People prefer consistent to inconsistent people, but do these same feelings carry over towards brands and businesses? And can you use this to dramatically increase your brand awareness?
Absolutely.
Not only that, where being a consistent person can help you make more friends, being a consistent business can help you make more money.
Basically, consistency is a good thing, and here’s why.
Consistent Differentiation
The first point is that you need to be consistent in your business, but not necessarily in your industry.
Essentially, don’t be like everyone else, but be consistent in being you.
Differentiation is a key marketing concept that focuses on making sure you’re unique within the marketplace.
A mistake many new ventures and startups make is focusing on being unique at the expense of all else.
It’s important to be unique, but ideally you want to be unique in a way that actually matters to your target market.
The thing with being unique or different, is that you need to be consistently unique or consistently different across everything you do.
This means your brand, image, logo, colors, message, tone, and style are consistently represented across each and every customer touch point.
A Touchpoint (contact point, customer contact, Moment of Truth, point of contact) describes the interface of a product, service or brand with customers/users, non-customers, employees and other stakeholders, before, during and after a transaction. –Wikipedia
Presenting anything other than a consistent brand message is actually harmful and counterproductive to your brand.
Authenticity Discrepancy
The opposite of consistency is a version of authenticity discrepancy.
Authenticity Discrepancy is just a fancy way of saying not being true to yourself, or your brand.
As an example, if your brand defines itself on providing excellent customer service (as Zappos does) and you have an employee or location that doesn’t live up to that standard, your brand and message are damaged.
The customer will experience a discrepancy between what they were expecting and what they received, and the damage may be irreversible.
On the other hand, if you ensure that all employees, all locations, and anywhere else your customer experiences your brand (including advertising, marketing, and other promotional materials you send out) all consistently deliver the same message, the positive effects will be compounded and the customer’s expectations will be confirmed each and every time they do business with you.
Another example would be in running an inconsistent advertising campaign (something I see all the time with new businesses just getting started with online advertising).
Rather than strategically planning out an effective advertising campaign they throw together a series of different ads with inconsistent images and messages so rather than building on the previous recognition each ad is essentially having to introduce the business all over again.
This gets expensive fast, and does little to build up a well known and recognizable brand.
How To 10X Your Brand
The thing with branding consistency is that it doesn’t provide linear returns.
It provides exponential returns.
Exponential returns that are compounded over time to deliver in bigger and better returns.
Every message you put out to the world and every image the customer sees of your business builds and reinforces your brand so it gets bigger and stronger with every interaction.
This is why it’s so important to keep consistent branding across all your properties including:
- Website
- Social media
- Email (message, tone, and email signature)
- Voicemail message
- Business cards
- Advertisements
Your message doesn’t need to be boring or repetitive, but it does need to be consistent.
Consistency builds trust, likability, and recognition. When you combine all three of these you end up with the perfect recipe for rapid business growth and awareness.
