Building a brand without brand consistency will negatively impact public perception
Building a brand can be a tiresome and tough business activity. Not building your brand in the right way from the offset can cost a business a lot of time, money and customers.
Your brand can be one of your most valuable assets. Branding is the tool that helps you differentiate your company and stand out from competitors, as well as create relationships and report with customers and prospects. Without a strong brand that is consistent and relevant to your target audience a company will find it difficult to stay top-of-mind.
With so many different marketing methods, channels and activities that make up the modern marketing mix, it can become very easy to lose track of the long term goal of your brand and focus on what’s going to deliver the most immediate results. The most successful branding is something that is achieved over time and not something that happened over night so it is imperative that business owners make their brand a priority when it comes to any marketing initiative. No matter the initiative, channel, or technique is it vital to ensure brand consistency.
How to build a brand and maintain brand consistency
Brand consistency is not using the same elements over and over or using the exact same message in all your campaigns. It means being distinctive, fresh and up-to-date with your target audience’s needs in a way that is unique to your brand and different to your competitors’. In order to achieve brand consistency there are a few things that you need to make sure are in place. Once all your branding elements are aligned and promoting the same value proposition then you can rest assured that you will leave a lasting impression and enjoy the rewards.
Creating your brand
Creating your brand is probably to most important step in achieving brand consistency as well as a brand that accurately brings across your business values. Going for the cheapest possible option or rushing through this step will inevitably leave gaps and mishaps that need to be fixed at a later stage – costing you time, money and effort. During this step it is crucial to take your businesses vision, values and future into consideration. Along with those elements, it is very important to get a complete overview of your brand with all the possible elements you may use in campaigns to make sure that all employees see the bigger picture and understand the importance of the brand to the business.
Building your brand
Once you have created a brand that promotes brand consistency then the focus needs to shift towards building your brand. Second to creating your brand, building your brand is one of the most important elements in the branding process. Having a brilliant, unique, catchy and memorable brand is only going to be all those things if you can get your brand in front of people and associates your brand with world-class products or services. To build your brand you need to deliver upon your promises, practice message consistency, get staff buy-in and adhere to the branding consistency principles put in place when the brand was created.
Maintaining your brand
Once you have managed to successfully create a memorable brand that has been built up to the point of delivering positive results, then businesses need to be extremely aware of how they are maintaining their brand to promote brand consistency. It can become very easy to sit back and enjoy the rewards of a strong brand, but without careful attention and constant tweaking a brand can very easily lose track of the businesses vision and promote values that have shifted. It can also become easy for ‘brand ambassadors’ such as employees to become complacent with the brand and forget to give it the required attention.
As businesses grow and develop, so audiences, services and products change. You need to ensure that you’re your company branding portrays these changes and grows and develops with the company to ensure that branding consistency is always at the forefront of change. It is important to remember that branding takes time and spending the relevant time, money and effort on your brand will help you become consistent, recognisable and unique.