IMPACT – 8.5/10

When you’re inside an organization, it’s easy to stop noticing the gaps. 

Like the invoice template that still sounds like a 2012 corporate firm, or the FAQ page nobody has touched in three years. From the inside, these feel like low-priority details. From the outside, they’re degrading trust.

On the other hand, an organization with strong brand coherence gives people a consistent experience. The voice in the proposal matches the voice in the rejection letter. The onboarding process reflects the same care as the pitch. 

This doesn’t happen from a style guide alone. It happens when there’s something teams can actually reach for when making decisions under pressure.

The cost of incoherence is the slow erosion of trust. 

You don’t always see it leaving. You just notice, eventually, that it’s gone.

PLAY – 7.5/10

The Brand Coherence System is a four-step audit you run once per quarter, or whenever a significant new touchpoint gets introduced.

Step 1: List your active touchpoints.

Every place someone encounters your brand: website, email footers, proposals, invoices, social bios, auto-replies, job postings, onboarding documents, meeting agendas, partnership decks. 

Step 2: Score each one against three questions.

1. Does it sound like us?
2. Does it reflect what we say we value?
3. Would someone encountering only this touchpoint get an accurate picture of who we are?

Score each: Yes, Partially, or No. 

Step 3: Identify your highest-traffic gaps.

Not every “Partially” needs immediate attention.

Focus on touchpoints that most people see, or that appear at high-stakes moments: first contact, onboarding, conflict resolution.

A “No” on a low-traffic internal doc is different from a “No” on your automated welcome email.

Step 4: Assign one owner and one fix per gap.

A gap without an owner doesn’t get fixed. For each priority touchpoint, name who is responsible and set a two-week window. 

SUSTAINABILITY – 8.5/10

3 Ways to Keep the Brand Coherence System Sustainable:

1) Make the reference point accessible.
The three audit questions from Step 2 need to live somewhere people actually look. Put them in a Notion page, a pinned Slack message, ot at the top of a shared template doc.

2) Before anything goes out, ask: Does this sound like us?
“Is this on-brand?” tends to trigger design thinking. “Does this sound like us?” invites people to trust their own familiarity with the brand, which is usually more reliable than a checklist.

3) Keep the scope small.
The quickest way to kill this system is to let it grow into a brand audit. A rewritten paragraph is a fix. A full redesign is a project. If the list of gaps starts feeling unmanageable, the scope has crept. Pull it back to the three questions and one owner per gap. 

Takeaway

In season one of The White Lotus, Shane spent his entire honeymoon furious that he was promised the Pineapple Suite and given something else.

Insufferable as a character, sure. But was he actually being unreasonable? Or was there just a gap between what was offered and what was delivered?

Closing those gaps is how you build the kind of trust that makes the Shanes of the world easier to deal with—and less likely to have a point.

Did you find this system helpful? Hit reply and let us know!

Until next recess,
Sarah & Jamie

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