How to measure brand consistency: key metrics and tools

Fans were outraged when Paramount released their trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog in 2019. The film offered a . . . unique take . . . on the titular character’s design. Instead of the stylistic, spikey blue alien that fans expected, the trailer’s Sonic was furry and uncomfortably human.

If this were a new franchise, the character design would have been fine. But Sonic is not new. Fans have been playing Sonic games for decades. Which means Paramount made a grave mistake: They violated the Sonic brand.

Fortunately, everything worked out. The visual effects artists went back to work and gave fans something that’s much like the classic Sonic, complete with cartoonish hands and eyes. Fans rewarded their effort. Sonic the Hedgehog made $320M at the box office. To date, all three Sonic films have earned more than a billion dollars.

Sonic represents a clear case of the power of brand consistency. For years, the Sonic brand was so consistent across games, animated movies, TV shows, and merchandise that fans were deeply offended when someone dared to depict him differently.

Brand consistency isn’t just for film and video game characters. By staying consistent, you can create a compounding effect that helps your company grow.

What is brand consistency?

Brand consistency is the practice of presenting standard messaging, visuals, and tone across all of your platforms and touchpoints.

It’s about making sure customers recognize your brand instantly, whether they’re exposed to your website, social media, email campaigns, or printed materials. This standardization is a key part of every successful brand strategy.

Why bother keeping your branding consistent?

Compelling reasons for committing to brand consistency abound.

Improved brand recognition: People are much more comfortable buying from brands they recognize.

Recognition isn’t limited to past customers. Something as simple as a consistent color can increase brand recognition by 80 percent. We all know Coca Cola red, Tiffany aqua, and Cadbury purple, even if you don’t purchase those products.

But to become recognizable, you have to hit your audience with the same branding over and over. This means drawing your Sonic the same way every time, so people recognize it.

For example, you recognize McDonald’s current logo instantly, even though it doesn’t even say the company’s name. That’s because the logo has been mostly unchanged and ubiquitous for literally decades.

Higher revenue growth: It’s notoriously hard to draw a direct, quantitative line between your branding and your revenue, but it’s not hard to see a relationship: Effective branding enhances customer loyalty and attracts new clients, which paves the way to increased sales and profitability.

Stronger customer trust: Consistent branding is linked tightly with trust. Eighty-seven percent of consumers are more likely to pay more for products and services from brands they trust.

In short, when every interaction aligns with your brand’s identity, your customers become intimate with who you are and how you help. This boosts brand loyalty and overall brand value.

Why brand consistency is challenging

Keeping your brand consistent is easy when your company is young, but as your marketing presence evolves, so does the potential for errors and inconsistencies. These are the top challenges:

• Limited resources, like cash, money, people, or time, can make it hard to keep an eye on all of your company’s activities.
• Siloed teams with poor communication can disrupt your brand messaging, especially when those teams are unaware of each other’s work.
• Operating globally and locally makes branding consistency tough, especially if you serve diverse audiences. You have to adjust your brand voice for different cultures, which can be confusing for digital marketing teams.
• After a rebrand (or just an adjustment), there’s a chance that old brand elements sneak by, thereby confusing customers and disrupting the brand loyalty they feel.
• Sudden market changes, new technologies, and shifting customer behaviors can make a brand identity feel like a moving target.
• The urge to do something new and different is strong, especially if your brand is decades old. (This one probably explains the Sonic filmmaker’s faux pas.)

How to measure brand consistency

Some elements of your brand are easy to measure. Are you using the same logos and colors on your website and social profiles? If so, you’re consistent.

But other brand components are more nebulous. How do you measure the consistency of your copywriting? Or the tone of your TikToks? Or the character design of your beloved blue hedgehog?

Qualitative research is our best tool here. We can turn qualitative responses into quantitative data, and then compare those numbers over time.

Qualitative research is far from perfect, however. Just one survey respondent can skew your data more than they should. Outliers are unavoidable, but we can blunt their effects by collecting lots of data over time.

So if a consistent brand is important to you, this is something you should check regularly, at least yearly, although some brands audit it more often if they’re in a new or disrupted market. To check your consistency, you need to track the right metrics.

Brand recognition score

Consistent brands are memorable brands. This means you can track if your branding is uniform across your platforms by discerning if people remember it.

How it works: Conduct brand recognition surveys (sometimes called brand awareness surveys) in which participants are asked to identify your brand from a set of competitors. This tells you the percentage of people who correctly recognize your brand elements, such as your logo, taglines, and colors.

You can test beyond the visual elements as well in a brand awareness survey. For example, you might describe your unique value proposition and ask your audience if they can name your product. Or you could play a clip from a recent presentation and ask who the speaker represents.

How to calculate it: Divide the number of times people correctly identify your brand by the number of people you ask. Multiply by 100 to get your percentage.

