The Quiet Engine Behind Singapore’s Most Trusted Online Brands
Let’s think of the brands that we trust the most. They’re the ones that we go to without a second thought. They’re the ones that we tell our coworkers about. They’re the ones that we trust even before we’ve had any interaction with them over the past weeks.
That’s not something that’s developed over time. It’s developed over time because of the consistent experiences that we have with the brand at every point where we interact with the brand. And that’s where the website of the brand plays a huge role.
Being consistent with your brand means that you have to ensure that your business is represented with one single look and one single voice across every point where your audience is trying to find you. It’s a very simple concept. It’s one of the biggest skipped aspects of creating a website in Singapore. It’s one of the most money-laden aspects of creating a website.
What Brand Consistency Really Means on a Website
Brand consistency on a Singapore business website is not just a matter of placing the same logo on each page. This is a basic necessity, not a strategy.
Real brand consistency on a Singapore business website means that all elements, be it visual or written, communicate a unified message and look like a single, coherent whole.
Does this mean that if a visitor clicks from the home page to the services page to the about page to the contact form, the experience should be one single, unbroken whole? Absolutely. Does this mean that if this kind of coherence is lacking, the visitor will not be aware of it, even if they cannot quite put their finger on what’s wrong with it?
Yes. Does this mean that a page with a varying font for headings, varying button styles from page to page, varying photography from clean product photography to casual lifestyle photography—does this not communicate a sense of disorder, no matter how effective the writing on the page might be?
For Singapore-based businesses that hire professionals to design their web presence, brand consistency is more than just “looking the part.” It’s a key way to win over visitors and keep them engaged. There’s significant business value.
But is the relationship between brand consistency and business performance based on conjecture or hunches? Nope. There’s solid academic research and industry data to support the value of brand consistency. In the 2019 State of Brand Consistency report from Lucidpress, now called Marq, a survey of over 200 brand pros found that “a consistent brand presence across all touchpoints can drive a 23 percent increase in revenue.” What’s holding businesses back from achieving this level of brand consistency? A lack of brand guidelines, tools to enforce the brand, and a lack of internal understanding of the importance of brand consistency.
For Singapore-based businesses that operate in a market with plenty of choice and where decisions are often made quickly, the opportunity to boost revenue by 23 percent based solely on brand consistency is a powerful incentive to invest the time and resources into achieving this level of brand consistency.
According to research from Nielsen Norman Group, visitors to a website have a “mental model of how the site should work.” When the site doesn’t conform to this “mental model,” the visitor experiences “surprise.” Surprise is typically a negative emotion. An internally consistent website allows visitors to quickly understand how the site works and confidently navigate the site. As a result, the visitor’s mental resources are free to concentrate on the merits of the product or service rather than trying to understand the site.
How Inconsistent Branding Loses Singaporean Customers
To understand the value of brand consistency, it’s helpful to understand how a lack of brand consistency hurts businesses. When a website is disorganized or looks “chaotic,” the visitor may question the quality of the products or services offered. When pages aren’t neatly aligned, content appears jumbled, or the quality of the images is wildly inconsistent, the visitor may question whether the same lack of attention to detail is applied to the products or services. In Singapore’s discerning market, this type of visual inconsistency may signal underlying operational inconsistency.
It undercuts the notion that marketing efforts are continually building awareness. When your Google Ads, your Instagram graphics, and your website all look quite different from one another with respect to color schemes, fonts, and photo styles, you’re not building on the brand awareness each one should be building. You’re not getting three reinforcing impressions of the same brand. You’re getting three separate first impressions of what seems to be three different businesses.
It creates friction at critical points for conversion. When a visitor clicks on a contact page that’s visually inconsistent with the rest of your site and for a moment wonders if they’re still on the right page, you’re creating friction when you should be building confidence.
