Branding Consistency- The New Buzz in the Marketing World
What Is Brand Consistency?
While the word branding is much more popular, the true essence of brand consistency is not fully understood. Brand consistency is an organization delivering branding messages aligning with the core values and brand identity elements. This helps the brand in building a cohesive consistent brand identity and thus giving a unified experience for both the existing & potential customers.
With brand consistency, the brand becomes more recognizable and trustworthy. The customers start recognizing your brand on a personal level and thus connect with a reliable feeling. Brand consistency can become quite difficult for an organization to maintain, given the quick shift in marketing trends and customer behavior. One of the major hurdles for the smaller organization is the personality of the creator outshines the personality of the brand. While in the case of the larger organization when seen as a whole picture, the online and offline marketing is disjoined.
How to build brand consistency
In this fast-growing world, we understand that it can be tough to create consistency in marketing. It’s time to ring the bell when your business is already established but none of the brandings aligns. Here’s the way to build your brand consistency whether the business is new or aged:
Mission Statement: It acts as a guiding light for your business in the sea of brand consistency. This statement tells a story about your company and how it functions. If you don’t have a mission statement yet, here’s your chance to start. The key points you have to remember while drafting a mission statement are- Easy-to-read language, Displaying your USP, Ensure Memorability, and Maintaining the future picture.
Brand Guidelines: Establishing the same voice across all the marketing channels is an important part of brand consistency. Let’s suppose certain pages on your website are written in British English, and the rest is in American English, the readers tend to get confused. One of the best ways to avoid such mistakes is to develop a brand guideline that includes language tone, grammatical preferences, hex codes, etc. With a very specific guideline document, there will be no room for errors.
Logo: Your logo is going to impact your brand. It merely takes 10 seconds for your customer to identify your logo & create an opinion. Always treat the logo as the brand’s first impression and the easiest way to introduce yourself to the customer. Remember to have the same logo, with the same alignment, color, and other elements if any.
Same Color Palette: Choosing a consistent brand color helps increase brand recognition by up to 80%. There is a lot of psychology related to color and how it affects marketing techniques. Thus design a palette that aligns with your brand goals. Develop the color palette in such a way that it can be incorporated across all the marketing collaterals.
Internal Support: Ensure that all the employees are familiar with your brand guidelines, and they are actively putting them into practice. Right from the client invoice sent by the finance department to a new policy released by the HR department, all the items should be aligned to the brand. Even though these are minor things, their presence will reinforce the brand to employees and they become your brand ambassadors.
Why is brand consistency important?
Maintaining the image and stable branding efforts is important to stay in touch with the customers. But why? People don’t know you and even if they know you they won’t trust you right off the bat. If they did, marketing would have been easier. But since they don’t, every brand and every brand out there is trying to build customer trust and that’s where the role of brand consistency comes in.
- Contributes to brand recognition: Ever seen a commercial ad and immediately recognized the brand? Remembering Mcdonald’s by seeing an ad with red background and yellow M is a perfect example of brand recognition due to consistency in branding. People are more likely to buy from the brands they recognize. One might never pick up from a brand they had never heard of or seen before. Brands with a distinct consistent branding benefit by being easily recognizable and thus saving money spent otherwise on advertising.
- Makes the brand memorable: With repetition, one tends to remember better. This is the reason why flashcards, lists, and pneumonia devices are effective for learning. People need to see, hear or read something at least 7 times to recall it later. To make your brand memorable across different marketing channels, it is important to maintain brand consistency. When an audience sees your brand across different marketing channels, they are likely to remember the brand when deciding to buy.
- Builds Awareness: Brand consistency helps in building awareness through which the customers can easily recognize the brand. Brands with consistent marketing efforts are more visible to the relevant audience and thus stand out. Such brands have a chance to get more prospects and convert them into loyal customers.
- Increase Revenue: Yes! Brand consistency is directly related to the increase in average revenue. By now, you understood that customers prefer brands with consistent marketing & advertising efforts. Then why should you be left behind in marking your presence? Give your customers a reliable experience with consistent efforts and bring in more income to your brand.
How do maintain brand consistency?
You are all set by redirecting all your efforts toward consistent marketing across all platforms. But what next? Brand consistency is not a one-day’s task. As the name states, it has to be consistent. It is not about establishing a specific brand image. It is the need to start their business with a strong business vision and strategy to achieve it. Many brands are still struggling with how to maintain consistency as the brand grows and the marketing collaterals evolve. Here’s our take on how you can set yourself ready to meet the success requirements:
Brand Analyse: With brand consistency, you want to ensure not to leave the brand open to a wide interpretation of the customers. So, the first step has to be figuring out what people think about the brand. To know about it evaluate the brand assets like website, social sites, communication modes, hard copies, etc. Mark if those assets reflect your core values, and describe what you want the customers to understand.
Understand the Audience: Brand consistency can deliver the expected results only if targeted to the right audience. Before strategizing your brand consistency, find out who your target audience is and what are they looking for. Evaluate their values and then resonate with the best possible strategy.
Check the internal communication: You need to establish an internal communication strategy for doing all marketing and promotional activities. The output of brand consistency depends on how well the employees understand and work towards the end goal. Ensure that the employees are familiar with the products/services offered and abide by the brand value. Whenever there is any changes/alteration in the brand element, make sure that your team is well informed. Prepare the customer-interacting employee to embrace the changes with guidelines, documents, or any other manifestos.
Allow timely evolution: Branding needs to be consistent, but that doesn’t mean that the business has to be static. Business needs to be evolved to stay in the business. It is very important to become successful and thrive in the market. The deal is to maintain branding consistency and evolve the business. Brand guidelines ensure a smooth evolution and take advantage of the new trends and fit into the market needs.
To be successful in the current saturated market, it is important to build a relationship with the target audience. The easy way to do it is to develop a realistic connection through consistent presence to remind the customer about your presence. Here are a few extra tips to maintain brand consistency:
- Plan your scheduling calendar
- Be present on the right channels
- Be authentic
A brand is much more than just a logo, name & product/service. It is an identity through which the customers connect emotionally over time. This brand consistency helps you keep identity stays in customers’ minds regardless of how the company might change throughout the years to come. Wondering how to maintain consistent branding efforts? Contact us today.
