How – and why – to unify.

Achieving a unified campaign for advertising and promotional materials is never an easy task, but maintaining it is one of the hardest jobs in all of marketing. In the day-to-day production of customer communications, it’s easy for a lot of people who have a say to imagine good reasons for using different colors or typestyles, or even for changing the entire look and feel to suit a particular whim.

Resist. Resist. Resist.

In a sense, the look and feel of your advertising and other promotional materials is like your company’s clothes. Whatever your sartorial style – formal, casual, wild and crazy, irreverent, conservative – it’s the look that describes how you present yourself to the world. Changing the design in mid-campaign, or only extending the campaign look to a few of your promotional materials, is like putting on a Donald Duck tie and brown penny loafers to go with your gray Armani pinstripe. Your customers might not say anything, but they’ll find the effect unsettling.

Here are the things to keep consistent in a unified campaign.

• Theme. The theme is often encapsulated in the tagline. For example, a campaign I helped develop for Epson printers a few years ago had the theme and tagline, “Number One and Built Like It”. The theme is the campaign “umbrella”.
• Tone. Ideally, the theme suggests the tone. In the Epson campaign, the theme suggested copy and headlines that were brash and confident, almost to the point of being cocky.
• Design. We had one illustrative style for all of the Epson materials, and made consistent use of colors, typestyles, layout and other graphic elements for everything from advertising to point-of-sale. You should do no less.
• Message. Epson printers were legendary for reliability. Everything we did consistently reinforced that message.

People on the inside of a promotional campaign almost invariably get bored with it before customers do. Refrain from making capricious changes, though, and you’ll reap benefits in improved credibility.

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