

Other than being extremely effective when it comes to highly competitive markets, brand recognition also provides a plethora of other advantages, such as:

• the ability to establish your brand in the customer's eyes,
• a number of established expectations that come from the brand recognition by default (often generating loyalty and trust),
• an easier time to create an association between the entirety of your brand and the positive emotions that you are channeling as a brand and a company.

All of the benefits that come from brand recognition provide a rather impressive advantage to any company that is capable of achieving success in this department. The issue here is that brand recognition as a whole is a rather problematic topic, to begin with, and a lot of companies struggle with both creating a brand image and maintaining it.

Of course, when it comes to a topic as complicated as this, there is no definitive way to create brand recognition out of thin air for any brand - all we can do is provide some tips and best practices to help companies with this complicated process. Some of the tips on the list are:

• Create a brand style guide
• Figure out a dedicated storage for your branding assets
• Avoid complete rebranding as much as possible
• Create a consistent marketing schedule
• Brand audits are a requirement and should be performed on a regular basis

This list is in no way complete, but it should serve as a sufficient example of how complicated and problematic the topic of brand consistency really is. Luckily enough, there are some ways to make this process easier.

For example, using an online banner maker when it comes to creating your advertisements and digital banners is a great way to maintain consistency in terms of banner style and branding elements – these online banner makers often have an option to create a multitude of different banners from just one template of yours.

However, creating a multitude of ads with a single template in mind is only effective when you know how to make that template in the best way possible - and this is another complicated process that is often problematic to work with since creativity and strict guides rarely work together.

What we can do in this context is to provide information and examples on how good and bad creative banners are made and what makes them so creative in the first place. Even the most basic banner that consists of a background image, a title, and a call-to-action is sometimes ridiculously hard to get right - which is why we have an entire article dedicated to examples of creative real estate ads that showcases both good and bad banner ad examples with detailed explanations.