Branding & the winner is Consistency

Effective marketing is essential for all brands to achieve their goals. Thus, practicing brand consistency aligned with its values and identity is crucial to building a lasting relationship with the clients. Consistency means when your target audience is always being delivered the same message by the brand, as a result, that allows the target audience to acknowledge the brand's characteristics more in each marketing campaign.

Branding Consistency, the Winner for Brands

We at CrissCross Lab can help you to improve the Brand Consistency. However, before that, you must understand this concept. We hope this blog may help you to have a clear idea about how consistency in branding is so important.

What Is Brand Consistency?

Brand Consistency is a way for the Brands to make people remember them with just a look, from the colors of the brands, the logo, the packaging, the social media pages, the website, etc., everything drools of the Brand's core values and the message is shared all across. Brand Consistency is not just about introducing the brand in the market, but also maintaining a continuous engagement with the Users. Brand consistency ensures that your brand is easily recognized across all marketing and shopping channels by your existing and potential customers. Consistency of every element in branding is required everywhere, be it the e-commerce websites, social media platforms, or packaging.

Major elements which play an essential role in Brand Consistency are:

• The tone of the brand's voice

• Same logo

• Same color theme

• Brand's slogans

• Fonts and Typography

• Pictures and imagery

• Graphics

Why does Brand Consistency matter?

1. Brand consistency takes you to the next level of marketing: brand consistency becomes successful when you are no longer persuading consumers to visit your store or buy your product online. Your brand is so consistent with every element that whenever any customer comes across your brand's Essential Elements, they are already convinced to make the next purchase from your brand.

We will take the example of Puma, a brand very well known in the athleisure shoe space, sponsor of the biggest sporting events, and partner with well-known athletes. It is easy to spot when somebody is wearing puma shoes because a lot of the elements just drool Puma, such as the Logo, easily recognizable and consistent for many years.

As you can see, Puma has been very consistent with its logo since 1978 and has been using the same logo since 1988, furthermore, Puma uses multiple elements in its products that help identify its products easily such as multiple logo placements, a flying side stripe, and their premium series with gold, silver, & black colors.

• The brand becomes more dependable: Suppose, one day you are attending your academic classes wearing formal clothes, the next day you are taking classes wearing traditional clothes and the forthcoming day you go to your classes wearing casuals, it will become difficult for your teachers and classmates to understand your personality and character.

The same goes for your brand. if your brand keeps consistent with its values and identity then it makes your customers feel comfortable to purchase from you. Having no consistency makes customers confused and ultimately they end up switching to the other peer brands who they feel are more dependable.

• The brand builds trust with its customers: One thing you must know is that brand recognition does not mean only being popular. Consistency in branding is about helping your existing and new customers to know your brand at a personal level, it is about that your users associate their identity with your brand's values. It is a long-held idea that purchasing is a psychological decision rather than a practical one. Brand consistency is a vital part of engaging your customers with the right emotion that they actually know your brand and can trust its products.

We would like to talk about the biggest and most expensive failure in the Branding, the Tropicana Orange Juice, you can read the more detailed case study of the fail here. Tropicana in 2009, redesigned its Orange Juice packaging, a packaging which the users easily recognized with the big orange in the middle and orange and dark green colors, however, when the new packaging came, the users found it difficult to spot the product on the grocery shelf and Tropicana lost $20 Million dollars in revenue and another over $35 Million dollars in redesign & marketing spend.

The fundamental key approaches to creating Brand Consistency:

• Keep the logo, colors, and other designs consistent: They create a memorable impression among the customers and help to boost your brand's recognition.

• Choose the right content: The right content that is aligned with your brand's mission and vision help to build the brand's credibility reputation and trust.

• Keep your brand’s tone and personality consistent: Being consistent in your brand on every platform helps you to boost audience visibility, reach, and engagement.

• Choose the right platform: You don’t have to be present on every platform to get a successful online presence. Not all social media platforms are useful in serving the same audience, so it’s important for your brand to find the right platforms where you want to target your preferable audience. Don't forget to stay active on those platforms and engage the users.

• Find the right social influencer: Find the right influencer who appeals to your target audience, talks about issues directly related to the pain points of your product, complements their personality to the brand, and appropriately uses your brand in the content. As influencer marketing is trending now, you must use this for your marketing to boost sales along with keeping the above-mentioned facts consistent.

Strategies for maintaining brand consistency:

1. Set brand guidelines, such as:

• Logo

• Color theme

• Typography

• Imagery

• Tone

2.Organize your marketing assets, such as:

• Emails

• Blog posts

• Website content

• Images

• Videos

3. Use a marketing calendar to plan ahead

4. Reuse old content

5. Repost User Content