A Brand That Only Exists on the Website

Where the identity actually appears

A rebrand or a new site produces a considered identity, applied carefully to the website.

Meanwhile the van carries lettering from four years ago, the invoice comes from accounting software with a default template, the quote is a word processor document, and the email signature is plain text.

A customer encounters most of those before they encounter the website, or after, and the impression they form is of the whole sequence rather than of any one item.

Which means the effort went into the touchpoint that is frequently the least seen.

The list nobody makes

• The van or vehicle.
• The invoice and the quote.
• The email signature.
• Business cards and any printed material.
• Workwear and site signage.
• The listing photographs and profile images.
• Automated messages from any system.

Write it out for your own business and count how many carry the current identity. For most, it is one or two out of seven.

Why it matters more than it sounds

Not because customers are assessing your design.

Consistency is read as organisation, and inconsistency is read as improvisation, without anybody consciously noticing either.

A quote arriving in a document that looks nothing like the website raises a small question about whether this is the same operation.

For higher-value work, where somebody is deciding whether you are established enough to trust with a large job, that small question has a cost.

The effect is cumulative rather than dramatic, which is why it is easy to ignore and worth fixing.

The order to fix them

By how many people see each, which is not the order people usually choose.

The van, if you have one, which is seen by more people than your website and by people who are not looking for you.

The invoice and quote, which are seen by every customer at the moment they are deciding or paying.

The email signature, which appears on every message you send.

Then workwear, cards, and the rest.

The first three cover most of the exposure and are the cheapest to change, since two of them are a template and a settings field.

A worked example

A business spent on a new website and identity, which they were pleased with.

Six months later a customer mentioned that the quote document had looked like it came from a different company, which prompted an audit.

Their quote was a word processor template from before the rebrand, their invoices carried the old logo, and their email signature had no logo at all.

Fixing all three took an afternoon: a new quote template, the logo uploaded into the accounting software, and a signature set up on every device.

The van was rewrapped the following spring, which was the only item with a real cost.

Their observation was that the afternoon had done more for how established they looked than the website had, and had cost nothing.

Documents are the cheapest win

Worth separating, because they are usually the worst and easiest to fix.

Accounting and invoicing software all allow a logo, colours, and sometimes a typeface, and most businesses have never opened those settings.

The same applies to quote templates, booking confirmations, and anything else a system generates.

Half an hour in the settings of two or three systems changes what every customer sees at the two most important moments, which are deciding and paying.

Check what those documents currently look like by generating one and reading it as a customer would, which is a check nobody does.

Consistency beats quality here

The point that makes this achievable.

Three touchpoints carrying the same modest identity look better than one carrying an excellent identity and two carrying nothing.

Which means the useful action is applying what you have everywhere rather than improving what you have.

A simple wordmark in one colour, used on the van, the invoice, and the site, produces the impression that the elaborate version applied inconsistently does not.

That also makes this a task for an afternoon rather than a project, since applying is faster than designing.

Write down the specification

The thing that keeps it consistent afterwards.

One page: the logo files and where they are, the colour codes for screen and print, the typeface, and how the business name is written.

Give it to anybody producing anything, including the signwriter, the printer, and whoever builds the next website.

The name matters more than people expect: whether it is capitalised, whether Limited or Ltd is used, and whether there is an ampersand or the word and.

Those small variations are what make a business appear in four slightly different forms across its own material.

Whoever answers the phone is a touchpoint too

Worth adding, since the list above is entirely visual and the impression is not.

How the phone is answered, what the voicemail says, and whether the greeting uses the current business name are all part of the same consistency.

A voicemail recorded before a name change, or one that gives no business name at all, undoes some of what the visual work achieved.

Record it properly once, with the current name, hours, and an alternative route, and check it after any change to either.

It takes two minutes and it sits at the point where somebody has decided to make contact, which is later in the sequence than anything on the visual list.

The counter-case

Consistency is not worth much on its own.

A business with immaculate branding across seven touchpoints and no reviews, poor photographs, and a slow website has spent effort in the wrong place.

Some inconsistency is also invisible: a customer is not comparing your invoice against your website, and small differences in shade or typeface go entirely unnoticed.

And a very small operation may reasonably decide that an unbranded van and a plain invoice are appropriate, particularly where the work speaks for itself and customers arrive by referral.

Fix the three cheapest touchpoints, write the specification down, and stop there unless the business is competing on appearance.

The afternoon

1. List every place a customer sees you.
2. Count how many carry the current identity.
3. Generate an invoice and a quote and read them.
4. Add the logo in your accounting software.
5. Set the email signature on every device.
6. Write the one-page specification.
7. Plan the van for when it is next practical.

Step three is the one that produces the surprise, since the documents every customer receives are the ones nobody in the business has looked at.

What a vehicle actually produces is covered in the job that came from a van sign.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.