Brand cohesion can create instant engagement. It can also cultivate more loyal customers and a clear path to dynamic growth.

In fact, no matter who your customers are and where they encounter your company, brand cohesion can give you a smarter way to stand out and connect within seconds.

Here’s how — and how you can use cohesive branding to set your business apart and above the competition.

What Does Brand Cohesion Really Mean?

Brand cohesion describes how consistent a company’s look, feel, voice, and messaging are across various platforms, media, and marketing channels. As such, brand cohesion may also be known as “brand coherence.”

Either way, it’s about more than just colors and fonts. Specifically, cohesive branding can showcase your company’s:

To do that, cohesive branding involves nearly every element of your business’s brand, including (but not limited to) the:

Logo
Tagline
Website
Business cards
Store or venue signage
Any print and digital marketing materials

With that, here’s the difference between a cohesive brand and an incoherent brand:

Cohesive brands are the same across the board: Wherever customers find the brand, it’s delivering the same experience. The logo is exactly the same, with consistent offers, calls-to-action, and customer communications.
Noncohesive brands are all over the place: These brands are incoherent and difficult to recognize from one place to the next because they never the look, sound, or feel exactly the same. That can be confusion and offputting.

Whether brands are just starting out or they’re trying to grow in new spaces, brand cohesion is key — and it can be wildly helpful when it’s time to:

Develop or refine brand identity
Launch new products and services
Roll out new marketing strategies and campaigns
Announce the latest offers, deals, or releases
Differentiate a brand from the competition

That’s true for hotels, restaurants, bars, food and beverage brands, and pretty much any brand in and outside of the hospitality, entertainment, and lifestyle spaces.

Why Is Brand Cohesion Important?

It doesn't matter how cool your logo looks — or how snappy your tagline is — if your branding is weak, inconsistent, or indistinguishable from the competition. That’s because brand cohesion can be essential to making connections and convincing an audience to become your new customers (or to continue being your customer).

The true power of brand cohesion lies in the facts that it can:

Build trust: Consistency can communicate dependability and reliability. Wherever customers see your brand, it’s the same, and they can rely on that. Over time, that can foster credibility and instill a real sense of trust.
Convey professionalism: It takes effort, attention to detail, and diligence to show up the same way in several different places. Cohesive brands go the extra mile to do that, conveying a level of care, organization, and professionalism that all send positive signals to potential and established customers.
Differentiate your brand: Cohesive brands stand out while showcasing what makes them unique. That can make it easier to drive more conversions in different spaces.
Make your brand memorable: Cohesive brands are easy to spot in a sea of options. With that, customers can recall jingles or special offers on the spot simply by seeing consistent messaging over and over again. In other words, brand cohesion can end up having a Pavlovian effect on customers when done right.
Establish an emotional connection: Branding cohesion can show your customers how your company fits with their values, goals, or aspirations. That can tie customers to your brand on a deep level, making them go out of their way to patronize your business because they believe in it — and they want you to succeed.

Practical Tips for Cohesive Branding: How to Create a Cohesive Brand

Better brand cohesion can start any time, and it’s easier to activate (and keep up) with these proven strategies for success.

1. Define your brand identity.

Develop or review the core elements of your brand identity to make sure they fit your vision, your audience, and your objectives. This can include choosing, creating, or updating your:

Logo
Fonts and colors
Images and videos
Taglines, offers, and calls-to-action

Remember, your brand identity will include visual materials and language, and these components need to match and align with each other. That’s the foundation for strong brand cohesion.

2. Craft a consistent message.

What is the first thing you want your audience to think, feel, and experience when they see your brand?

Are you trying to invoke a sense of worldliness, luxury, and sophistication? Is your brand more focused on comfort, convenience, and accessibility? Or are you going for something else altogether?

Whatever it is, the messaging needs to be exactly the same everywhere your company has a presence, including:

In person, at your place of business
Online on your website, social media, paid ads, and elsewhere
In print materials, like flyers, mailers, and billboards

Deploying this can be somewhat easy because the same basic elements can be copied from one format and pasted onto the next (you won’t have to reinvent the wheel every time to get your message out).

3. Create a Brand Style Guide.

Document the look, voice, feel, and overall “experience” of your brand identity in a Brand Style Guide. This Guide is basically a resource for your team. It helps anyone keep the cohesive branding journey going on the right track at any point in the future.

4. Run quality checks.

People make mistakes, and you don’t want those mistakes to reflect poorly on your brand. So, plan for a routine quality control check on your brand’s marketing assets and materials. A quick check can uncover glaring errors or even embarrassing oversights that you can fix before your customers point them out.

5. Train your team and plan updates.

Go over the mission, values, and objectives of your brand and what it takes to maintain cohesive branding. This doen’t have to be a long, boring training, but some type of company-wide instruction should happen to:

Make sure everyone’s on the same page.
Give your team the opportunity to ask questions or share concerns.
Go over customer feedback on brand cohesion.
Check in on opportunities to improve branding cohesion.

Ultimately, brand cohesion can streamline and turbocharge your business’s ability to connect and communicate with an audience — and to build that audience into more loyal customers.

Ready to find out how cohesive branding can fuel your brand with more customers and greater success?

If so, let’s talk. We handle brand cohesion, visual marketing, social media marketing, and so much more for new and established brands nationwide, delivering mind-blowing results quickly. We’d love to do the same for you.

Cohesive Branding: What, Why & How to Get It Right