Brand Consistency: Are You Doing It Right? Are You Even Doing It?

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Take measures to promote consistent brand messaging and secure your portion of the competitive landscape.

Your brand is who you are and what your business stands for. If your branding strategy is not uniform across the board and at every point of contact, your company will send mixed messages to its target markets.

The result?

Not only could you face difficulties when attempting to stand out from your competitors, there’s a chance your brand image could be created for you through the eyes of customers who don’t quite understand what you believe in.

A smarter approach: Take measures to promote consistent brand messaging and secure your portion of the competitive landscape.

Executing Your Branding Strategy

What’s your mission? Simply put, what are you hoping to accomplish each time you conduct a transaction, and how will you communicate this to your market? Your unique message should be transparent but compelling, so potential customers can grasp a thorough understanding of who you are. With each interaction, they should grow more eager to do business with you.

Trouble arises when you have so many brand assets—so many pieces of digital information including images, social media and blog posts, documents, creative files, trade show materials, advertisements, marketing communications and sales presentations—that you can’t keep track of them.

It becomes increasingly difficult for all key stakeholders to access and manage these brand assets and almost impossible to implement brand management guidelines, strategies and usage standards. In this case, using reputable brand asset management software can help get you back on track and ensure that your brand messaging is consistent.

3 Critical Questions for Branding Customer Experience

In addition, take a step back and assess the following:

  • Are there voids or unmet needs in the industry? If so, how can you fill them? Take a look at customer reviews and online forums or lend a listening ear each time you encounter a patron with a grievance.

Note the reason for their dissatisfaction and devise a plan to fill the gap.

  • How will you exceed the current expectations of your customers? Simply meeting their needs isn’t enough, especially if the market is oversaturated and prospects have several other options to choose from.

Customers need to know that they can trust you to deliver an awe-inspiring experience each time they patronize your services or purchase your products.

  • Are each of your products or services truly unique? Creating strikingly similar items for the sake of increasing demand can backfire once customers determine what you’re offering is prepackaged.

While you may have succeeded in boosting your bottom line short-term, chances of repeat business is highly unlikely. In fact, overlap could be detrimental to your brand.

Be sure your mission speaks the language of the segment you’re targeting or your efforts may be in vain. The “build it and they will come” approach is no longer valid in this competitive landscape; it’s your duty to properly brand the organization and attract the caliber of customers that will help your businesses thrive in the long run.

Check out this Business Insider article to see the 10 things that all the best brands do.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Flavio Martins
Flavio Martins is the VP of Operations and Customer Support at DigiCert, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise authentication services and high-assurance SSL certificates trusted by thousands of government, education, and Fortune 500 organizations. Flavio is an award-winning customer service blogger, customer service fanatic, and on a mission to show that organizations can use customer experience as a competitive advantage win customer loyalty. Blog: Win the Customer!

1 COMMENT

  1. This is a good reminder, Flavio. Businesses often bombard customers with every benefit when in fact, you only need to pick key points that will make your product or service stand out. I especially like your point on looking at ‘unmet’ needs. By bridging that gap, you instantly make yourself more useful. Now how you market that, is the real question.

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