How top-tier marketers achieve brand perfection
Brand consistency is incredibly important. Imagine going to a soda machine to get a Pepsi but when you go to push the Pepsi button, you see the logo is bright yellow. The Pepsi logo is now a heart shape and the lettering is in Comic Sans font. Is this the same Pepsi you like drinking? Did the soda company do a rebranding stunt? Is the recipe even the same? You decide that maybe, you should just get a Dr. Pepper instead. This uncanny effect is a simple illustration of the power of brand consistency! Moreover, it gives you an idea of the direct and indirect consequences caused by brand inconsistency.
Though your company probably isn’t as big as Pepsi, branding should still be taken seriously. After all, your brand is more than just a logo. It’s how people relate to your company!
Brand consistency builds trust, helps create familiarity, establishes rapport, and gives your clients something that they can rely on time and time again.
Company Brand Compliance is Paramount
Amid countless cultural shifts and a constantly growing world of technological advancement, brand trust matters more than it ever has before. Did you know that on average, 33% of consumers worldwide are willing to switch from a brand they currently use to a competing brand if trust is breached? It’s true; if they believe that a competitor’s products or services are more trustworthy, they will switch services for that reason alone.
Brand intelligence and consumer trust go hand-in-hand. A brand’s reputation has the power to tangibly alter consumer behavior. This is demonstrated time and time again by popular brands around the world. For instance, brands like Microsoft, Amazon, Nike, MasterCard, and Adidas, have invested millions of dollars toward improving consumer trust over the last six years.
Communicating consistently with your clients and customers is also important. Are all salespeople working together to stay on the same page? Has your company been clear about its core values and brand standards? Communication is the key to establishing trustworthy and consistent client relationships. When trust is built, repeat business is more likely to occur.
Customer retention and acquisition marketing statistics must also be considered. As you likely already know, acquiring a new customer can cost nearly five times more than maintaining the pre-existing relationship you have with a current customer. This means that once you have begun a relationship with a prospect, your time is better invested in growing or maintaining that relationship. Maintaining your brand is an inherent part of maintaining existing customer relationships!
You should also consider how well your current branding efforts are going. Are consumers able to easily find and identify your products and services? What do the email signatures look like at your business? Is everyone in the marketing department using the same colors or fonts? While these issues may seem small, over time, they add up. Brand consistency is an incredibly important part of building trust with your patrons.
Company Brand Compliance is Paramount
Brand compliance encompasses the aesthetic feel, messaging, and values conveyed by your company’s brand. This includes your business standards, core principles, and visual exhibition. Consistency and dependability are incredibly important in this area. Brand compliance reflects the character, tone, policies, and observable style of your company.
Consistently presenting your clients with brand-compliant assets ensures that their expectations will be reliably met. When your audience gets their expectations met consistently, positive brand equity is generated. The reinforcement and brand equity further strengthen your company and help it grow. On the flip side of this, inconsistent brand implementation can cause your clients and customers to lose trust in your business and its services or overall reliability.
The Negative Impacts of Inconsistent Brand Implementation
There are many direct and indirect costs of having an inconsistent brand identity. Here are some of the ways that brand inconsistencies can hurt your enterprise directly or indirectly.
Brand Awareness is Reduced
Your brand builds trust, establishes familiarity, and reinforces an idea with your audience or target demographic. Your brand makes your business easier to identify every time a customer interacts with your products or uses your services. So what happens when employees or marketers inaccurately represent your brand? You lose the opportunity to build awareness. This is a huge problem, as it indirectly prevents customers from having your core messages reinforced reliably.
Damage to Your Revenue and Customer Base
According to a recent report made on the impact of brand consistency, organizations can dramatically increase growth by simply maintaining invariant branding. In fact, for companies that put dedicated effort toward maintaining brand consistency, an estimated 23% growth was attributed. With this in mind, businesses that do not work toward maintaining brand consistency are likely to damage their revenues directly.
