In the era of powerful social media, tech marketing and offline communication, brand consistency is the key that unlocks your brand identity and adjusts it for all channels. Brand consistency is the key to upper-level marketing. It paves the way to brand recognition and awareness. Therefore, many marketers make sure that brand consistency reflects in their entire product, service or company’s activity.
Brand consistency is an essential part of smart marketing. The most iconic brands who mastered consistency are Coca-Cola, Apple, McDonalds and Starbucks. Customers recognize their commercials without seeing the brand names and have no trouble mentioning their products, regardless of the country they are in.
Brand Consistency: An Introduction
However, before discussing brand consistency as a marketing tool, make sure you include it in your company’s documents. Press releases, email signatures official statements must make you recognizable, especially in the B2B world. Find a personal letterhead template for your marketing team and tick the first step in accomplishing consistency.
Brand consistency also includes:
- Message: Defines your values and shows your behavior. This is what your public needs to know about your brand and how it recognizes your brand from a simple sentence.
- Tone: Shows how you speak to the public in your messages. The tone adjusts to your public and makes sure that your message is relevant to them. The public relates to what seems familiar.
- Design: Protects your brand from imitations and allows your public to visually recognize you. These are your logo, font, tagline design and color patterns.
- Delivery: Creates the communication rhythm, on the most suitable channels for your public. You discover where your public is and communicate with it through that media.
5 Reasons Why You Should Focus on Brand Consistency
1. Credibility
Consistency makes your brand more recognizable and, therefore, trustworthy. By providing consistent messages, you improve communication with your customers. They will know how you communicate news, react to conflict or crisis and build expectations based on your actions. The more consistent and self-evaluating your brand is, the clearer is your message. Then, you will also show purpose, stability and professionalism.
Once brand recognition increases, customers trust you even more and you become an authority in your field. Therefore, you increase conversions as the purchase decision is rather emotional than analytic, according to a study.
2. Customer Loyalty
When you are consistent, you send messages that your public can relate to and engage in, regardless of the channel you use. If you sell a product for young people, then a business tone on social media might not be the right marketing approach. Consistency allows your public to trust your brand and be loyal to it. Customers expect you to be a little predictable, especially through packaging, campaigns, and social media communication.
When changes are due, consistency helps you develop your own ways to adjust your strategy, according to your public. Brand consistency involves authenticity, relevance and transparency. These are the key elements that build up customer loyalty.
3. Online and Offline
Brand consistency creates a platform that supports the communication with your public. By aiming to be consistent, you follow the guidelines that work for your public. If you develop an offline contest, campaign or event, you can construct it around your brand’s tone, message, design and delivery. You can also promote the event online or on social media channels and engage your public. Moreover, consistency connects marketing with public relations and emphasizes your brand’s core values.
If your brand receives an award or plays a key role in a major event, your audience will recognize it as a community leader and respond as such. There are no limits for online communication. You can promote your offline initiative on social media, in blog posts or even live streaming.
4. Internal Values
What better way to show your brand’s values is there but to use examples? Brand consistency draws standards that can also apply in your corporate activity. When employees understand your brand’s vision and value, they communicate them easier. You can raise internal awareness by assigning a brand manager that supervises the brand’s services, products and customer support. That manager can also decide if you can promote internal changes such as ad postings on social media.
By tracking internal performance, you can see your brand’s relationship with its customers first hand. Moreover, you also cover the brand – customer communication after purchase and avoid potential flaws or internal conflicting personalities.
5. Brand Evolution
According to Forbes, the most powerful worldwide brands are Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Coca-Cola. These are all brands that developed while focusing on brand consistency. They handled changes according to brand guidelines and initiated campaigns that went viral. The highly mentioned consistency allows your brand to develop. As it becomes recognizable for your core public, it creates a brand experience to a wider one.
Consistency responds to your public’s personal and emotional expectations and questions, though a tone that they already know. Your messages strengthen, as communication deepens. Moreover, your brand remains relevant and responds in a dynamic manner to market trends. You can regularly measure consistency and revise its results through brand management.
Is Your Brand Consistent Enough?
Brand consistency reflects how your products or services dress. When customers know what to expect from them, they develop ways to adjust them to their needs. In depth, if you already gained authority in your niche, customers will turn directly to you with questions and potential complaints. These make you trustworthy. However, consistency is a marketing tool for usage on the long run. Don’t fall into the cliché trap of considering consistency being boring. As marketers say, very few wonder how Coca-Cola tastes like or how its logo looks. Yet, they already know when and why to buy the juice, because they know how it satisfies their needs.
When customers doubt your corporate values, product advantages or investments in quality, your brand might not be consistent enough. This is the invisible string that holds marketing and branding together. So, if consistency is not visible enough, it might have consequences on your brand’s success. To sum it up, by being consistent you keep your brand’s promises for your public.
Image from Wikipedia.
