Brand Consistency In A Globally Accessible World
Is the lack of brand consistency diluting your business image or even worse damaging your brand’s reputation?
Are you a marketing manager or business owner who’s thinking about launching your business into a new market, or maybe you’ve actually already been operating in a market for some time.
If you are you will know how important brand consistency is in terms of building brand awareness, especially when you’re competing, in a highly competitive market, or you’re entering a market where you haven’t established any kind of, presence or authority.
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More opportunities for people and brands to reach markets
With the internet growing at such a rapid pace, and the ability to access the internet becoming more and easier through technology and communications, it’s created more opportunities for people and brands to reach markets you previously would have not been able to reach before. And do business with countries you wouldn’t have thought about doing business with before.
While on the one hand, it’s great for, obviously, business growth. On the other hand, it has brought with it another set of branding challenges.
So what are some of the things that you can do to ensure your brand image and the way it is represented is maintained and consistent?
One of the best ways for me to explain this is to give you an example. We recently did some work for an established UK sports solutions provider, and while they had already established a considerable pool of distributors and dealers in the global market, which had been growing and growing up steadily. What they hadn’t expected was;
- the amount of work that would be involved in servicing and maintaining the demand for brand assets to support dealers in marketing the brand at a local level.
- The consistency of how much work would be involved in terms of making sure that distributors presented their brand to the same, high standards as was expected in the UK.
While the client already had brand guidelines for their UK market activity, they didn’t have one for the global markets. So one of the first things that we did was to create a brand guideline document.
Debbie at FIRE Creative hit the ground running fully immersing herself in the brand, our product ranges and the wider company.
Linda Forster, Global Marketing Manager
Create or review your brand guidelines
So one of the first things that we did was to create a brand guideline document. While they already had a brand guideline for the UK market, they didn’t have one for the global market.
So the first thing that we did was to review the assets that were there already and then upgrade them and bring together a global-specific brand guideline document for the distributors. The second thing that we looked at was what we call a dealer resource file, which was essentially a document that contained all the different existing brands, material, assets, marketing material, and examples of those, really to set a benchmark of what dealers in local countries and local territories could do.
The third part and one of the key elements of the brief was around the way Pulse Fitness wanted to sell and position their products in the global market. This needed to be slightly different to how they were doing it in the UK. They wanted was a more product-specific marketing and advertising campaign that dealers could use to sell the fitness equipment either individually or as a group package. To build out the brand and also maintain consistency.
So why is this important?
Probably the best thing to do is pick out any one of the big global brands. You’ll see one thing that sets a lot of the big well-known brands apart is the consistency of how they use their branding. No matter whether it’s a staff member, a lorry, a shop storefront, or whatever it is, big brands set very clear standards around how their brand is presented at every different touch points.
As you can see brand consistency can actually be a crucial part of helping your brand stand out in the market.
So I really hope you find this useful, and obviously if you know anyone else that might find it helpful then please feel free to share it.
If you are a marketing manager, and you are concerned about the consistency of your current branding and marketing material, here are 3 ways we can help:
1) Schedule a call or book a brand discovery session here.
2) If you would like to learn more about our work with Pulse Fitness, you can access the full study here.
3) Read or watch How To Maximise Your Brand & Marketing for further insights.
2 Steps To Maximise Your Brand & Marketing ROI
Telling the world who you are and what you believe in is what good branding and storytelling is all about. It’s about taking a few well-chosen words and combining them with images, either still or moving, to really craft brands’ stories that are both memorable and meaningful.
So why is brand storytelling so important? And is it really possible to increase your brand awareness and even your marketing ROI by harnessing it?
I think so, and if you look around at the moment on advertising and in social media you will see how a lot of brands are exploring ways to really get more connection with their audiences.
So let’s looks at how you can use brand storytelling to maximize your brand and marketing ROI.
Step 1 | Your Words
From your narrative to your copy, everything from your brand values, your essence, your mission statement, your vision statement, your history all make up the core elements of your brand’s strategy.
From there, you have your content which includes everything from your marketing communications, your website copy, your social media copy. All of that is very much about words and the narrative and the tone.
When you get clear on who you are and what you stand for, you can begin to communicate with your customers more effectively and look at step two, which is your visuals.
Step 2 | Your Visuals
This is where you get to bring all of the words to life and tell your brands story and narrative in a more visually appealing way.
So what can you do from a visual telling story perspective?
Everything from your brand identity, your visual identity and the different ways that you might want to express that identity, whether it’s purely through illustration, purely through photography, purely through graphic design, or sometimes it can be a combination of all of those things.
And once you have achieved these two steps you can then combine them to fully market your business, and then start to roll out your brand assets across your marketing, social media, staff uniforms and signage and even store interiors. Use can also use mediums like video and animation to bring your brand’s story to life.
So, when it comes to your business, is it really possible to increase brand awareness and even profits by harnessing the power of your brand story? We think so.
At the same time we understand that as a busy business owner or marketing manager with hundreds of competing priorities, it’s sometimes difficult to even find the time to think about your brand story and how to fully use it across your marketing mix.
Thankfully solving this problem for business owners is what my team and I do all day, every day. So here are 3 ways we can help:
1 | Book a brand discovery session
During this 60min session, we’ll take a look at what’s working and what could be better using the 3 C’s Clarity, Consistency and Credibility. Click this link to book your session.
2 | Download a complimentary copy of The Art of Telling Your Brand Story workbook and
learn the 6 essential deep dive questions we ask when uncovering a companies brand or messaging strategy.
3 | Got a marketing brief you’re ready to discuss?
Contact Debbie direct to arrange a meeting debbiee (at) firecreativemedia (dot) com