It sends a message that your brand isn’t being actively managed. When you’re a Singapore B2B business, where the quality of your management and attention to detail are part of what you’re selling, a site that’s visually inconsistent sends a message to prospective clients that your digital presence isn’t being actively managed.
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The elements that need to be consistent across your entire Singapore site
In order to ensure a high degree of brand consistency with your Singapore website design, you need to set standards for these elements and implement them everywhere, without exception:
- – Colour system: Identify your main brand color, secondary color, and neutral colors with exact HEX, RGB, and CMYK values. These values should be used consistently across your site. Color drift, or slightly differing shades of the same color on different pages, is more apparent than you might expect.
- – Typography system: Identify the exact fonts, font sizes, and font weights for all text elements on your site, such as H1, H2, H3 headers, body copy, captions, button text, and form labels. This should be a documented system that’s implemented everywhere across your site and with every new addition to your content.
- Logo use guidelines – define the types of logos that are used, the minimum size they should be used at, the amount of “clear space,” and the types of backgrounds they look good on. If the logo is used with a shadow, without a shadow, stretched to fit the background, and with colors that aren’t officially sanctioned, then no one is paying attention to the way the brand is represented.
- Photography and Imagery Style – define the look and feel of the imagery used throughout the site. This includes the style of the photography used throughout the site. If the site uses bright and cheerful photography one minute and dark and moody the next, it’s as if the conversation is disjointed.
- Voice and Tone – the words used on the site are as important as the way they look. A formal and precise tone used on one page and a conversational, first-person tone used on the next will make it seem as though two different brands are communicating. Develop a voice and tone document that defines the way the brand speaks and use it to inform the way the site is written.
- Layout patterns – If there is a pattern in the layout of the service pages, such as a pattern of headline, paragraph, feature list, call-to-action, then this pattern should be consistent across all service pages. This helps with the cognitive load of return visitors and gives the appearance of a methodical brand.
Building a Brand Consistency System That Stands the Test of Time
One of the challenges that Singapore businesses face after the successful completion of the web design project is how to maintain the level of consistency achieved in the initial phases. This is particularly true as new content is introduced by team members who may not have been part of the process initially. A new service page is introduced without checking the template that has been set. A new image is uploaded without the standard image color treatment. Over time, these small inconsistencies build up and undermine the brand.
The answer is a document that outlines all the standards of the design system and makes them easily accessible to anyone on the team who is adding or managing content on the site.
So, a good brand guidelines document for a Singapore SME website doesn’t have to be a giant, doorstopper of a book. A well-organized 10 to 15-page document covering your color system, typography, logo use, image guidelines, and voice guidelines will suffice, providing you a useful reference point to keep everything consistent, without having to be a designer to decipher the meaning of it all.
And, when you add a template library of pre-designed page layouts and content blocks for your most frequently used website content, the obstacle to producing consistent content diminishes significantly.
Brand consistency as a compounding competitive advantage
The business world works like this: consistency is king, and consistency compounds at every stage of business, for every business, including Singapore-based companies. This means that when a user visits your website and it matches everything they have come to expect from your social, your email, and your business card—exactly the same look and feel—the pathways associated with your brand become strengthened.
Over time, this results in the most valuable asset a brand could ask for: the ability to be recognized without much effort from the audience and to establish trust even before the claim is assessed.
So, the most successful brands in Singapore do not look at consistency as a project related to the launch of their website, as a one-off process related to the look and feel of their website. Instead, they look at it as a process related to the operations of their website, requiring constant maintenance and commitment from the people involved.
However, if you are dealing with a professional web design company in Singapore, then the best way to achieve this would be to incorporate the consistency standards into the initial project brief.
The most successful brands in the digital arena of Singapore may not necessarily be the ones with the biggest budgets or the most cutting-edge technology. They may, however, be the ones whose audience has encountered their brand enough times and consistently enough to have developed a relationship even before the initial conversation begins.
This, of course, is the power of consistent branding, and it begins with your website.