Brand consistency leads to many benefits for organizations. It’s easier to retain customers. And eventually, those customers form an emotional connection to the brand, leading to positive sentiment and word-of-mouth promotion.

You’re creating a welcoming, recognizable experience people can associate with through the brand.

However, playing fast and loose with it by putting out inconsistent messaging and visuals creates confusion. And unfortunately, many companies are guilty of doing this.

Find out where your brand began to stray

Where does brand dissonance come from? It happens when organizations take liberties with existing content without a plan. If you’re managing a brand, sometimes this dissonance occurs when there’s pressure from clients or upper management to make ill-advised changes.

As Aleksandar Sasha Jovic, from Executive Digital, points out,

“The No. 1 mistake marketers make that completely ruins brand consistency is lacking focus on the user experience and consistency of the brand visuals. Often, there is a cohesive element missing: the confluence of various team members working on their own views of what the brand strategy should be. ”

Other times, it comes from external influences like your competition. When these internal and external forces impact the brand, it creates chaos for its consistency moving forward.

Let’s look at some typical signals that your brand has gone off the rails.

Off-brand internal and external visuals

Unless you have an iron grip on your brand’s visuals, this is one area that can quickly fall apart, especially for teams working without a style guide. With so many people creating assets and developing strategies, things slip through the cracks. A rogue email signature here. Some odd social post graphics there.

And with many businesses reporting that they are guilty of producing off-brand content, your visuals are one of the first places to look for inconsistencies.

Shaky core values

Many consumers feel that companies don’t treat them as individuals. They believe most businesses fail to maintain the human connection that’s so important in relationship building.

It’s not unheard of for there to be a disconnect between what businesses say their core values are and what they practice in reality. This incongruence often results in misalignment within organizations between different departments, extending into the brand itself.

For instance, your marketing could talk about how the company cares about sustainability and the environment as a core value. Yet, the company actively uses vendors with questionable land cultivation practices in its supply chain.

It sends a message to consumers that not only is the business guilty of greenwashing, but it’s also negatively impacting the environment it claims to want to protect.

Unclear, ineffective messaging

Customers pay attention to what businesses have to say. And they care about how they say it. You may think that your latest campaign was hilarious, but it fell flat. Why? Because it, as Christian Lachel of BRC Imagination Arts said, “[overshot] the cultural context in which the brand lives.”

When the message doesn’t match what your audience expects to hear, it leaves them feeling disoriented and, sometimes, even angry. When working on brand and marketing campaigns, your dialogue with customers needs to be timely and, more importantly, relevant to them as an audience.

Think about why you strayed

Once you see the gaps in the brand, it’s time to think about why you decided to do it in the first place. If it was because your competitors were doing something similar, did you need to follow them?

But if you strayed from your brand’s guidelines because of the latest marketing trend or social channel, did it make sense to jump on the bandwagon?

The answer to both questions is: Probably not.

Revisiting why your business drifted away from the established brand elements provides direction to get back on track.

Sticking to your brand guidelines

Your style guide keeps your entire team on the right path. It prevents off-brand content and marketing from mucking up how people see your business. Creating and following your company’s style guides makes it harder to justify why you need to deviate from the brand’s voice, visuals, and other elements.

It doesn’t mean every marketing piece and communication from your business needs to be robotic and stale. Brand consistency means it has a personality people respond to and feel empowered to buy from. Preserving your brand’s image, message, and values only benefits your business—and its customers—in the long run.