The reputation of your brand and brand consistency play a crucial role in the success of your business. Brand transparency is one very effective way of building up the reputation of your brand.
A significant majority of customers say that they’re more likely to be loyal to brands that provide transparency to their customers.
Besides being honest and transparent with your customers, part of creating brand consistency is also the appearance of your brand.
When you think of Coca-Cola or Facebook, the colors red and blue immediately come to mind. Using distinct colors increases brand recognition by up to 80%.
Read on to learn about some of the reasons brand consistency is important for the success of your company.
5 Reasons Brand Consistency Is Important for Business
When you are marketing your business, you need to make sure that you are projecting a complete and consistent message about what your brand represents.
1. It Helps Customers Recognize Your Brand
Can you imagine if a brand changed their colors or the image of the brand every few years? Not only would that get very confusing, it would also make people distrustful of the brand.
Brand consistency builds customer recognition, which leads to increased sales. For example, imagine a customer in a department store. They are presented with a myriad of options for each product they want to purchase.
Standing in an aisle staring at all of these products, what leads them to choose one brand over all of the other options? Assuming it is a price-insensitive product, they will choose based on brand recognition.
When brands are consistent with their messaging through taglines and colors, the branding gets embedded in consumers’ minds. Slogans like “Maybe she’s born with it” or “Just Do It” bring Maybelline and Nike to mind immediately.
Brand appearance is just one part of brand consistency. It’s not enough for people to simply recognize your brand, they want to see that your brand values are in line with their own and that you value your customers as well.
The days of customer complaints being ignored or kept away from the public eye are long gone. Now customers can complain publicly on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Brands need to address these complaints in a way that shows future customers that the brand is trustworthy and reliable.
2. Separate Yourself from Your Competitors
Coke and Pepsi sell essentially the same product, but would you ever confuse the two brands? Or Nike and Adidas?
Of course not. Even though these brands sell nearly identical products as their competitors, each has developed a loyal fanbase.
In a saturated market, separating yourself from your competitors is crucial for success.
Have you ever had to purchase something for someone else in your household? Maybe your wife asked you to pick up some body wash or your husband asked you to get him a new razor. After about a minute of debating between two dozen different options, you realize the impact that brand consistency has when you’re trying to buy a product that has never been marketed to you.
It’s important to keep your marketing consistent so that people associate your brand with your industry. From the design of your logo to the font you use, each of these elements helps to define your brand and separate it from the competition.
You also want your brand to be distinct from the competition so that people don’t mistake it for another brand that has a bad reputation. For example, if you run a financial services company, don’t design an orange logo for a company named Anthony Allen.
3. Brand Consistency Creates a Company Identity
All of the most successful brands have an almost cult-like following when it comes to their employees. Employees at Google are called Googlers. At Microsoft, the employees are known as Microsofties.
The fanaticism for these brands comes from the image that they project to the world. When we hear and see the same messages from a brand repeatedly, they get ingrained in our minds. This creates an identity for the brand which we associate with the quality of their products.
For example, think of the brands Toyota and Porsche. Even if you aren’t interested in cars and without being presented with any visual aids one of these brands makes you think of reliability and the other makes you think of luxury.
This is due to brand consistency in their advertising as well as creating products that match their company identity. Toyota cars are advertised as being reliable and seeing their cars from 10 or 15 years ago still on the road reinforces that idea.
4. Brand Consistency Sets a Standard for Your Employees
Brand consistency is ultimately driven by your employees. Your marketing team needs to understand the brand image and promote it when designing campaigns. Additionally, your customer service representatives need to have not the training and the initiative to help your customers.
Some brands, like Amazon, have been able to use customer complaints to their advantage by empowering their customer service representatives to have fun when chatting with customers as long as they’re solving the problem at the same time.
The result? Many of these conversations have gone viral and Amazon has built a reputation for having great customer service.
This is a double-edged sword, however. If your customers consistently have negative experiences when dealing with your brand, your brand reputation will quickly become tarnished. There are solutions for brands who find themselves in this position but it requires a huge upheaval before customers will trust the brand again.
5. Brand Consistency Keeps Your Company Focused
If Apple started selling cars, would you buy one? What about if Lamborghini started selling smartphones? It would certainly be more affordable than one of their cars!
When your brand is gaining success, it may be tempting to add unrelated products or services to what your company currently provides. But this will detract from your brand consistency.
The result is that customers will become confused about what your primary service was. If you’re a full-service digital marketing company and you start selling e-commerce stores, then your customers will no longer be certain where your expertise lies.
Building Your Brand Reputation Is Crucial
Through brand consistency, you can build up a good reputation for your brand. When designing your marketing material from television commercials to blog posts, ensure that your marketing team is following your brand image.
One of the most difficult elements of brand consistency is how to manage your brand image across social media. Click here to learn about some of the mistakes you may be making with how your brand is marketed on social media.
