Building brand consistency is a key component to ensuring that consumers know what to expect when they interact with your business. The big names in most industries have established a clear, recognizable brand presence: a Coca-Cola and Pepsi can, for example, are easy to discern because we associate specific colors with each brand. Branding consistency, however, isn’t just about your color palette or logo. It’s also about ensuring that every time consumers interact with your brand, they have the same experience.
Why Brand Consistency Is Critical
There are several key reasons brands must maintain consistency across channels and interactions to provide a high-quality experience for your customers.
1. Consistency helps consumers spot your brand.
Continuity in branding ensures customers can tell when they’re interacting with your brand and versus with one of your competitors. You want consumers to remember when they have interacted with you and for your brand to stand out in their minds. If your branding is inconsistent, you may find that customers cannot remember their specific interactions with you, meaning they may, overall, have a harder time picking out your brand when they’re ready to make a purchase.
2. Consistency builds consumer trust.
Customers crave reliability from your brand. They want to know that when they connect with you, they will have a solid, reliable experience, whether they’re on your website, checking out social media, or connecting with your customer service team.
3. Brand consistency helps better display who you are.
Increasingly, customers are recognizing the importance of voting with their dollars—that is, they’re choosing brands that fit their ethical standards and that focus on causes or issues that are important to them. Consumers will be more likely to support your brand when they see transparency about what you stand for and why they should choose to connect with you.
How to Build Brand Consistency Into Your Brand Positioning Strategy
Your brand positioning strategy allows you to clearly position your brand within your industry. You want your brand to stand out from the crowd so that customers will recognize you and remember what you offer. At the same time, you want to fit well within that existing bubble so that customers who have selected items in that category in the past—from fast food and soft drinks to technology tools—will recognize you as a good fit for those needs.
Maintaining consistency is key.
1. Start with your core values.
Take a look at your business’s core values. What is it that you believe in, and why? What does your business stand by offering, both to its employees and to its customers? If you know what those core values are, you can more effectively align the rest of your content with them, putting you in a better position to provide the consistency your customers seek.
2. Establish your brand guidelines.
Create clear guidelines that govern how your brand will communicate with consumers, how you will communicate internally, and more. Your brand guidelines should govern each piece of content created for your business. You may want to have requirements regarding:
- Mission and values. Ensure this is clearly laid out in your brand guidelines so that anyone who writes or creates content for your brand, including contractors, can easily include that information as part of their plan.
- Tone of voice. Do you generally speak with an engaging, friendly tone, or do you prefer that your business sound highly professional, maintaining that sense of distance?
- Grammar rules. Some companies have highly specific grammar rules that they want their customers to follow. (Where do you stand on the Oxford comma?)
- Text and font sizes. The aesthetics of your brand also play a key role in recognition and should remain consistent.
Put together a document to clearly communicate those brand values and requirements to your content creators. Remember that this should not be a long document that is difficult to dig through and follow. If you do have extensive style guidelines, consider condensing them into a one-page sheet that users can easily reference.
Your style guide can be adaptable based on use case, but the key is keeping the core of your business consistent so that customers know what to expect when they interact with your brand and receive a consistent level of quality from you.
Maintain Brand Consistency to Increase Customer Connection
Maintaining overall brand consistency is a key part of ensuring that you remain connected to your customers and that they trust what your brand offers. By clearly establishing who you are and sticking to it as part of your brand positioning strategy, you ensure that customers will recognize your brand and continue to turn to you.
