What if your favorite fast-food restaurant looked and acted differently at every location? What if each restaurant had a different menu, hours, and uniforms? What if the food tasted different from location to location? Would it still be your favorite?
As a manufacturer, whether you sell your products directly to consumers, through distribution channels, or both – product recognization drives sales.
Clarity and consistency produce powerful brands. Powerful brands drive product recognition. Product recognization drives sales.
To illustrate, imagine if every one of your audience touchpoints were inconsistent. Prospective buyers would be confused about what your product offers, how it might benefit them, and whether or not they could trust you.
Inversely, imagine that every touchpoint with your audience aligns and builds on one another. Now you’re building trust, and it’s simple for prospective buyers to understand your product and how it benefits them.
Branding is the framework that aligns all the potentially disparate digital and analog interactions, and it works because clarity and consistency are foundational to the framework.
Brand
Clarity
Brand clarity starts with knowing who you (your company) and your market are. Companies that are clear about their mission and whom they serve tend to have powerful brands.
Brand clarity defines your company’s personality, beliefs, style, user experience, and tone of voice through specific word choices, colors, typography, and imagery. Along with directing your marketing and sales efforts, your brand should guide and align things as deep as your company culture, hiring practices, and new product decisions.
Brand Consistency
Consistency reinforces your clarity. Brand consistency repeats all the elements that brand clarity offers. Now, your brand can become consistently established internally across stakeholders and employees and externally across customers and your broader community.
When everyone is aligned and clear on the value the company and its products offer, excitement, confidence, and sales increase.
Something one time is often forgettable. The same something every time is branding.
By now, you can see — that your brand is a big deal. Like a good-looking garden, it takes work to create, nurture, and maintain. However, when you do, you get blooms and a harvest in the form of aligned employees, better products, loyal customers, additional sales, and momentum toward your mission.
Can your brand improve?
- Are we clear on our mission? Ask someone on your team at every level what your mission is. If they don’t know it, there’s work to do.
- Do we know our audience? Do you have a buyer persona that details your ideal customer’s preferences, frustrations, and hopes?
- Is our brand aligned with our mission and address our customer needs? Will your brand help you attract others to your mission and accomplish your mission?
- Does everything we say, do, and produce align with our brand? From how you answer your phone to the packaging of your products, are you creating clarity or confusion for your buyer?
Bonus:
Where does your logo fit into this?
Your logo is not your brand. Your logo is a visual representation of your brand. It’s one element of many within your brand that help your company and products become recognizable, memorable, and trustworthy.
About the Author
Jason Otis is the president of Perk Brands and founder of Built for Home. Perk Brands is a digital marketing agency that partners with home product manufacturers to make their products easy to find and buy. Built for Home is a community of home product manufacturers and a resource for buyers to find products that make their lives better at home.
