People want consistency in their lives. Consistent routines, consistent lovers, and consistent friends. It makes sense for us to want consistency from brands, too.
And that consistency starts with brand messaging.
Let’s dive right into it.
What Is Consistency for Brands?
Consistency here means maintaining a coherent brand identity, voice, and values across all customer touchpoints and communication channels.
Essentially, you’re making a map for your customers to use.
What do your customers need to look for to find you?
In a day and age where online presence matters just as much as offline brick-and-mortar presence, posting once everyday isn’t enough.
And remember: there are so many brands out there. The difference between you and your competitors is how you hold your customer’s hand while navigating them through the customer journey of your website, your socials, and (ultimately) your brand story.
Here’s Why Messaging Consistency Matters
Let’s lay out the simplest reasons why bigger brands go so far as to invest in a PR and Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) agency just to maintain message consistency in their brand.
We’ll start with:
What Messaging Consistency Avoids:
- With Inconsistency, You Might Be Labelled As A Scam
This is the most obvious reason.
If your post visuals aren’t consistent with your company’s website and your store, 9 times out of 10, your potential customers might label your business as a scam.
That or (worse) you don’t have the dedication for a solid PR and marketing team. All brands, big or small, have their budget range.
But if your brand isn’t dedicated to consistency, why would anyone want to buy from you? When everyone craves consistency–even in their relationships?
- With Inconsistency, Your Reputation Could Change (for the Worst)
PR and IMC agencies highly recommend meticulous planning when it comes to a change in message mapping. If your core messaging, or the very core of your brand, changes somewhere along the line, you have to carefully plan out how to execute the change.
If you don’t, you might end up like Tropicana back in 2009: a 20% plunge in sales because their customers couldn’t recognize their signature juices. Or these 34 other examples companies had to spend millions recovering from.
Some Local Examples:
Want a Filipino example: Look no further than two of the country’s top government agencies:
- The Department of Tourism spent P49 million in rebranding the country’s logo from “It’s More Fun in the Philippines” to “Love the Philippines. There was a nationwide backlash because the video used recycled footage and was seen by the public as unimaginative, boring, and not enough for a campaign that cost millions.
- Not too long after that, the Philippine Gaming and Amusement Corporation (PAGCOR) was under fire for their P3 million logo. For a logo so expensive, the public wondered why it seemed so jarring and so professionally undone.
Which brings me to my next point.
- With Inconsistency, It’s Expensive to Recuperate From A Messaging Mistake
In the golden words of Warren Buffet, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
When artist David Carroll sang about how his guitar broke from manhandling at the United Airlines, the airport a whopping $180 million–or 10% of their stocks weekly.
I wrote about how to build trust in your brand during uncertain times, but…why would you want to go there? When you can invest in a PR and IMC agency that could prevent a preventable crisis in the first place?
Critical PR Example:
If a small-to-medium sized brand, say, invested P100k in a larger-than-life campaign without referring to any PR expert whatsoever, they will run the risk of facing public backlash.
Which will prompt them to create at least one apology statement–which can also run the risk of public backlash. Which will then be another expensive mistake.
Even with a non-preventable crisis (a calamity or economic shortage) you would need a PR and IMC agency to ensure that your messaging is consistent (and sensitive) enough–across all your channels.
Now let’s look at:
What Message Consistency Strengthens
Here are the benefits of a consistent brand message–and coincidentally, what a PR and IMC agency can help you with.
- Increased Brand Identity
The more consistent a coherent a brand is in their messaging, the more the brand’s identity is solidified.
This, in turn, lets customers know what you and your brand is from the jump.
Examples of Strong Filipino Brand Identity:
Notice how Jollibee isn’t known for their medicine (unless you count their spaghetti as medicine, then sure). Belo isn’t known for how their chicken oil tastes good on rice, either.
It’s more than just visuals. From the product descriptions to how these brands advertise themselves, everything and anything is made of consistent brand messaging.
- Increased Brand Recall and Recognition
It’s important to remember that a customer should see a brand’s marketing messages 5-7 times before making that decision to buy from you (University of Maryland, Communications and Public Affairs).
And as far as I can tell, Jollibee isn’t remembered as a skincare brand. So imagine how easily people will remember your brand if it’s consistent across all your channels–online or offline.
If your PR and IMC agency gets your brand’s message at the right spots, customers will remember you more often, too.
- Increased Brand Loyalty and Connection
With recall and recognition comes loyal customers who connect with your brand. A 2023 study on brand communication found that effective, controlled communication (defined here as curated promotion and advertising) had a significant effect on building and maintaining customer loyalty.
More than just increase sales (which, I think, is the ultimate goal), your brand should be able to have a customer base you can connect to…if you play your cards right.
Critical PR Example:
And if, say, Mercury Drug suddenly started selling fast food to their customers (an audience of people who rely on the pharmacy for their medicine), there will be backlash. At best, you’ll get memes out of it but the sales will stagnate.
At worst, Mercury Drug will lose money and a critical connection to their loyal customer base. Because why bring out messages of health if you’ll sell unhealthy food?
Consistency Is Your Brand’s Love Letter
At the end of the day, your brand should be consistent with its messaging because your customers should matter to you.
Think of it as a love letter to your customers…or would-be customers.
And with the help of a PR and IMC agency (or not, if you still prefer to do it on your own), your love letter should:
- Be consistent across all offline and online channels
- Establish your business as legitimate
- Keep your brand’s reputation consistent
- Reduce the risks of reputation mistakes
Moreover, with the right strategy, your consistent brand messaging will strengthen these aspects of your brand:
- Brand identity,
- Brand recall & recognition
- Brand loyalty, and
- Emotional connection with your customers
Have you read this far and want to make your brand’s messaging more consistent?
NGP IMC could have the solutions you’re looking for! You can schedule an appointment here, or contact them here.
Kriztin Cruz is a recruitment and digital marketing professional, freelance writer, hobbyist painter, and frustrated sociologist–with too many things to want and too little time to spare. She graduated with a Psychology degree in 2019 at De La Salle – College of Saint Benilde Antipolo. When she’s not drafting a corporate letter or working on anything digital marketing, you can find her doing the following, but not in this order: reading a good book, scavenging for a good book, sketching, painting, journaling, junk journaling, obsessing over an obscure Czechoslovakian surrealist film (or anything by Miyazaki or Del Toro), cooking, finding a cafe to relax in, and creating new things while a nice documentary plays in the background.