Customers Can Become Confused and Unsure
Your brand and visual identity can be used to help make your business recognizable. If things are always changing, clients, customers, or audience members won’t be sure what to expect. In fact, they may not even be capable of discerning whether they have the right company. It all depends on your industry. Regardless of what your company does, confusing the consumer is never a great idea.
Brand Inconsistencies Cause Reputation Damage
Your company’s reputation matters. A few poor Google reviews are enough to prove this! So what happens when your public reputation is damaged? Direct profit losses take place. Brand inconsistency can directly cause damage to your reputation. For many consumers, brand inconsistency directly correlates with product quality inconsistency. Loyal customers might not feel the pull to remain loyal. After all, why should customers stay consistent and dependable when your company does not?
Rebranding is Incredibly Expensive
Changing your brand standards is an expensive undertaking. In fact, for small businesses, the average cost of rebranding ranges from $100,000.00 to $180,000.00. Moreover, large businesses are likely to spend $500,000.00 at a minimum. Why would you want to spend that much on rebranding? It is almost always much more profitable to maintain the brand that you have already worked so hard to create. Most marketing managers, directors, VPs, and CMOs will understand the value of working with what you have instead of tossing your investments into the wind.
How to Avoid Brand Inconsistency?
Fortunately, there are many ways that you can avoid inconsistency within your company and brand. To start, you should ensure that your company’s colors, templates, visual aids, graphs, graphic charters, and presentation standards, match across the board and are stored in a brand center (e.g. SharePoint, Intranet, DAM, etc.). Just make sure they are easily accessible to your employees so that people actually use them! Brand Centers don’t have to be expensive, something as efficient as a SharePoint can do the trick; however, for more sophisticated solutions, the ROI easily justifies the expense.
Cohesive rules that apply to all brand-related materials and visual aids are important. These standards of cohesion and brand compliance should be readily available for all of your employees to review.
Also, stick with similar components and themes for designated periods when sending promotional products, emails, ad inserts, or anything else from your company to consumers. This can even include social media posts. If you change things up seasonally, transition with care, and use this marketing and timing opportunity to your advantage. It may also be prudent to employ a designated brand manager or designer.
In addition to this, make sure you are building up your brand whenever and wherever possible. Many people need to see a logo at least five times to connect with the company. You should also make every branding touch point count! Do whatever you can to improve engagement with your audience. Every interaction you or a team member has with a customer should be optimized to its full extent. Using consistent branding in emails, advertising, and visual information is fundamental.
Brand surveillance can also be an amazing solution. Although a brand manager is important, sometimes, one person (or even a team) can’t keep an eye on everyone in your company all the time. With intuitive brand monitoring systems, you can have eyes across the board monitoring at all times. This ensures that everyone stays on the same page and gives you a fantastic return on investment in terms of consistency and brand building.
Using Better Brand Monitoring: Astute Review Can Help
If you want to effectively prevent branding issues within your organization, brand monitoring can be an enormous help. With Astute Review, brand and visual monitoring are easier than ever. Our intuitive and empowering monitoring strategies help you maintain consistent branding company-wide!
Marketing teams work hard to deploy digital assets and brand guidelines but really have no way of knowing how content is being misused (old logos, images w/ expired licenses or dated images, trademarks, etc.) across an organization. Astute helps you understand where violations are occurring – giving teams actionable insights through our intuitive dashboard and reporting, allowing organizations to efficiently improve brand health.
Astute Review is here to help you avoid the direct and indirect costs of inconsistent branding by making sure that everyone in your company is on the same page.
Organization monitoring and analytics help with:
• Company-wide Brand Consistency
• Real-Time Monitoring
• Assets Library Monitoring
• Presentation Automation
• Preventing Brand Misuse
If you want to find out more about what Astute Review can do for you, this video can help. Numerous versatile and effective Astute Review products and services are available for companies of all sizes. Businesses big or small can benefit from our adept brand review and monitoring services. We are ready to help you protect the identity of your brand now! Safeguarding your brand is one of the best growth investments you can make.
