Having a great logo and beautiful website for your business is a good start but to build a great brand it’s what you do as a company in reality that matters. You have to consistently deliver on your brand promises and live up to the customer’s expectations every time to earn customer trust.
Brand consistency is understood as delivery of brand messages in a consistent manner to its customers. Here, the word consistency has dictionary meaning of “Acting or done in the same way over time, especially so as to be fair or accurate”. On a closer look, you will find there are three aspects to it, coherency, regularity & accuracy. Breaking down consistency this way will help in the better execution of your brand strategies.
Uniformity – in brand messages across different mediums.
Regularity – Delivering brand messages across different touch points regularly.
Accuracy – Staying true to the vision & core values.
Coherency
Your brand messages to customers which help registration and thereby build awareness is a key element. For young brands who are just starting out, building awareness is one of the main challenges. Often, I have seen tagline and brand identity are separately communicated. This leads to confusion in customer’s mind, who in today’s world has the very limited span of attention. If a customer sees a different interpretation of your brand identity or overall persona, it is bound to lead to confusion. Key here is to identify single largest asset of your company, which in most cases is your brand identity and coherently communicating that aspect in different mediums, be it offline or online.
A brand manual which illustrates different logo usages, do’s & don’ts serves as a reference point for maintaining brand coherency across different touch points.
Regularity
I would have preferred frequency, but regularity trumps frequency when it comes to consistency. Imagine a retail store who sells your products. If your brand does not have the customer pull, apart from higher margin relationship with retailer also plays a key role in selling. To build a relationship, your salesman must visit the store regularly which will lead to confidence. If the salesperson visits 5 times in a month & then disappears, the frequency is high, but regularity is not maintained over a period of time. It is the same for brand communication. So, regularity is the first priority to build a consistent brand.
Accuracy
Accuracy, in this case, means staying true to the brand’s vision and core values every time. While it is tough to stay accurate over a long period of time under sales pressure, it is extremely important to build a great brand which is trusted by millions. “Think different” campaign by Apple emerged from its quest to find its core values which the brand then was drifting away from.
A splendid example of brand consistency is Coca-Cola. Commitment to consistency has helped Coca-cola to become one of the most recognizable brands in the world. Keeping the brand consistent across different mediums is key for building customer loyalty & trust.
As Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn has pointed out in one of his tweets from 2013,
“Trust equals consistency over time. There’s no shortcut for either.”