What is brand consistency worth? Ask businesses what it would mean if their brand were always presented consistently, and they'll put a number on it. In The Impact of Brand Consistency, a 2016 study by Demand Metric and Lucidpress, that number was 23% more revenue.
23%
is how much businesses estimate their revenue would grow if their brand were always presented consistently.
Does brand consistency really increase revenue by 23%?
You'll often see this quoted as "consistent branding increases revenue by 23%". That isn't what the study found. It asked 234 organisations to estimate the effect, so the figure is their judgement, not a measured result.
We think it's interesting for a different reason. The people who know their own brands best believe that inconsistency is costing them real money. And you don't put a price on something you already have: the estimate is really a measure of the gap between how their brand should look and how it actually goes out.
Why is brand consistency worth anything?
Why would consistency be worth anything at all? Mostly, recognition. The more often people see a brand that looks and sounds the same, the more familiar it becomes, and familiarity counts when people choose. In Nielsen's 2015 survey of more than 30,000 people, 59% said they prefer to buy new products from brands they already know. (We wrote about that in Familiar brands get chosen first.)
Consistency is also a signal. A brand that looks the same everywhere comes across as organised and established. One that looks different in every post makes people work harder to recognise it, and many won't bother.
The cost of inconsistency is hidden
Few businesses decide to be inconsistent. The cost creeps in:
- Waiting. Every post that goes through a designer joins a queue, and is paid for in design time (see what social media design costs). Every post that skips the queue risks going out off brand.
- Rework. Posts get sent back because the logo's the wrong version or someone swapped the font.
- Drift. Copies of copies of templates slowly move away from the original, until the brand on social no longer matches the website.
Each one is small on its own. Together they're the gap that 23% is trying to describe.
Guidelines tell people the rules. Templates keep them.
Most brands already have guidelines. The trouble is that a PDF can't stop anyone. It relies on everyone reading it, remembering it, and having the time and the skills to follow it every time they make something. Some design tools let you lock parts of a template, which helps, but someone still has to build the templates and look after them (more in BrandStudio vs Canva).
BrandStudio takes the opposite approach. We build your guidelines into the templates themselves: fonts, spacing, colours and layouts are fixed, and your team changes only the words and pictures. Nobody has to remember the rules, because they can't break them. You can try a real studio in the live demo.
What we won't claim
We can't promise your revenue will grow by 23%, and nobody honestly can. What the study does suggest is that businesses already believe looking like themselves every time is worth something substantial. The easier you make that, the more of it you get.
In short
- Businesses estimate their revenue would grow by 23% if their brand were always presented consistently (Demand Metric and Lucidpress, 2016). It's an estimate, not a measured result.
- The value comes mostly from recognition: 59% of people prefer to buy new products from brands they already know (Nielsen, 2015).
- Guidelines tell people the rules; templates with the brand locked in keep them.
Questions
Does brand consistency increase revenue?
There's no reliable measured figure. The number often quoted comes from The Impact of Brand Consistency (Demand Metric and Lucidpress, 2016), where 234 organisations estimated their revenue would grow by 23% if their brand were always presented consistently. It's their estimate, not a measured result.
What is brand consistency?
Brand consistency means presenting your brand the same way everywhere: the same logo, fonts, colours, layouts and tone of voice, whoever makes the post and wherever it appears.
How do you keep a brand consistent across a team?
Build the rules into the tools people use, rather than relying on a guidelines PDF. Templates with the fonts, colours, logos and spacing fixed in place let anyone make a post that's on brand, without a designer checking each one.