For manufacturers, achieving brand consistency is especially vital as it showcases their attention to detail and efficiency.
Your organization’s brand is what draws customers in and keeps them coming back for more. That’s why consistency—a uniform delivery of everything under a brand’s umbrella—is crucial. How can manufacturing brands, with highly complex offerings, implement consistency to build brand recognition? Allow us to explain.
Strategies for achieving brand consistency
- Develop an informed brand strategy. One of the first steps to achieving consistency is developing an informed strategy for your organization’s brand. A strategy helps outline your brand’s characteristics, values, personality, and voice while also serving as a roadmap for constructing the visual identity.
- Establish clear brand guidelines. Documenting a brand’s visual identity ensures every piece of collateral and digital element you create is consistent and on-brand. Without it, your audience and even your internal team might be confused about who you are. Brand guidelines can also outline your organization’s mission, editorial style, verbal identity, values, and history.
- Align messaging and visuals across channels. Once a brand style guide has been developed, your organization should align messaging and visuals across digital and traditional channels. If the logo on your website doesn’t match print materials, it’s time to make everything cohesive.
- Train and empower employees. Your employees are the face of your brand, and they play a crucial role in delivering a consistent customer experience. Provide comprehensive training to employees, not only on the brand guidelines, but also about your brand values and how to embody them in their interactions with customers. Empower them to make decisions that align with the brand’s principles.
- Measure and conduct regular brand audits. To ensure consistency, regularly measure and assess your brand consistency across different touchpoints and conduct a branded content audit. Use metrics and data to identify any deviations and take corrective actions to bring them back in line with your brand identity. A branded content audit is basically a review of content across all channels that can uncover how consistent it is—in addition to helping identify what is and isn’t working for your brand.
Defining or refreshing a brand for consistency might sound daunting, however, it’s doable and worthwhile.
Benefits of brand consistency
With all the work that goes into creating a consistent brand, you might question if it’s worth it. The answer is a resounding “yes”. While there are some challenges—coordinating efforts across multiple teams in addition to the multiple marketing and communication channels—developing brand consistency has several benefits.
- Enhanced brand recognition and awareness. Consistency helps a brand build recognition and awareness. Consistency fosters brand recognition, making it easier for customers to identify and remember the brand. For instance, when farmers see a bold green tractor with the iconic yellow deer logo on the front, they instantly associate it with John Deere, a renowned manufacturer of agricultural machinery. The consistent branding and distinctive logo build trust and familiarity, encouraging farmers to choose John Deere’s reliable and high-performance equipment over competitors in the agricultural industry.
- Differentiation and customer loyalty. Manufacturers like John Deere, who align messaging, logo, and customer experience not only help ensure brand consistency, but they also set themselves apart in a crowded market. By delivering a consistent and positive brand experience, John Deere builds customer loyalty among farmers who rely on their machinery. Over the years, John Deere has established a reputation for reliability and quality, creating a strong bond with its customer base, and making them the preferred choice for agricultural equipment.
Tips for implementing brand consistency
Now that you know the benefits of and how to achieve brand consistency, it’s time to implement those strategies.
- Engage key stakeholders. Whether your organization is instituting a new brand or considering a refresh, engaging key stakeholders in the development process is important. An organization’s leaders and employees will be responsible for communicating and living the new brand, and those who are aligned with the brand can become ambassadors. Communication with stakeholders through the branding process helps create transparency and wider acceptance because they have been involved.
- Regular assessments and audits. Creating or refreshing a brand isn’t a one-and-done process, either. Conducting regular assessments—or audits—can help organizations identify a brand’s strengths and areas for improvement. After you complete an assessment, review the findings to set goals and create a plan for implementing change.
- Leverage technology. While steps like communicating with stakeholders and audits are done manually, technology can also be leveraged for executing brand consistency. Marketing automation tools like HubSpot can help streamline processes and provide a more personalized experience for customers.
To recap, brand consistency is more than just using the same fonts and colors on graphics and in print. Customer experience and an organization’s values are also crucial elements. In a field like manufacturing with the need to prove trust and quality, consistency can help develop brand recognition and a positive reputation. If you need help implementing brand consistency, give us a call.