Furthermore, in today’s fractured market, the average customer will engage in dozens of different interactions before making a purchasing decision. For instance, before making a purchase, your customer may visit your page on a social networking site, visit your webpage, visit your physical storefront, communicate with an employee in person or via phone or email, or use your payment processing system. Every single interaction will leave an impression, and a consistent message will lead to the development of professionalism and an influx of loyal customers.

Brand consistency is not an issue of repeating the same thing over and over; it is more about a consistent experience that reinforces your brand promise every time. If customers notice incongruent messaging, incongruent visual messaging, or incongruent service quality, it undermines their confidence and causes them to question your reliability as a business.

Why Brand Consistency Is Important to Perceived Customers

Consistency promotes familiarity, and familiarity promotes trust. When consumers see the colors, language, and voice of your brand from platform to platform, they develop a sense of consistency and professionalism from your businesses.

Inconsistencies from platform to platform indicate a lack of organization or attention to detail. These are qualities consumers do not want to see associated with the businesses they are interested in.

Research in consumer psychology shows that one of the most important factors in consumer decision-making is their preference for brands that are easy to recognize and understand. This acceptance provides a level of comfort that diminishes risk in conducting business with you. Consistency is even more crucial in emerging businesses since, at this point, you are attempting to build credibility that wasn’t previously established.

Branding also helps in recall. When customers are consistently reminded of you at all touch points, they are more likely to recall you at a time when they need your products/services. This is extremely valuable in a competitive marketplace where customers have a lot of choices.

Mapping Your Customer Touchpoints

Creating consistency begins with your knowledge of customer points of interaction with your brand. It becomes necessary to create an entire customer map ranging from awareness to servicing after sales.

These may include such online touch points as your business website, social networking sites, email correspondence, online advertising, mobile apps, and other online tools used by consumers to conduct business with you. These online channels have limitations and dynamics of their own but have to keep the same corporate identity despite the differences.

Physical touch points include your retail storefront and office, product packaging, promotional materials, signage, employee attire, and all other physical elements that customers interact with or receive. Often, the strongest impression will be made by the experiences that exist in the physical realm.

“Service touchpoints” include direct interaction with your employees, either in person, by phone, or via chat support. The language used by your employees, your employees’ level of knowledge of the products, and the problem-solving skills of your employees all project the value of your brand.

Refining Your Brand Standards

Achieving consistency requires that your brand have a set of documented guidelines to apply the elements of your brand identity. Your brand style guide needs to discuss the use of your logos, colors, fonts, and imagery. It also needs to discuss the tone, key messaging, and the characteristics that your brand represents.

“Your Visual Identity should have flexibility with the ability to remain recognizable. You should have primary and secondary color schemes that are versatile. Create guidelines on logo usage, size, and distance required around the logo. Decide which fonts should be used in which situations. Provide examples for approved image styles.”

The use of voice guidelines helps make everyone’s voice consistent in written and verbal communications. Are you casual or formal? Fun or serious? Authoritative or friendly? Write this voice’s personality into a detailed document of do’s and don’ts with examples of phrases to use and avoid to make social media managers and customer service staff use a unified voice.

Physical Brand Consistency Through Employee Presentations

Your employees act as brand ambassadors, especially those who have regular contact with customers. Their uniforms and the accessories they use are an important part of the brand image. Custom lanyards are an effective and simple tool to keep the brand image consistent while meeting the functionality criteria as well.

Custom lanyards enable employee identification should they be attending an event, working within a retail setting, or generally when they represent your company. They promote uniformity while establishing your company’s identity through your logo and colors. Beyond company identity cards, lanyards could hold your company’s slogan or website. Employees can be your ‘brand on the move’.

Custom lanyards also ensure that your team can easily stand out during conferences, trade shows, and other events. Customized lanyards promote a sense of consistency among your team members, which gives a sense that your company is professional and has planned everything in detail. Customized lanyards also help customers identify employees easily during unorganized events.

Online personal brands require special care with consistency because consumers are able to quickly browse between sites and recognize discrepancies right away. Make sure the logo design, color scheme, and personal information are the same on all social networking sites and profiles you maintain. Choose editing effects for photos that produce consistency between your Instagram photos and Facebook page and site so they all have the same brand owner.

The email communication should include elements that match the design principles followed by your website. Whether it is the newsletter sent to customers, the confirmation email sent after a successful order or the customer service email sent to resolve their query, the email should clearly belong to your company. A standardized format should be followed by the email signatures sent by all employees.

Your website is the central point of your online presence as a brand. Each page needs to echo your brand identity by using consistent navigation, buttons, headings, and content positioning. Error messages and loading screens also offer chances to retain your brand personality instead of using the same default messages offered by the server.

The Checkout Experience as a Brand Touchpoint

Payment and checkout is a key brand touchpoint where consistency is imperative to winning customer confidence. A fragmented checkout flow that suddenly switches to unknown branding and/or the generic payment page that isn’t associated with the known brand can contribute to abandoning carts at the last minute because the customer will wonder if they are indeed being served by the same company.

Payment tools, as seen with companies like Payline, enable the brand to stay consistent right up to the last mile of the customer experience. Since your payment experience is not taken to a different page where the brand identity exists but instead happens in a fluid transition from the brand interaction to the payment experience, it increases the customer trust factor when customers are most exposed, which is when they are asked for payment information.

Consistent experiences at the point of sale are also consistent with your brand promise because this same standard of polish and professionalism led them to the company in the first place. Whether these purchases are being made online, through mobile devices, or in a traditional point-of-sale setting, it all comes back to consistency and ensuring the customer knows they’re in good hands.

Assessing the Influence of Consistency on Brands

Measures of how consistency influences customer behavior include tracking brand recall, customer satisfaction, and net promoter scores. Conduct a survey among your customers to determine their view of your brand, where you may find some inconsistency that you have not detected.

Watch for customer service touchpoints for language and approach consistency. Check customer-facing communication for alignment with your brand standards on a regular basis. Your brand standards or guidelines should also change when your business changes, but they should be rolled out in a systematic way for all customer touchpoints rather than appearing erratically.

Training the Team on the Brand

The entire team in your organization plays a part in brand consistency, not just the marketing team. Offer brand training for all your employees and make sure they know not just the visual criteria but the meaning behind the visual elements represented by your brand personality and values.

Make it easy to access, and employees can consult it when preparing any type of communication that reaches customers. Design templates for common use, such as presentations, proposals, or social media communications, to ensure consistency becomes the easiest way. This refresh training keeps consistency in mind as your team expands and changes. 

Building Long-Term Brand Equity 

Building a consistent experience for your brand in all customer interactions leads to compound equity. This is because with every interaction, you reinforce all that has come earlier in terms of customers grasping who you are and what you represent. All this equity becomes an asset that sets you apart in the marketplace. Consistency is a sign that you respect customers’ time and intelligence. 

Consistency helps make customers’ experience predictable and efficient. They understand what to expect when doing business with your company, and this will turn some customers into your ambassadors in due time, since customers will be assured that everyone gets the same favorable experience. Consistency in physical components, such as personalized lanyards, online interfaces, payment systems, and customer service, and digital components, such as online interfaces, payment systems, and customer service, establishes a consistent brand identity that instills trust, imprints professionalism, and inculcates favorable customer sentiments with every interaction. Being consistent in this manner, with regard to brand identity, ensures that tangible outcomes are generated in terms of improved business performance.