5 insights for building global brand consistency in today's market

Introduction

Keeping your branding consistent helps you become more memorable, stand out, and build a positive brand reputation. Yet, creating branding harmony is still a big struggle for many local and global companies. 

That’s why in our latest article, we’ll share 5 ways your brand can strengthen brand consistency today. By analyzing why companies struggled and how they overcame these problems, we’ll provide practical insights to help unify your branding, locally and globally.

Invest, develop and build a strong brand identity

What’s a brand identity?

A brand identity shows how your brand will be presented to customers, visually and textually. Your brand guideline should cover all branding elements, from logo, typography, and color scheme to tone of voice and copy style. It will guide your teams in the right direction, helping them deliver the right message while strengthening brand consistency across different markets.

So, how do you build a brand identity guideline?

Let’s take, for example, CykelGear, Denmark’s leading e-commerce cycle company, which was looking to expand into Northern Europe. 

By conducting extensive market and competition research, Cykelgear discovered a true point of difference: that they equally served every type of cyclist. This insight served as a center point for Cykelgear’s complete rebrand, helping inspire a new name: Bikable, a cycle company with a can-do attitude that encourages everyone to cycle. 

From there, the creative ball rolled with a new flexible logo, typography and color palette to showcase all the possibilities on two-wheels. By the end, Bikable had a fully stacked and comprehensive brand identity guide to help catapult them into Northern Europe and beyond.

Looking for more on brand identity? We dived deep into the topic in a previous article, detailing the four essential steps to building a brand guideline here.

Remember, keep your photographic style consistent

Having a uniform photographic style is significant to building brand consistency. By creating unified imagery across your marketing channels, you’ll power brand recognition and create stronger, more authentic customer connections. 

However, some companies run into problems trying to harmonize imagery. For Maersk, one of the largest freight companies in the world, the look and feel of their images across international markets were incoherent, leaving customers feeling detached from the brand. 

But by spotting the problem early and testing multiple creative image styles, Maersk landed on a definitive photographic look that was impactful and recognizably Maersk. With this editorial photographic style, Maersk now has unique, eye-catching and, importantly, consistent brand imagery.

Use automation to produce marketing materials at scale reliably

Automation helps iron out any inefficiencies in your workflow and marketing production, as well as streamline long, laborious administrative tasks. That means your employees can focus on the tasks that matter and work seamlessly across multiple national and international offices. 

Take, for instance, Nilfisk, the global professional cleaning equipment company. As they expanded to foreign markets, noticeable mistakes piled up, leaving them unable to reliably market at scale. But by introducing an automated brand management system, Nilfisk stamped out these global stoppages and created a seamless, efficient and effective workflow. 

One lesson from Nilfisk is if you’re struggling with brand consistency, start by reviewing your internal systems. This might lead to a simple fix, like introducing automated technology that reduces the margin for errors and speeds up any size marketing production.

Introduce a language translation management system

Many brands have to reach a wide and diverse audience. And that means using language translation tech to develop materials for customers worldwide.

A language translation management system (TMS) is software that can translate any text into any language. Here’s why this tool is essential for global brands:

• Immediate and timely corrections on translation errors.
  This is critical when communicating with local markets. 
• Empowers collaboration on a single platform.
  By doing so, global offices can work seamlessly together and stay informed on multiple language projects. 

For Danish medical manufacturer Ambu, language translation was essential to produce informative materials at high volume and high quality for healthcare professionals worldwide. From medical leaflets to instruction manuals, language tech helps Ambu reduce the margin for errors and stay compliant with global healthcare regulations. 

Lift production pressures with outsourcing

For many brands, outsourcing is a reliable, tried and tested solution to marketing production problems on a local and global scale. This cost-effective and efficient marketing method provides brands with an expert team of specialists that cater to your specific needs, whether production, digital, or creative. 

When outsourcing, you’re tapping into expertise that would otherwise be extremely costly for your brand. That marketing know-how will help you develop better, more successful campaigns. This knowledge might come in the form of new ideas and perspectives, or simply knowing how to tighten how your brand looks across its marketing channels. 

Here is 3 ways outsourcing helps with brand consistency:

• Reduces the risk of production mistakes. 

With a team of experts, you’ll be able to produce materials efficiently with less chance of mistakes.

• Improves brand recognition.

The more successful your campaigns, the better your brand will be known and loved. And that’s what outsourcing helps you achieve, whether you’re in one market or many.

• Harmonize branding across multiple markets.

By outsourcing, you’ll have the resources and expertise strengthen your branding locally but also reach new markets without ever losing touch with your key values and message. 

But with many production agencies, how do you choose the right one to work with? 

Well, here are two key criteria:

• One-stop-shop marketing performance partner. 

These agencies cover all of your needs and eliminate the communication problems that arise from a multiple-vendor approach.

• Proven market experience.

Working with a proven marketing partner gives you invaluable insights and expert advice on sparking growth in domestic and foreign markets.

When production pressures increase, outsourcing is critical. Take, for example, Aller, one of Europe’s leading magazine and weeklies publishers. By outsourcing, Aller found a trusted, long-term performance partner that continues delivering first-rate creative solutions and 24/7 marketing production. Now, Aller has one less worry in a fast-moving market, with a go-to marketing performance partner for production at any time and any scale. 

Our final thoughts

For brand consistency, many companies first have to look inwards. And that means having a clear, robust, and comprehensive brand guideline that details how your brand looks, feels and communicates. This will also help when creating new campaigns, as you’ll have a reliable, go-to source for building visual harmony across all your marketing channels. 

With a brand identity guide in place, your brand should then take advantage of technology that will reduce errors in production. By introducing these changes, you’ll be one step closer to harmonizing your branding, helping you grow in the right direction while connecting deeply with customers, locally and globally.