Staying consistent without a rulebook

Consistency is treated as a matter of following rules and is actually a matter of not having to remember them. A business stays consistent because the consistent thing is the easiest thing to do, and becomes inconsistent the moment staying on-brand requires effort at the point of writing.

What has to match, and what does not

Not everything. Insisting on total uniformity across channels produces stiff, obviously-corporate output and is also impossible. Three things have to match and the rest can flex.

• What you claim. The promise on the website, in the advert and in the first email have to be the same promise. This is the one that actually breaks businesses, because a customer who was sold one thing and met another has been misled regardless of intent.
• Who you say you are for. A site that addresses small restaurants and advertising that addresses hospitality groups are two businesses.
• The name, the mark and the colour. Recognition requires sameness and nothing else.

What can differ: the length, the formality, the amount of detail, and the register. A social post and a specification sheet should not read the same, and a business that makes them read the same has mistaken consistency for monotony.

Make it structural rather than disciplined

1. 01Write the five standard messages once and reuse them: confirmation, delay, refusal, refund, and the answer to the question you get weekly. Most inconsistency is improvised writing under time pressure, and these remove the improvisation.
2. 02Keep one place where the current claim lives, in the exact words. Every channel copies from it rather than paraphrasing it, because paraphrase is where drift starts.
3. 03Keep the logo and the colour values in one accessible file, so nobody is sampling a colour off a screenshot.
4. 04Decide the two or three channels you will actually maintain and close the rest. An abandoned profile with two-year-old information is an inconsistency that outlives every rule you write.

The audit worth doing once a year

An hour, and it finds things no amount of guideline-writing would.

1. 01Search your own business name and list every result on the first two pages. That is where you exist, including the places you forgot.
2. 02Open each one and check four things: the claim, the prices, the contact details and the logo.
3. 03Fix or remove anything out of date, starting with contact details, because a wrong phone number is worse than an old logo.
4. 04Write the list down with the date, so next year's audit takes fifteen minutes instead of an hour.

Where consistency genuinely pays

Recognition is cumulative and fragile. Somebody who sees your name four times in different forms has seen four unrelated things; somebody who sees the same thing four times has begun to know you. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why the boring sameness of a mark and a colour is worth more than any individually clever execution.

The moment somebody else starts writing

Consistency survives one person doing everything without any effort, and breaks the week a second person is involved. That is predictable, so it is worth preparing for rather than discovering.

1. 01Hand over examples, not instructions. The five standard messages and the sentence pairs do more than any description of how we sound.
2. 02Give them the claim in exact words and tell them not to paraphrase it. Paraphrase is where a promise quietly changes.
3. 03Decide who can speak on behalf of the business and who cannot. Not a hierarchy, a list, because the absence of one means everybody assumes they can.
4. 04Review the first run of everything, then spot check. The review is the handover; skipping it and complaining later is the usual pattern.

The same preparation covers a freelancer, a part-time assistant and anything drafting on your behalf, which is why it is worth doing once properly rather than three times badly.