From the initial stages of building your company, building brand consistency should be in your top list of priorities. Why? Once consumers have tried a product and like it, they are rarely going to switch over to another brand. Building consistency within your overall brand builds trust and dependency.
Branding isn’t just about having consistent packaging designs and labeling. Brands should be consistent on multiple levels. For example if your packaging is bright, colourful and playful but your website verbiage is written in a flat or dull manner, you are breaking consistency.
The easiest way to create consistency is to break down your consumers into personas. Once you have specified personas you can go on to design packaging and write copy to each persona. Personas should be broken up by demographics such as age, gender, location, interests etc.
Would you maintain trust in a friend if they were always on time and then all of a sudden they starting showing up late or not at all? Most likely you would think something was wrong. They are no longer dependable, something has changed and most likely your friendship will suffer. The same can happen with brands. Brands can go on for months or even years building a strong consistent brand that consumers trust, but with one small change in marketing language or graphic design and poof. That small ‘poof’ can result in mistrust and even worse the loss of brand loyalty.
How do you maintain trust? Maintaining trust means sticking to set guidelines from day one. This doesn’t mean that you can’t try new things or experiment. What this means is that you must never lose track of who your target market is. When building your brand, your company needs to write rules of how you will brand and market your business.
Building a strong and consistent brand doesn’t happen overnight. It starts with great overall planning from day one and sticking to it. Figuring out your target market and building personas will greatly help you market and design for the right audience.
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