Everyone knows that branding is essential to the success of a business. But many people are still unclear on just what branding is. More than a logo and a company “voice,” branding is a promise to your audience. A promise about what they can expect from every interaction with your company, its products, services, and employees. With this in mind, let’s dive a little deeper into what it means to create a consistent brand experience.
How to achieve consistent brand management
An example of consistent brand management is imagining stepping into a popular coffee house franchise branch with locations across the globe. It doesn’t matter if that branch is in London, Tokyo, or Toronto – you know what to expect from the experience, from the layout of the cafe to the colour of the barista’s apron to the drink in your cup.
Achieving this kind of consistency is a huge feat, but it comes down to a handful of effective strategies:
- Establishing solid processes
- Implementing thorough training programs
- Integrating your technology
Well-established processes performed by an educated and empowered workforce and supported by efficient technology enable your company to deliver on its brand promise reliably. These three elements working together make brand management predictable and repeatable.
Why employee brand engagement is key to your success
Your employees are the keepers of your brand. As the people who carry out processes and interact with customers, your team holds the key to your success.
Consider, too, that online platforms have granted customers greater access to your brand than ever before and at more incredible speeds than ever before. Each of these connection points—whether it’s a chatbot, a social media account, or an email response—has the power to strengthen, weaken, or destroy a customer’s relationship with your brand.
This is why it’s essential to hire the right people and then train, support, and empower them effectively and on an ongoing basis.
Challenges to effective brand management
Branding management isn’t a project, it’s a process, and it requires continual attention. Launching a brand is just the first step. To set yourself up for long-term success, you need to anticipate and prepare for the everyday challenges that arise, which include:
Staying nimble
No matter what your industry or market, change is a certainty. You have to be prepared to adapt your brand to the shifts in preferences, technology, strategy, and more that will come your way.
Evolving the brand
The best brands know when it’s time to refresh and reinvent themselves, which keeps them relevant over years and decades. Don’t hold so fast to the consistency that you stop evolving and start falling behind.
Streamlining technologies
With the fast pace of technology change, it’s essential to make sure that your tech is working for you, not against you. Studies show that some professionals use more than 20 different platforms and programs in performing their day-to-day tasks. This kind of complexity can end up dragging down your efficiency and creating needless confusion for your employees and your customers.
Key Takeaways
Achieving consistent brand management is a big task, but it becomes manageable when you focus on the key pillars of good process, good training, and sound technology. Your employees are some of your most valuable and powerful assets in launching and maintaining a reliable brand experience that attracts and engages customers for the long term.
