5 - What is so important about consistency?
Branding is about making an emotional connection with your customers and communicating a certain expectation of how you work and deliver your product/service. When we are face-to-face with our potential clients we need to be consistent in our messaging about what we do and how we do it to engender trust, the same applies to our visual communication and is so easy to achieve! This message needs to be consistent from everything you say, to how show up (in person and digitally), and in the types of products you offer.
The positive results in being consistent in your brand are:
• an impression of reliability
• builds trust
• builds a reputation
• helps your customers to find you quickly
• it shows a brand that really knows itself and what they have to offer and how they deliver that service/product.
If you brand isn't consistent, for example, perhaps you have different logos across your social media platforms because you haven't really got a logo yet or different profile images, then, apart from confusing your potential customers, it has a psychological implication that if you're cutting corners on the simple things, are you cutting corners in other places that really matter?
The negative implications of an inconsistent brand treatment are:
• confusing potential customers when they're searching for you across a variety of platforms, have they found the real you or a dummy business? They will lose interest and move on to someone else.
• it shows that you might now know who you are as a business yet and might not provide the best service as a more established business
• ignorant or even worse, lazy
And all you need to do is consistently show up! Repetition gives comfort to your customers, you are who you say you are and they've found what they were looking for.
Achieve this by:
• the same logo everywhere that your business is on display - social media profile picture on business pages - your website - business cards (this is important that your hand out material matches your website, it'll serve as a stepping point from meeting to research from your customer)
• having a brand font - it can be the same as on your logo or complimentary if your logo is too decorative - if your brand font is a serif or a sans-serif, make sure that is again, used wherever you are producing large bodies of text
• colours - web colours are easy to match each other, just get your hex code and apply across all digital platforms. Print is trickier but working closely with your designer and printer will ensure the closest match possible
• strapline - if you have one, make sure it's word-for-word exactly the same every-where
If anything in this article is confusing, do contact us and we'd be happy to give you a Brand Review and provide a detailed list on where you can mend any inconsistencies in your branding, simply email Caroline Vermeulen at: caroline@mysteryhare.com