The face of your brand is what helps people recognize your business. But if it looks different every time they see it, naturally, they’re going to be confused. They know something has changed, but they can’t quite put their finger on it.

Because they’re focused on this, they aren’t paying attention to your message and are more likely to disregard it entirely.

When your visual identity shows signs of inconsistency, it dilutes the brand’s integrity. We’ll explain what brand dilution is, how it affects businesses, and ways to avoid it.

What is brand dilution?

Brand dilution happens as a result of its elements (logo, color palette, etc.) being misused. Tiny drips of brand inconsistency eventually become a flood, washing away the foundation of its visual identity.

So, what causes this in the first place?

The top three issues we’ve seen happen within companies large and small boil down to one or a combination of:

• Ignoring existing brand guidelines
• People making unauthorized changes to internal and external collateral
• No internal brand oversight or brand management

One of the above can weaken your visual identity, but the road to brand dilution is much faster when combined, leading to serious problems for your organization.

Consequences of brand inconsistency

Brand inconsistency usually isn’t a one-off thing. What generally starts as a minor oversight eventually snowballs into chaos that diminishes the brand.

These inconsistencies can also have a negative financial impact, which we covered in our Brand Consistency report.

Here are a few highlights:

• Many businesses understand the importance of brand reputation and how it impacts revenue, but less than 50% actively pay attention to it.
• Brands that care about maintaining brand consistency experience, on average, higher earnings than companies that don’t.
• Customers assess company brands throughout their entire purchasing journey.

Speaking of the last point, customers are forgiving of many things. However, they are less so when a brand breaks their trust.

The findings in a series of experiments analyzing the relationship between brand fondness and wrongdoing revealed how much customer sentiment can fall. When companies transgress, customers’ feelings can range from mild upset to full-on outrage, if not outright hatred for a brand, if the offense is serious enough.

We’ll concede that brand inconsistency is not on the same level as other mistakes companies could make, but it still erodes the trust you’ve gained or could get from customers.

Ways to avoid brand dilution

Now that we’ve discussed how brand dilution occurs let’s talk about how to stop it from happening so you can maintain brand integrity and avoid confusing or frustrating your customers.

Follow your style guide
Your company’s brand style guide is the master document explaining how to use each element of the company’s visual identity. It needs to be readily accessible to internal and external teams as they create various customer-facing and internal materials.

Train your team
Introduce team members who may need to produce simple or complex communications as part of their job to your brand guidelines early. Making this part of your onboarding process or hosting workshops will help you expose new (and current) employees to the brand’s assets and teach them how to use them correctly.

Manage your visual assets
Assign responsibility to an individual or team within the organization to conduct quality control on the company’s branded materials. This person or department usually acts as a brand manager, marketing manager, creative or art director to make sure what goes out meets the standards of the established style guide.

Conduct brand audits
Brand audits give you a detailed view of your visual identity’s strengths and weaknesses, revealing inconsistencies and other issues. Performing a brand audit regularly, at least once a year, helps you catch any problems before they turn into disasters.

Make temporary changes
Sometimes, it will make strategic sense to create a marketing campaign that bends the rules of the brand on purpose. In these instances, any modifications to the brand’s elements should only be temporary and be explained to your audience to avoid confusion.

Staying true to your brand’s visual identity

Brand dilution reduces the power your business has for people to connect with it. Understanding how it occurs allows you to identify gaps in your internal processes to prevent them from taking hold.

Moving forward, you can build efficiencies that help current and future employees come into the organization knowing how to use the brand’s assets. Once your team is on the same page about using the company’s logo, fonts, colors, and other elements, managing the brand is easier.

By controlling the essentials of your company’s visual identity, brand dilution becomes a thing of the past, and you can give people a positive, consistent impression of the business.