"A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well." – Jeff Bezos.
If you surveyed a group of marketers and asked what the keys to great branding are, “consistency” would surely top the list. And with good reason – consistency sets brands apart in today’s crowded marketplace and turns casual customers into lifelong loyalists.
To begin with, always keep your brand promises consistently and uniformly. This applies not just to what you say but how you act across every touchpoint—from your social media persona to your product packaging to your phone conversations.
But what does branding consistency mean in practice? Why does it matter so much? And how can you start to improve it within your organisation? This article will explore the core components of consistent brand experience, why it’s critical to earn trust and loyalty, and actionable ways to assess and enhance it.
Defining Your Brand Touchpoints
The first step is identifying your brand’s touchpoints across channels. These touchpoints represent where customers interact with and perceive your brand.
For example, common touchpoints include:
Website experience
Product packaging
Email communication
Social media presence
Print/TV/Radio ads
Signage and branding in stores/offices
Customer service interactions
Trade show booths
Mobile app design
Take a moment to map out your brand’s current roster of touchpoints. What does a customer’s journey look like today, from initial awareness to loyalty and referral? What impressions shape how they view your brand?
Gaining this holistic perspective allows you to strategically examine where inconsistencies may lurk – and where improving consistency could significantly impact.
The Critical Elements of Brand Consistency
Okay, so you know your brand touchpoints. Next comes understanding what needs to stay uniform across them to foster consistency.
The core foundational elements of consistent branding include:
Visual Identity System: Logos, colour palettes, typography, and graphic styles should align across touchpoints. Using cohesive visual assets breeds familiarity while allowing flexibility and personality.
Messaging Tone & Voice: How you communicate your actual messaging also needs consistency – from social media captions to radio ads to customer service scripts. Consider the overall voice you want to convey (fun? reliable? innovative?) and stick to it.
Experience Values: Going beyond communications alone, think through the experience you want customers to have. Do you pride yourself on being helpful, efficient, and friendly? Identifying core experiential values to align ensures consistency in more than just rhetoric—it comes through in actual interactions.
By examining where your branding currently aligns or diverges across these elements, you can pinpoint priority areas to address.
Why Consistency Matters: Trust and Loyalty
Still not entirely convinced consistency deserves all the hype? Consider these powerful benefits it brings:
Trust: Humans crave predictability. When a brand experience feels familiar, comfortable, and void of surprises, it fosters instinctual trust. Think of your favourite restaurant or clothing store – you trust them implicitly because you know what to expect each time.
Fulfilled Expectations: Following through on what you promise customers at every touchpoint also builds trust. If your branded social media content markets quick delivery but shipping takes weeks, you damage credibility. Consistency means no disconnect between messaging and reality.
Loyalty and Advocacy: Consistent and positive interactions with a brand can create lasting memories that stay with us. We are all aware of the influence of nostalgia in driving our loyalty and decision-making. When a company is consistent in its interactions with us, it becomes easy to do business with, and over time, we develop strong relationships with that brand. Such loyal customers often become the best promoters for the company.
Simply put, consistency leads to experiences that align with expectations. This breeds the holy grail: trust and loyalty.
Taking Action: How to Improve Your Brand Consistency
Ready to analyse and enhance your own brand’s consistency? Follow these best practices:
Audit Current Touchpoints: Conduct an in-depth audit assessing both quantitative and qualitative consistency across touchpoints. Survey customers on expectations vs reality and have neutral parties assess communications alignment. Look for what’s working and what needs realignment.
Create a Style Guide: Compile brand guidelines around visual identity, messaging tone, and best practices for swag, videos, ads, and all other touchpoint channels. Overcommunicate these to any employees, agencies, or partners interacting with customers. Appoint a brand consistency “czar” to answer questions and preserve standards.
Foster Cross-Department Dialog: Break down silos! Ensure marketing, sales, product teams, and support have an open dialogue – if the brand personas and promises made to customers differ by department, inconsistency results. Develop processes for cross-functional collaboration.
Listen and Learn: Finally, keep listening to customer feedback and adapt to changing expectations. Consistency doesn’t mean rigid inflexibility—it means continually improving while staying true to core identity.
Recap: Consistency Breeds Loyalty
A consistent brand may sound simple in theory but necessitates meticulous orchestration across teams and channels in reality. Yet the return on investment makes it supremely worthwhile. When touchpoint interactions uniformly deliver on the expectations you set while reflecting core visual and verbal identity, you build trust and emotional connections. This loyal tribe of customers then serves as brand ambassadors to organically widen your reach.
So, take consistency seriously. Audit inconsistencies, foster dialogue to address them, and keep listening. By aligning touchpoints to deliver consistent brand experiences, you’ll transform casual customers into avid fans. To quote branding consultant Simon Lancaster: “A company/customer relationship is like a bank account – every interaction either makes a deposit or withdrawal. Consistency, innovation and ethics drive up the trust dividend." Keep making those deposits via consistent delivery across touchpoints!