How can you ensure brand consistency during startup scaling?

One of the biggest indicators is your customers: Are you getting the customers your desire? Are you not getting the customers your desire? Are you losing the customers you have? These three indicators will tell you how consistently you are staying true to your core and maintaining your "brand guidelines". At our startup Granimals, the moment we notice the customers that we aren't targeting reach out to us we know that something is broken. Either the creative, the targeting or the messaging. Your brand is what you sell who you sell it to and how well you are able to retain them. Everything else such as colors, fonts, etc. are secondary.

Also, keep your staff consistent and on point with the message. Adding too many cooks to the kitchen as they say.. Outside opinions are great to hear and to bounce new perspectives around but always come back to your core mission statement and see if the stuff compliments it or contradicts it.

Don't limit your brand guidelines to mere aesthetics. Weave a compelling narrative into your brand's persona. Specify your tone of voice and messaging guidelines.

Ensure your brand guidelines explicitly address scalability considerations. As your startup expands, these guidelines should provide a framework for adapting visual and tonal elements to new markets, audiences, and mediums. This foresight guarantees that brand consistency isn't compromised during rapid growth, fostering a cohesive and recognizable identity across diverse channels.

Every Brand has it's own identity and that should be clearly visible to anyone coming across brand anywhere. The complete branding can include dozens of things but here are some key things: 1. Color Theme 2. Typography 3. Brand Mascot 4. Logo 5. Tagline 6. Values 7. Vision

Moving beyond guidelines, foster a brand-centric culture within your organization. Encourage every team member to be a brand ambassador.

Establish an ongoing training program to continually educate your team and stakeholders. Regular refreshers, webinars, or interactive modules ensure that everyone remains aligned with the evolving facets of your brand, fostering a shared commitment to consistency amid growth.

Before starting any new project or new hire onboarding, make sure to have your brand guidelines (oftentimes referred to as "brand bible") easily accessible and shareable. It could be a simple PDF + Dropbox link, or if you're fancy, use tools such as Air or Brandy for an interactive showcase of your brand assets, voice, and examples.

It's important to train your team and stakeholders for consistency and understanding of how to use the guidelines. If they don't understand it it will show and letting them ask questions along the way is important for them to learn because it's sometimes when your creating things is when questions can arise.

It's important to train employees, especially those involved in marketing and customer-facing roles, on your brand guidelines. Make sure they understand the importance of consistency and how to apply the guidelines in their work.

Examine successful brands in your industry or related sectors. Benchmark their strategies, campaigns, and customer engagement tactics. What can you learn from their achievements and mishaps?

Regular assessments, utilizing tools like HubSpot, provide a comprehensive overview of brand mentions, sentiment, and reach. These audits serve as checkpoints to evaluate the ongoing alignment of your brand with objectives and audience expectations.

Scaling your startup means keeping an eye on how your brand is doing. Tools like Brand24 and surveys help you see what people are saying about your brand. This feedback is gold, helping you spot any issues and make your brand even better. It's like having a brand radar to navigate your growth.

Implement a 'Quarterly Brand Health Check.' Don't just set it and forget it; your brand needs regular check-ups. Use KPIs tied to brand perception, like Net Promoter Score (NPS), to see how the public views you. Take corrective actions based on this feedback.

Consistent branding is crucial for expanding startups. As a startup, you've built an audience that identifies with your brand. It's tempting to try every new platform and product offering for fear of missing out. However, blindly chasing trends can make you lose your core identity. 3 things to keep in mind - - First, stay grounded in your origin story. Regularly revisit your founding vision and principles. - Learn to say no. Not every trend needs to be followed; not every project is right for you. - Before you think about your ideas and opinions, your customer feedback and their sentiments are non-negotiable. This doesn't mean that you should not experiment. You should definitely, but with the right balance.

Adapting is important because I recently had a brand refresh and It's being incorporated because there is definitely a mismatch using two different brands and it's noticeable. I've removed the old branding first in order to focus on the new.

Create a 'Brand Evolution Map.' As your startup scales, regularly update this map with insights and shifts in your market. This will serve as a living document that helps you decide when a brand refresh or pivot is needed.

In the journey of scaling your startup, don't forget your community – the people who believe in your vision. They can be your greatest allies in shaping your brand. By involving them, you build trust and loyalty while spreading your brand's influence far and wide. It's a win-win partnership!

Launch a 'Community Ideas Portal.' Enable your community to submit and vote on ideas they want to see from your brand. It's a powerful way to keep your ears to the ground and make your community feel heard.

In the dynamic realm of brand development, community involvement is the cornerstone of sustainable growth. Beta testing stands as a gateway, ushering users into the product's evolution. This inclusive approach fosters active participation and nurtures brand loyalty by actively implementing community feedback. Simultaneously, advisory boards, featuring community voices, steer brand decisions. Strategies align with community expectations. Consistent brand values build trust by echoing beliefs. Recognizing contributions fosters a deeper bond, offering exclusivity. Collaboration forges an enduring partnership.

I truly believe that in the early stages, the real brand value of a startup is that of the founder/founders. They are the face of the company and any all investments they receive in the early stages is a result of their credibility and personal trust. Hence, it might not be in their best interest to spend a lot of time pondering over the color palette or the logo dimensions, both of which would inevitably evolve over time.

Having a consistent brand across the board will help people identify it and will start to get to know it no matter where they see it. That's what you want so your brand can grow as well.

Always have a 'Brand Emergency Kit.' This includes ready-to-go PR statements, social media posts, and internal memos for various situations. In a crisis, having these materials can save precious time and help maintain brand consistency.

A big part of your brand is how your customers experience your product. At Industrious, we made sure we created the same experience for our members no matter what location you visited. We were able to maintain our high standards and scale the experience by meticulously documenting and reviewing everything. We had what we called our “black book standards” which laid out everything from what brand of soap do we use in the bathrooms to what color markers are allowed on the front desk (no neon colors). We also added systems to things you usually can’t systematize. Something like “surprise and delights.” We actually had a math formula for how many we ran each month. It’s this level of detail that allows you to scale an experience.

Once you start scaling up, it's time to create a "university" whose mission is to get your people immersed in a clearly defined culture. You have to spell out where the organization is going and how you'll get there. Netflix once created a presentation that was widely shared, "Netflix Culture: Freedom and Responsibility". The visual and other sensory aspects of the brand are relatively easy to maintain standards over. The harder part in many organizations is to get their people to deliver a distinctly recognizable brand experience. That's usually because the culture was not explicitly imparted.