For example, if you ask 135 people and 112 correctly identify your brand, your brand recognition score is 83 percent.

Message consistency score

A message consistency score measures how well your brand’s messaging aligns across all of your communication channels, including your website, social media, email campaigns, and ads.

It even applies to the entire customer experience, such interactions with salespeople, support tickets, or chat messages.

You’ll need to conduct content audits of all of these channels. Check each for alignment with your brand guidelines. You’re looking for inconsistencies in tone, word choice, and of course the content of the message.

Don’t limit yourself to customers. Check internally, as well. Does your team understand and apply your brand messaging appropriately?

AI is a big help here. Natural language processing (NLP) tools can assess written content for consistency in phrasing, sentiment, and terminology. These tools aren’t perfect, but they can cover a lot of ground quickly.

How to calculate it: Divide the instances of consistent messaging by the total number of pieces of content audited. A blog post is a piece of content. So is an email message or a chat log. Multiply by 100 to get a percentage.

For example, if you audit 845 pieces of content and find consistent messaging in 821 of them, your message consistency score is 97 percent.

If that seems like a lot of work, you’re right.

Tools for measuring brand consistency

Keeping on top of the details related to brand is extremely time consuming when a typical content team cranks out literally hundreds of assets every year.

That’s why we built Brand Consistency, a suite of tools to audit all of your content (on all platforms) for consistency; part of its beauty is that you can use it in tandem with our other tools, like those for content and behavior analytics and quality assurance, without leaving our platform.

Think of Brand Consistency as a complement to other tools you’re already using, like Grammarly and Writer. It also pairs well with social media monitoring tools like Brandwatch and Mention, both of which give you insights into public conversations about your brand.

For example, if you’re aiming for a hip and trendy brand, you can glean whether your audience thinks of it that way.

You might also combine Brand Consistency with Canva or Frontify, both of which are asset management platforms and help you store and distribute approved brand elements.

For example, you might create graphic templates for your social media team and use Brand Consistency to make sure nothing falls between the cracks. 

Best practices for maintaining a consistent brand

Brand consistency depends on tools and eagle eyes, but it’s also rooted in a mindset that should infuse multiple habits across your content, brand, and design teams.

1. Set brand guidelines

While most companies develop brand guidelines, enforcing them is an entirely separate challenge. Many companies fail to follow their own brand rules and end up working against themselves by misrepresenting their own brand identity across their platforms and channels.

Nevertheless, branding guidelines are critical. You can’t enforce a rule unless you document it somewhere.

This document should live in a central location that everyone can access. In addition to guidance on things like color palette, font, and wording, include key information, like your values and mission statement. Instruct everyone to consult this document whenever they create content.

(Keep in mind that “content” refers to everything, not just your blog and social posts, and not just the words but graphics used to promote events and banners in emails. Your knowledge base, FAQs, in-app tutorials, and desktop notifications are all content that should reflect your brand.)

2. Provide your team with resources

Instead of sharing vague suggestions, give your team everything they need to stay on brand.

Give them fonts, images, color palettes, and other art assets so they don’t have to make decisions or find it themselves (again, this is where brand guidelines come in handy). Provide sample copy so your people know what to write and how to curate photos and artwork so they don’t grab something random (and copyrighted) off Google.

You might share a few examples of what you’re looking for with your team, like a few blog posts, a one-pager, and some social posts, marked up to show the decisions that are inherent in the asset, like colors, word choice, or voice.

Also consider doing short workshops or trainings that you can record and distribute. You might be surprised by how many team members actually care about getting the details of your brand right, they’re just moving so fast and details aren’t documented, so they charge ahead when they should slow down to check things.

3. Build brand control into your workflow

Any time you publish content, whether through your marketing messaging or product design, someone should run the marketing material through a brand guidelines check.

Depending on the size of your organization, this could be as simple as a checklist each content creator uses before hitting publish.

If your organization is large, this might require a dedicated team to review each brand asset before release. A “brand manager,” so to speak, who makes sure your Sonic never leaves the studio looking like a toddler in a tracksuit.

4. Focus on high ROI activities

If you don’t have the resources to control every piece of content your brand produces, focus on the activities that produce the biggest impact.

Suppose most of your leads come through your blog content. In this case, your blog deserves a greater portion of your branding attention. You or someone on your team should use a tool like   to identify inconsistencies.

Prevent branding blunders

It’s unlikely you’ll experience a brand catastrophe like Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog (though you could make an argument that the error plus the fix created more hype than it'd have received otherwise), but even little mistakes can hurt your bottom line.

A consistent brand experience comes down to documenting your guidelines and enforcing them any time you produce content or interact with your customers and audience. That’s a famously difficult and frustrating task — one that you can now automate, whether you’re dealing with new or legacy content.