Brand Consistency: Why Is It So Important?
Brand consistency is the secret to achieving brand success. It is the form of expression that influences what people think about your business. Consistency means your target audiences are being repeatedly exposed to visual branding, core messages, and other branding factors, which help to strengthen your brand recognition.
Branding is often known to be a vital part of marketing. Whenever a business fails to
maintain its consistency, the brand value is severely affected. This may have an irreversible impact, which can even result in the dilution of the company. Now let’s have a closer look at brand consistency and its importance for a business.
What is Brand Consistency?
Brand consistency can be defined as the process by which a brand communicates its concerns related with the brand in a way that doesn’t trivialize the core values, brand strategy, the fundamentals and foundation of it. It is the secret sauce behind the prosperity of a business and is one of the most significant keys in branding.
Every brand is born with its own visionary of elements, which delivers some important messages to more targeted audiences. Additionally, it so that it can be easily differentiated from its competitors and stands out of the crowd.
A very intrinsic aspect of brand consistency is to be constant with branding and promotional activities. Moreover, this impacts a long term effect in the minds of the consumers as they are able to visualize the brand almost always.
Why is Brand Consistency Important?
Building brand recognition is a very important element for any business enterprises since people are now more inclined towards purchasing from a well-known company.
When we recall a brand, we tend to recall it by its own distinctive logo which acts as the face of the brand. Moreover, many people think of a unique and quirky name, which due to its uncommonness, remains engraved in our mind. This blend of uniqueness becomes a part of our subconscious mind.
When a brand subjects its customers to an inconsistent branding element, by going against all this factor, it creates a lot of exposure. People may not be able to recognize the brand easily, which could have an adverse effect on the business. It could be a change in its logo, color palette of the logo, the font in which the brand name is written, the words in its web page, and more. A change in any one of these factors could be responsible for a huge threat to the company. Whatever the case may be, the company would expose itself to great risk, by being inconsistent in its branding elements. This creates huge confusion among people and can also lead them in the wrong direction towards an unreliable and dubious brand. Eventually, these diverse messages could damage the company’s real potential in this competitive market and even lead to demolishing the name of that company.
This concept of brand consistency can also be a hallmark of reliability. When a customer sees and feels the same logo, the similar kind of messages, the same color combination, and artworks, in all the media through which the brand is expanding its market, a more dependable and authentic picture of that brand is perceived by them. Moreover, the brand must focus on three analytical areas to gain the loyalty of the customers:
1. Outstanding customer experience: Providing a consistent and outstanding customer experience will foster and nurture the trust and confidence of your brand.
2. Keeping values: Not just words, your words should be backed up with your actions. Your action should speak for yourself. This creates more trust and loyalty to the brand.
3. Identity for the brand: The visual components of the brand should be so unique and
exclusive that it gets easily recognized by the people and help the brand to stand out in the market.
How to Maintain Consistency in Branding?
1. Enlighten or civilize the brand: It is of utmost importance to create a more personal
relationship with the customers by humanizing the brand. It is the basic human
psychology to recognize other human beings on the basis of their outfits, and this
foundation of the special inherent characteristic of every individual makes it possible to differentiate between every other being.
The more individualized the promotions and marketing strategies are, the more
customers will be attracted.
2. Having a set of corporate guidelines: It is essential to have a set of corporate guidelines to guide the management of the companies along with the designing department of the company on how to use the creative elements of the brand consistently. This is to be done while working on the branding elements, such as the logo, messaging strategy, and working on with jingles.
For example, one of the determining factors in the checklist of setting corporate
guidelines is that the brand should not change the color of the logo, either its
positioning. Being inconsistent in branding and its strategies become one of the most
difficult hurdles in gaining success in this competitive market.
3. Understanding the vision of the brand: Needless to say, one should understand the
vision and mission of the brand that consists of the core values, goals, character, and
fundamentals. When these facets are well attended to by the management and brand
managers, they will be able to exhibit and promote the brand with constancy.
4. Setting up an approval process: A systematic approach is first of all required.
Inconsistency of a brand can be brought to book by addressing the flaws and
miscommunications between the marketing and branding departments. Another cause of inconsistency may be the experience gap between employees leaving the company for future opportunities and the ones newly hired. Disparities can be avoided by setting up a stringent and thorough agreement process for all the imaginative artworks, corporate, and marketing communications with the director or any prime member of the management being the approving head.
5. Being genuine: Of prime importance for a brand to be successful in this competitive
market is to maintain originality. A consumer should be able to taste genuineness in the undertakings, contributions, and the cumulative articulations of a brand. The brand should refrain from following steps of or even resembling slight characters of other contenders in the market. Thus, brand reach, worth, consumer growth, and recall factor are ensured. The authenticity of a brand depends on the perception of its precursor that is individuality, consistency, and progression.
An insight from a survey done by Inc. says,
• For organizations with whole consistency problems, the calculable average revenue
increase attributed to perpetually presenting the whole system is twenty third.
• Quite expectedly, those who are efficient in enhancing their branding and promotions
are likely to be recalled by customers than the ones who vanish after doing it once or
twice.
• 95% of the companies have their own set of guidelines, but only 1/4th have formal
guidelines which are implemented by them.
• Conformation to the brand strategies and guidelines are prerequisites, and 60% of
organizations complain of not abiding by those.
• Pessimistic brand usage results in a dilemma among customers and the research found from 71% of the population.
Conclusion
Brand value is based on its status, consumer end, and management end experience,
trustworthy feeling, a promise for a consistent worth and development of an emotional-
connect. In this case, you have a destiny in your hands. A loyal customer will keep on providing incentive and not fail you until fail to deliver. A brand also has an emotional value attached to it. If the brand is able to kindle a powerful, constructive feeling, then it will always experience a positively-sloped turnover graph. Be it a logo, tagline, the message it portrays or the jingle it plays, all need to be consistent enough for the brand to set its forte firmly in the competitive market. A brand’s promise should always be its tagline, and it should be its prime focus. It should be able to fire up a tremendous amount of excitement in its customer to gain praise, love, approval, and most important of all, be ahead of the competitors successfully.
