What Is Brand Consistency And Its Role In Trust Building?
What Is Branding Consistency, And Why Is It So Important?
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Staying Consistent
You have heard the importance of staying consistent in your business, but why? Branding consistency has been in our lives for many years. We respond strongly to similarity within brands. Companies like Apple or McDonalds have been influencing us with clean and modern design and nostalgia of growing up with such a famous fast-food chain.
Connecting with your audience is crucial, understand the parts they empathize with and the feeling they experience when they are a part of it. Once you start to identify these points, turn them into your brand and stay consistent when spreading the message. Your brand must resonate with positive feelings and the comfort they have when using your company’s product or service. This is so important to understand from the beginning, even though it may take time to really recognize what makes you special. Your branding goes further than overloading your graphic designer with a ton of visual parts they need to design, it narrows down on the culture, atmosphere, and overall message you represent. Start with identifying your why and what your company stands for. In this blog, we will cover the steps needed to create brand consistency, why this is so important and how you can get started right away. Let’s go through this together, we just got to the fun stuff!
What is Brand Consistency?
Brand consistency is your message to the world on what your business does best.
Words, design, offerings or perspective can all be considered when thinking about the importance of a brand. From the way you introduce your brand to selling a product or service, it’s each moment that collectively showcases the way you want to be seen. “A set of values that the whole organization not only acknowledges in places like the company’s website and on a standard company mission statement . . . but also actually lives and breathes through its people, inside and outside of the company.” – Jacob Dayan, CEO and Co-Founder of Community Tax
Why is this important?
Would letting the population interpret what your business stands for and what it offers to be something you want? If not, then creating a strong message behind your brand will give people the direction they need to help understand what you stand for. This can be done in so many ways that we continue to see in our everyday lives. “In order for people to trust you, they have to feel like they know you” – Taughnee
We all need to feel some sort of trust and connection to want something from a specific brand. Let your brand tell your consumers who you are and what you stand for.
Identifying Your “why”
We all started our companies for a reason, if it was passed down or it wasn’t your original idea, we need to find the drive and purpose for being in the decision making role. Identifying your why can be difficult. This can take months or even years for some companies, it’s about starting the process and having it in your thoughts for your next big business decisions.
– Start with some of the why’s that you feel are what drives the company. Ask yourself “why do I wake up in the morning and do this every day” or “why do we even exist?”.
– Once you have made a list of a few points, move on to your internal team. Starting with the owners/leaders, ask them what they think and write down each response you get.
– Next, use the core findings and resonate with your message to your staff. Monitor their reaction and pick up any important points that the employees mention. Be inspirational and make them feel important. They need to know what they are working for.
Take everything you have learned and written it into a short and sweet paragraph that can be seen by each and every staff member in your business. Give them a sense of purpose they deserve. Your employees when happy and feel like they are recognized by the brand will only spread positive brand awareness to the public. Let them as a group showcase how amazing the brand is to someone who is unaware.
Let’s Put This Into Action!
You have now identified your company’s purpose and you are ready to start the amazing journey of brand consistency. Surround yourself with the amazing words that define who you are and start to visualize this. Does your current marketing fit? If you start to feel a clash, this is the time to recalibrate the brand and to align it with the true definition of the research you have just done. If you feel your current brand is matching your why, it’s time to create a brand guideline.
Establish a set of rules that are defined by what your brand represents. This will help consumers understand your brand better. Make sure that all internal processes promote the brand’s values, including training for new employees or meeting structures. Your brand consistency should be across all platforms. Any new content being produced should also have the brands messaging clear and consistent. Let your consumers see the similarities that your brand showcases. From colours, shapes, jingles to customer service and culture, the feeling should all be the same.
Give your internal staff access to logos, collateral or any other sharable brand information and let them be your brand ambassadors.
You Can Do This
This is less daunting than you may think, you are capable of this as the brand is what drives you forward. You live and breathe your work and it should be your top priority to ensure the brand you stand for has clear values and messaging that impacts and resonates with your consumers. We instill this at Token Creative Services each and every day. Even though things have changed over the years, the culture has kept us moving forward. We thrive off of helping customers with their brands and being there to breathe life back into the company.
We would love to sit down with you and learn more about the impact you are making in the world. Contact us today to get started or learn more about how we helped Kitchener Housing find their brands why.
