According to Lucidpress, consistent brand presentation can increase revenue by up to 23%. However, in practice, ensuring brand consistency can be challenging. As organizations scale, they create multiple web properties: custom landing pages, blogs, and microsites. Each introduces new opportunities for inconsistency without proper guardrails. Over time, these inconsistencies create compounding costs that hurt brand trust, ultimately hurting customer conversion and retention and slowing down the pace of execution. 

Companies can overcome this challenge by investing in design systems. These systems help enforce a consistent brand experience across all touchpoints while improving cross-functional collaboration, resulting in faster time to market without compromising brand integrity. 

In this blog post, we’ll explore the hidden costs of brand inconsistencies and how investing in a design system can prevent them.

Design systems: Building the foundation for a scalable, consistent brand

A design system helps organizations conceptualize, create, and iterate on web experiences and collaborate cross-functionally. It’s the single source of truth about how the brand manifests in the digital experience. By creating a design system, brands can: 

• Create a consistent brand experience: Design systems automatically ensure that any design decision across a property is consistent with brand guidelines, whether typography or font size. 
• Increase execution speed: Instead of building new pages from scratch, teams can use reusable components, accelerating the time to market. Additionally, if teams update guidelines or need to make any changes, developers can easily change one part of the codebase to replicate it across others. ‍
• Improve cross-functional collaboration: With a shared source of truth, developers, marketers, and designers have a shared language and understanding of the brand guidelines, which can help them work more effectively together.

The compounding costs of foregoing investment in design systems

Despite the advantages, brands often delay investing in design systems because of the significant time investment. Teams must audit their existing digital experience for inconsistencies, align on the solution, implement the new design system across all their digital properties, document everything, and train team members on the new system. This is a significant undertaking, but without these systems, brands risk creating an inconsistent brand experience across their websites. Over time, these inconsistencies can impact business outcomes and team performance in several ways: 

1. Reduce conversion and retention

If your website doesn’t follow consistent brand guidelines (like conflicting UX behavior or mismatched fonts), it will confuse and frustrate your customers, resulting in lower conversions and poor customer retention. Here are a few different ways this can play out: 

• Increase abandoned visits: Customers might get confused about your brand and leave your site. For example, if a customer visits your product page but the style or brand treatment on the page doesn’t match the rest of your website, it can be a disorienting experience, leaving them confused and even prompting them to exit the page altogether. 
• Reduce conversion: Inconsistent user interfaces create friction in conversion funnels, reducing completion rates. For example, when Brad Frost created United Airlines’ design system, he streamlined three different date pickers across the homepage, booking page, and logged-in experience into one. This reduced friction by simplifying how users entered dates into the website, reducing cognitive overload, and improving the overall user experience. 
• Reduce brand recall: When customers encounter inconsistent brand experiences, they struggle to recognize your identity across touchpoints, which hurts brand recall and loyalty. Think of how confusing it would be if Starbucks used its familiar green logo in stores and on coffee cups but different colors and fonts in its app (like bright orange Comic Sans font). Customers would struggle to connect these as the same brand, hurting Starbucks’s brand recognition.  

2. Erode brand trust and credibility 

Brand inconsistencies can impact how customers perceive your company. At best, they make you look careless. At worst, they can make you look unprofessional, eroding trust and loyalty. Over time, this can impact your standing in the market and lead to market share loss. 

For example, if you’re a financial services company, and your navigation bar looks different in one part of the app versus another, users might feel as if the website is “broken,” which might raise other questions about your product’s capabilities. This doubt can make it more likely for users to switch to another service, or not recommend your product to their network. 

3. Create operational inefficiencies

Marketing teams can leverage design systems to ship on-brand campaign assets quickly. Without them, they have to redesign components from scratch, which slows down execution and delays time to market. Redesigning these components also introduces room for human error, resulting in brand inconsistencies that require manual effort to resolve. Over time, these inefficiencies shift teams from a proactive optimization mode to a reactive, firefighting mode. 

This inefficiency also extends to maintaining or updating existing assets. Without a design system, developers must manually update the same component across all marketing assets. A design system makes this process more efficient by automatically propagating updates across all instances of the components. Developers must change one part of the codebase to automatically update the component across all assets, simplifying the project's scope and effort. Marketing teams can leverage this agility to experiment and optimize their brand’s identity. 

4. Introduce (and deepen) cross-functional collaboration friction 

Without a shared source of truth, cross-functional teams, such as design and development, might make assumptions about how your brand identity translates into actual digital components and experiences. This can introduce friction in the relationship or, if teams already operate in siloes, worsen misalignment. Ultimately, this weakens an organization’s agility to launch bold initiatives that require cross-functional collaboration (like rebrands, new product rollouts, etc.).

Reduce brand inconsistencies with Webflow Shared Libraries

A website platform can make it easy to build and deploy a design system and maintain brand consistency while scaling. Webflow takes this further by enabling true reusability, consistency, and change management through multi-site design systems. 

Webflow Shared Libraries enable brands to easily share, discover, and experiment with components and style guidelines across all their web properties. Whether you’re making minor tweaks or executing a major rebrand, Shared Libraries provide governance and scalable change management flows that empower marketers to build on-brand experiences. Here’s how: 

• Centralize: Share variables (i.e., for color, typography, spacing, etc.), components, and assets across the organization. 
• Safeguard: Leverage roles and permissions to control who can share, install, and manage Shared Libraries.  
• Review: Each designer can review and accept updates to Shared Libraries when ready, rather than rushing to implement changes all at once, ensuring a smooth and stable deployment.‍
• Evolve: As your brand evolves, update your Shared Library just once. After the updates are accepted, Webflow cascades them across all sites — no extra effort required.

• ‍Optimize: Brands can use Webflow Optimize to run experiments on components across all their sites, making it easy to test and optimize a brand’s visual identity. For example, you can use Webflow to test the effectiveness of a particular CTA button sitewide so that you can make data-driven updates to your design system.

Turn brand consistency into your competitive advantage 

Brand inconsistencies can feel like death by a thousand paper cuts — each successive one chips away at your customers' trust and erodes brand loyalty. But it doesn’t have to be this way. 

By investing in a platform like Webflow, your design system can live in the same place where your website is built. This eliminates the time-consuming back-and-forth handoffs between designers and developers (that become increasingly complex as your digital presence scales) and reduces the risk of brand inconsistencies across your design system. 

Further, with a design system that curtails this handoff process, the process of accessing, managing, and updating components is simpler and centralized. Best of all, this streamlined approach speeds up development cycles, resulting in faster time to market and greater brand consistency at scale. 

Ready to take the leap? Learn more about Shared Libraries and get started with Webflow today to design consistent, on-brand web experiences.