Branding is more than just a logo—it’s the foundation of trust, recognition, and credibility. For multi-location businesses, ensuring brand consistency can feel like an uphill battle, especially when:
- Franchisees and local managers use different logos, fonts, or color schemes.
- Locations take marketing into their own hands, creating unauthorized assets.
- Marketing materials are scattered across multiple platforms or stored on local drives, making access and version control difficult.
Most businesses don’t realize how much brand consistency challenges cost them—until the damage is already done. Once you know the dangers and understand the importance of brand consistency, you can ensure you’re avoiding the pitfalls. Let’s look at how these sneaky cost leaks occur:
5 Ways Inconsistency Costs You
1. Customer Confusion Causes Lost Revenue
When customers encounter different logos, color palettes, messaging, or even service levels across locations, it creates uncertainty and confusion. A customer who visits two branches of the same brand but experiences wildly different atmospheres may begin to question the brand’s reliability—and certainly its consistency of product or service as well.
Example: A customer walks into two locations of the same chain, expecting the same experience. The first is bright, upbeat, and promoting a new seasonal menu. A week later, they visit another location where the signage is faded, the team wears different uniforms, and no one mentions the seasonal promo. That moment of confusion sparks doubt—chipping away at brand trust and possibly future sales.
Fact: Consistent branding across all channels can increase revenue by up to 23% (Lucidpress study).
2. Redundancy Inflates Marketing Costs
Without a streamlined system for branding, corporate teams and locations often duplicate work, leading to wasted time and inflated costs.
Common issues include:
- Recreating the same flyers or templates multiple times. This happens more than you’d want to know!
- Paying for last-minute reprints due to design errors. Head smack!
- Ordering signage or materials that already exist but aren’t easily accessible—a bit like buying extra food at the grocery store that you already have in the pantry. Sound familiar?
Example: Here’s how it can happen—a franchisee, unaware of a corporate-approved signage vendor, orders custom signs from a local supplier, leading to additional expenses and inconsistent branding across locations. There is a better way.
3. Brand Reputation Gets Tanked
Brand consistency challenges do more than just create visual discrepancies—they erode your brand’s credibility. Poorly designed or incorrect marketing materials can make your brand look unprofessional and unreliable.
Example: A location manager creates a low-quality flyer with the wrong brand colors, incorrect pricing, and pixelated images. Customers who see this associate the poor-quality marketing with the brand itself, weakening overall trust.
Over time, inconsistent branding causes customers to lose confidence in the brand, affecting both retention and reputation—and it’s hard to recover from that deficit. This again underscores the importance of brand consistency.
4. Operational Inefficiencies Increase
You’ve likely been here before. When branding assets aren’t consolidated in a centralized spot, local and corporate teams can waste hours searching for the right materials, seeking approvals, or recreating assets from scratch. It’s incredibly frustrating.
Key Inefficiencies:
- Franchisees spend excessive time tracking down marketing materials.
- Corporate teams are stuck in endless cycles of approving/rejecting off-brand designs.
- Teams work in silos instead of operating as a unified brand.
Example: A marketing team member spends two hours hunting for a single approved marketing asset. That’s two hours that could have been spent on revenue-generating work instead.
5. Brand Control is Lost (Local Teams Go Rogue)
When locations can’t access corporate-approved branding assets, they resort to creating their own. This can lead to:
- Off-brand social media posts.
- Incorrect pricing or promotional details.
- Mixed customer experiences from location to location.
Example: A franchisee orders branded uniforms from a local vendor with the wrong logo and colors, leading to confusion among both employees and customers.
Why Multi-Location Businesses Struggle to Build and Maintain Brand Consistency
So why is this happening? People make mistakes, and brand inconsistency isn’t always intentional. Many businesses are challenged by:
- Lack of a centralized system for storing, securing, printing, and distributing all brand assets.
- No clear approval process, leading locations to create their own materials.
- No accountability or oversight, resulting in inconsistent branding execution.
Without a structured brand management strategy, inconsistencies inevitably creep in, harming customer perception and business efficiency.
The ROI of Fixing Brand Consistency Challenges
Investing in brand consistency isn’t just about avoiding problems—it also yields significant financial and operational benefits. You can measure the importance of brand consistency through:
- Centralized assets and templates: Having everything in one place helps corporate teams manage branding costs efficiently while ensuring consistency. They have oversight of all budgets but can enable locations to foot their own bills if desired.
- Reduced marketing costs: Streamlined production and fewer last-minute reprints keep costs in check.
- Increased customer trust and sales: Customers love, expect, and reward a consistent brand experience.
- Faster time-to-market: New campaigns and product launches are easier to implement when everything is centralized, permission-based and tied to efficient approval workflows.
Related: Best Practices for Developing Brand Consistency
Take Control of Your Brand Before It Costs You More
Inconsistent branding is more than just a visual issue—it costs your business money, credibility, and efficiency. The longer it goes unaddressed, the more difficult it becomes to correct the course.
How to Fix It: Implement a Brand Management Platform
Ignition = Your Brand Control Command Center
Ignition is our proprietary brand management platform that significantly simplifies brand management by:
- Centralizing assets so locations can access approved materials instantly.
- Empowering locations to create marketing materials within corporate guidelines.
- Streamlining approvals and ordering to eliminate back-and-forth delays.
Related: Brand Management Platforms Level Up Multi-Location Marketing
Corral the Branding Chaos
The importance of brand consistency cannot be overstated, so don’t let inconsistent branding undermine your business. We’ve helped implement and manage over 150 Ignition storefronts to simplify marketing for multi-location companies, empowering them to take control of their brand and operate more efficiently. Now that you understand the value of consistency, let’s get your brand back on track today!
