Maintaining Brand Consistency

This informal CPD article on Maintaining Brand Consistency was provided by London School of Public Relations, who offer courses that explain how brands can build reputational capabilities and stay competitive by taking advantage of the growing importance of social influence and public relations in the changing nature of business.

Maintaining Brand Consistency

Brands need a cohesive image, in order to stand out from the crowd and to position themselves in the minds of customers. Creating a consistent strategy for the brand, in terms of communications, market positioning, relationship building, customer care, engagement, and digital marketing helps solidify the key values the brand stands for.

Communicating your brand’s personality

Communicating your brand’s personality is also equally important, and you can achieve this through clear and consistent messaging, in both a written and a visual sense. Consistent messaging yields improved market visibility, and generally gives you a competitive advantage over other firms. Companies that achieve a unified communication strategy typically present a strong brand story and, therefore, build intimate relationships with their customers which leads to improved sales.

Here are 5 top tips to maintain brand consistency:

1. Develop your brand’s identity: Your brand’s identity is a mixture of your content quality, customer service and your relationship with customers. Apple is a great example of creating a clear brand identity through the establishment of core brand values. Apple’s brand values are comprehensively instilled within the organisation, from digital communication to even the make-up of their physical products. For example, Apple are synonymous with high build quality, simplicity and innovation.
2. Create a well-defined brand strategy: An often under-utilised step in social media marketing is the creation of a pre-defined strategy. It is difficult to establish a strong community on social channels without having a clear vision. Twitch, a live-streaming gaming platform has a pre-defined strategy centred around providing real value for specific niches and communities, and this strategy has yielded them high fan engagement and subsequently high revenue generation.
3. Protect your reputation: Without brand values that are trust-orientated, any investment in marketing is futile. You must be perceived as consistent and trustworthy to build brand equity. This can be achieved by focusing on building long-term value-led customer relationships and conducting business ethically and with transparency.
4. Monitor Results: To improve brand consistency it is important to use and evaluate performance indicators so you can verify whether a strategy is working. This will provide you with clarity about your brand positioning and will give you insights so you can further improve your marketing and branding campaigns.
5. Use Taglines: You only need to see the tagline ‘Just Do It’ to know the brand in question is Nike. Taglines are most effective when they represent a company’s values and beliefs and when they are used repeatedly to build brand consistency. Taglines are particularly useful for gaining traction with social media marketing.

Regardless of an organisation’s size, nature or history, brand consistency is vital. However, brand consistency can be only achieved through cohesive branding and messaging, which is determined by your pre-defined communication strategies. These strategies should focus on engaging and building relationships online and in-person with customers and influencers.

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