Whether you’re a national gym chain or a global fast-food outlet, brand consistency is always a top priority. As your business expands and you continue to open new locations, it’s crucial to keep your brand consistent across all touchpoints. Your signage is a key part of this process, and adopting a uniform approach early on will help you to create a strong, cohesive identity for your company.
There are a few things to consider when developing a plan for safeguarding your brand across all your sites.
1. Make sure your signage is on brand
From the window signage in the individual shopfronts, to billboards by the freeway and illuminated digital signs – all your branding should have a consistent look and feel. This ensures that customers can easily identify your business, no matter where they are. Your signage should reflect your brand personality, and any deviation from this could confuse or turn off potential customers.
2. Keep it simple
Your network of branded assets might be a multilayered system of physical and digital signage across several markets with a sophisticated maintenance schedule, but to your audience, it’s gotta be simple. Streamline the aesthetics and core message behind your signage, so that it’s easy for customers to understand and digest. Clear message, zero clutter.
3. Find the balance between uniformity and flexibility
What do we mean by this? For example, if you have multiple locations, it could be more efficient to use standardised templates for your signage. This helps to ensure that all your signs are consistent and easy to produce. The downside of this of course is that being too regimented makes slight tweaks and adjustments much more difficult – think “transcreation for foreign markets”, or “rebranding inefficiencies”.
While it’s important to maintain a consistent brand identity, you should also be flexible when it comes to your signage. Each location is different, and your signage should reflect this. Take into account the specific needs of each site when designing your signs.
The trick is to find the right balance between standardised templates for efficient production, without adopting a “one size fits all” approach that causes a portion of your branded assets to miss the mark completely.
Sounds difficult, doesn’t it? This brings us to the final point…
4. Work with a professional
Effectively managing your signage network in a way that safeguards your brand across all your sites is a big project, and one that is constantly operating in the background. Most large organisations have plenty of other big projects to deal with, which is why it’s much more efficient to trust a dedicated sign management firm with your branded assets.
By bringing a third party on-board to plan, execute and maintain your brand’s network of signage across multiple platforms in various markets, you can rest assured that all branded assets are:
- Cohesive with your brand messaging
- In optimal condition at all times, to reflect the professionalism of your business
- Tailored to target audiences based on location, demographic, etc.
- Routinely serviced/maintained for longevity
- Efficiently updated in the event of rebranding, mergers, acquisitions etc.
Safeguard your brand across all your sites, with SignManager
At SignManager, we help large corporations improve the way they manage their brand across all their locations. Our services and systems are designed to manage our clients’ brands for its entire lifecycle across their network. Get in touch to learn more.
