Brand governance, the process of ensuring consistency and accuracy across internal and external brand channels, is not a new concept. It’s something that marketers have strived to achieve for decades. But it’s taking on new significance in 2025.

That’s because inconsistency isn’t just damaging brand perception, it’s killing profitability and stifling creative effectiveness.

Brands in the mire of inconsistency are leaving revenue on the table, to the tune of nearly £3.5 billion over the next five years. Meanwhile, brands that score in the top 20% for consistency are more likely to generate awareness, differentiate themselves from the competition and change attitudes.

The old way of achieving consistency through brand governance in the form of a brand bible or rulebook is not enough. After all, only 30% of organisations use their brand guidelines regularly and 15% don’t have any rules in the first place.

Ultimately, your brand book can never address the root cause of a consistency problem: organizational silos. The disconnect between teams is what breeds inconsistency in brand implementations and campaigns.

The symptoms that silos are getting in the way of consistency

Diagnosis is the first step towards consistency and brand governance. There are many tell-tale signs that your brand governance challenge is actually an organizational silo challenge:

• Your tech stack is bloated and inconsistent.

Multiple platforms, systems or technologies are used by teams to support marketing and the wider business. We’ve seen departments have separate CRMs, marketing tools, productivity apps and software subscriptions. Not only is this incredibly wasteful from a cost perspective, it entrenches silos within teams. Yes, some departments will always need specific tools, but your overall tech stack should be aligned across the organization wherever possible.

• You can’t build a complete picture of your audiences and measure impact.

Measurement challenges can be a sure-fire indication that silos are hindering your brand. While teams may work with different tactics, it's important they all feed into a unified measurement system so you can understand overall performance. This is vital to understand how brand and top of funnel is influencing other stages of the sales journey. Or, which tactics are working, and how audiences are behaving across channels.

• Knowledge gaps, bottlenecks and a lack of collaboration.

This can sound sinister, but it’s rare that people willfully withhold information or hoard intelligence. Unified organizations make sharing content, assets and information as easy as possible. They arm teams with all the tools to work seamlessly together, which is closely linked to a unified tech stack across the organization.

• Working across purposes.

It sounds simple, but aligning departmental with organizational goals and rewarding overall success helps to eliminate conflicting or competing priorities and will help ensure teams work to a common objective.

Breaking silos and uniting the business

Every marketing department wants to create a centralized business function where teams can adhere to the same standards while working towards the unified goals in a collaborative and supportive environment. Not only is this the key to brand and marketing success, it boosts business results.

But, like brand governance, achieving this unified business function is much easier said than done. We have developed a four-step process to help guide the unification journey and deliver a successful framework for brand governance:

• Discover

Start with a cross-functional audit of your business ecosystem to fully map out organizational silos, understand your situation, challenges and objectives. These findings can define the core metrics for success, and determine cross-market governance maturity.

• Design

With a proper audit, you can design and build an approach in line with your key objectives. This should include a rollout and communication plan featuring a strategic narrative, implementation roadmap and project RACI.

• Deploy

Implement the program in line with your rollout plan. Provide comprehensive documentation to guide the transition for different teams, regions and partners, along with extensive training to ensure all stakeholders possess the necessary skills for successful program adoption.

• Develop

Ultimately, what you’re creating is an ongoing process. You want to continually evaluate to identify growth opportunities, while enhancing and preparing the program for new challenges that may arise.
This process helped L’Oréal realign its global agency structure, establishing clear roles and responsibilities for every business unit or agency partner. As a result, L’Oréal saw a 175% increase in market adoption, scaling across 19 markets in just 12 months, with an 85% task adoption rate.

Leveling up your marketing

By bridging organizational divides and aligning teams through a centralized, collaborative framework, businesses can truly work to the same goal, and ultimately, level up marketing.

Unified teams align on strategy, tactics, executions and measurement. Not just for consistency, but for improved performance. Unified teams can outperform. When every creative and strategy is aligned to core objectives, audiences and technology for true campaign optimization, overall performance becomes greater than the sum of each individual element. Ultimately, it ensures efficiency, consistency, and long-term success.