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 The Importance of Consistency Over Time When It Comes to Your Brand

Branding is a lot more than logos and fonts. Branding speaks to the feelings evoked in your ideal customer when they encounter your business name, symbol, mark, information, content, ads, or products. However, how do you maintain consistency overtime when it comes to your branding while also keeping up with modern times, ensuring your audience knows who you are for years to come?

* Look at Examples - Check out long term brands that you know about including Dove, Tide, Martha Stewart, and others. Look at their marketing and advertising over the years. What do you notice? How do they evolve to modern times and values while maintaining the know-like-trust principle through time?

* Expect Steady Brand Evolution - Over the years, the needs of your market will change. Their values will change slightly with the culture or how they express those values will change. For example, killer technologies might end the need for one product but ramp up the need for another. Your business needs to be ready to face those changes by making slight changes over time to your branding.

* Understand Your Mission - Look at your mission statement. Regardless of changes in technology or values of a demographic, that mission statement probably doesn't need to change. But seek to understand the mission statement more fully as you move through time and grow your business.

* Build Your Branding Foundation - Create brand guides and templates to use throughout your business in every single department. If it's just you, you still need to take the time to develop your branding guide and templates to ensure consistency throughout platforms, online and offline. It's a lot simpler to keep track if you have that foundation to look to.

* Focus on Providing Solutions - Just like you started out by providing solutions to your audience for their problems, that will continue. However, you may choose to add more solutions to more of your ideal customers' problems, which may change your branding slightly but not the mission.

* Roll Out Changes Slowly - You don't really need to do a complete brand makeover from top to bottom and announce it suddenly. Instead, for a long-lived brand that a lot of people love, you may want to roll out changes in your fonts, logos, images, and so forth slowly to bring it to more modern times without pushing your audience away. For example, Tide is spending a lot of money adding men to their commercials which reflects new branding for a new target audience that targets the men in the house and not just the women because family dynamics have changed over time.

It's important to be consistent in your branding, not just across platforms, but also over time. Your audience might stay the same, but depending on your products or services, they might not stay the same - such as with the laundry detergent example. But you don't want to change so much you're unrecognizable to your ideal audience. You want people to come across your stuff a few months or years from now and recognize it as something they like and trust.