A consistent brand keeps friends at hand.
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Brands that continually gain power and endure over time have one thing in common: consistency.
Imagine your friend Sarah reinvented herself by getting lots of plastic surgery, cutting and dying her hair, changing her clothing style—even changing her mannerisms and way of speaking. She passes you on the street, but you don’t recognize her, so the opportunity for connection is lost. It’s the same with your brand.
The next time you see her, you faintly recognize her, so you stop and say hello. She’s as nice and fun as always, but the drastic change in her appearance and behaviors makes you wary and uncomfortable. Moving forward, you don’t make as much effort to stay in touch, because even though it’s all in your mind, you don’t feel like you know her anymore - she’s not the ‘same old Sarah’ you had grown to love.
It’s the same with your brand.
When brands change, they often lose what made them relatable to customers. For example, a brand that had a whimsical personality and pretty pastel colors suddenly gets all corporate with serious words and harsh navy blue and red colors. This psychotic personality change probably won’t appeal to your customers because they were attracted to your former fun brand. They related to your old brand, so they felt that your brand was also theirs. But you had to go and change it. And now they feel that you’ve ruined it, cheapened it or made it too boring and corporate. They can’t relate to the new brand. So they don’t stay engaged with it as much as they used to. A competing brand is now in a good position to woo them away from you.
Do not change your brand unless your customers or the marketplace demand evolution in order to survive.
Mergers and acquisitions create an environment of change that is rife with examples of what to avoid. M&A situations, and unfortunately many more mundane circumstances, lead company executives to make the mistake of believing that they ‘own’ the brand and can change it to suit their desires.
A careless executive decides to change his company’s brand to match the other brands in the company’s portfolio. Or because the new marketing director is bored. Or because he likes the color orange. Or because he wants to name the company after his dog. Or his nephew is a logo designer and needs a job. You get the idea.
But while a brand is shaped by the company, it is owned by its customers. Drastic changes can annoy, alienate, confuse or lose customers altogether. The more drastic the changes, the greater the loss. When this happens, your company has lost or devalued its brand equity. And it’s difficult to rebuild.
There will be a time when you need to evolve your brand. Make sure the trigger is your customers’ desires.
Times change, people grow, industries advance and businesses need to evolve to stay competitive. There will come a time when it is necessary to evolve your brand. The trick is not to pull the trigger due to internal concerns. Only pull the trigger when you see that your brand is losing customers or failing to acquire new ones. This means your customers desire something your brand no longer offers, and you need to find out what it is.
This is when a careful brand evolution may be needed. We recommend that clients retain as many core brand elements as possible, while replacing outdated elements with more relevant names, taglines, messages or visual styles. Approach a brand evolution with caution, only change the parts that don’t appeal to customers, and retain some old elements that allow your brand to maintain its appeal with customers who like the ‘old’ brand.
If you put the proper processes and tools in place, you can efficiently monitor your brand and bring it back to consistency when it drifts.
Annually audit written communications: do they conform to the Brand Message Platform? If not, edit them.
Annually audit designed communications: do they confirm to the Visual Style Guide? If not, revise them.
Get customer feedback: how do they feel about your brand? How has their perception changed since the last time you asked?
Do market research on your own brand: Use analysis tools like SEMRush, Buzzsumo and others to see how your brand is trending, what key words are associated with your brand and how people are talking about it.
If you want to learn more about how to build a strong and consistent brand, I highly recommend our e-book: The 7 Essential Elements of Brand Strategy.
So how’s the brand at your company? Strong and consistent? Ever-changing and confusing? We’d love to hear about your brand and how you keep it alive with your customers!
