Who doesn’t love a delicious cake?!
But it has to taste amazing – it’s no good if it looks the part but fails to live up to the expectations of your taste buds. Conversely, it could be a fantastic cake, but look awful in which case, nobody will even want to try it.
A winning product or service, blended with sound messaging and an eye catching, relatable style are the three essential ingredients for your company’s consistency cake. Ice your cake with a planned strategy and you will be sure to serve up a winner, whether you are catering for an intimate occasion, or a global party.
So how do you begin? To start with, you need to select quality ingredients, which means researching the plethora of available options from the outset, only then can you settle on the ones which work best for your cake. Investing time on this will deliver a more efficient finished result and ensure that every advertising dollar spent, will be working as hard as you are to be memorable for the right reasons.
Product Consistency
One of the key branding ingredients for your cake is consistency – this allows your audience to know from the outset, who you are, what you do and what to expect when they engage with you.
Would you want to do business with someone who constantly changes their recipe? Such a random ‘make it up as we go along’ approach won’t come across as reliable or reassuring. Any trust which has already been gained, is likely to be eroded and therefore, unlikely to be successful.
Let’s use a global example here – the Big Mac. Love it or loath it, you are pretty much guaranteed that if you order one in say for example Russia, it will be the same as the one you order in Brazil, or China, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. It’s reassuringly familiar.
Now imagine if one day you walked into a McDonalds, ordered a Big Mac, sat down to eat it only to realise when you took your first bite, that you were tasting a chicken patty instead of a beef patty. What would you think? Most people would immediately conclude that they weren’t even eating a Big Mac. It may well be a delicious burger, but it isn’t what they were expecting when they placed their order.
Top tip: know your audience and what they want, then deliver it time and time again. You can adjust the ingredients throughout your journey, but make sure these align with market demands, and that you don’t simply change things because you felt like a chicken burger for lunch one day.
Messaging Consistency
Whether your business is fun, serious, offers a life changing solution, or is just there for everyday convenience, don’t mix your messaging and don’t bombard your audience with an overload of advertising. Frequency is a key element in a good consistency cake. It’s like swearing. Do it too much and it loses impact. Do it at the right time and in the right place, and people will stop what they are doing and sit up and take notice of your cake.
Top tip: ask for feedback – everyone has an opinion. Whether it’s chatting to friends and family or organising a more formal approach such as a questionnaire or focus groups, it’s important to know that the message people are getting, is the one you intended to deliver.
Style Consistency
Successful brands are more than just a beautiful logo or a clever tagline. They are continually, but gradually evolving, working their way into your subconscious without you even being aware of it.
All brand styles evolve, although the key ingredients remain the same. Sometimes you can just look at a colour, or a theme and know in the blink of an eye, which company it belongs to. So how does this happen? Through consistency. Your audience will soon build an association with your brand from the way it is presented stylistically to do your product or service justice, without having to spell it out. This is next level marketing.
The more consistent your brand styling becomes, the more efficient your marketing campaigns will be. Nike no longer needs to use their brand name unless they choose to, they are instantly recognisable from their iconic tick. But it doesn’t even need to be a visual cue. Remember the Intel Pentium processor jingle?
Top tip: Be patient. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
