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Without the company’s meticulous focus on brand messaging, Dollar Shave Club might easily have been the Dollar Shave Dud. Instead, the disruptive delivery service never lost its witty, irreverent tone. Plus, when the company pursued product extensions, they chose ones that didn’t dilute the brand perception, such as shampoos and deodorants (basically anything that helps customers not “make a stink”).
Reducing or eliminating brand dilution isn’t easy, but it’s well worth the effort. Top businesses have proven this repeatedly. When it comes to consistency, major corporations such as Adobe and Walmart rely on specific style guides that govern all aspects of their brand messaging, even their partners’ branding. You might not be on the same scale as those giants, but you should still prioritize consistent messaging — a failure to do so will cost you.
A recent study by InnerView Group, a marketing consulting firm, and FocusVision, a customer insights technology provider, found that brand dilution could cost companies $10 million or more each year due to the negative impact on customer experience. In fact, 66% of survey respondents lacked confidence that their whole company was on the same page regarding the brand story. It can only follow that customers aren’t getting the right impression every time. And in the world of pervasive digital branding, the stakes are even higher.
Brand dilution can impact not only a business’s bottom line but can also be a problem for personal brands. Personal brands also have to be communicated consistently across all channels — especially through social branding. When it comes to engaging your people in your brand, you need them to deliver on your corporate brand promise in a way that’s authentic to them. Making them robots or replicas won’t work. Neither will leaving them to make up their own mind about your organization’s brand promise. The best results occur when corporate branding allows room for personal expression on the part of every brand ambassador. This does not result in dilution. Quite the opposite: when your people can apply their unique strengths in support of the corporate brand’s mission, they deliver an authentic yet consistent message.
To keep your brand messaging aligned, learn from the big names and take the following four steps.
1. Rely on reality.
Most people associate the Cadbury name with chocolate, but fewer realize that the brand offered instant mashed potatoes for around two decades starting in the 1960s. While the Smash product was successful, it diluted Cadbury’s branding as a premium confectioner. On the other hand, Starbucks has exploded into energy drinks, liqueurs and even ice cream on occasion — all areas outside the coffee category, but close enough to strengthen the brand.
Choose brand extensions carefully because they can derail you in the long run, even if they seem to be providing a temporary bump in sales or interest. Before you go all-in on an exciting new product or service, conduct research to ensure your branding stays consistent throughout each channel. What do followers love about your existing brand? Does the same trend resonate with a majority of them? If people appreciate your insightful analysis and witty remarks, you can bet they’ll expect anything else you invest in to give them more of the same.
2. Teach through experience.
If your training or knowledge-sharing efforts involve PowerPoint presentations from 2011, you’re not alone — but it might be time for an update. Many companies rely on traditional top-down methods to keep customer-facing employees aligned on branding, from email communications to sales sheets or one-pagers. However, it’s also clear that most companies aren’t confident in the consistency of their messaging. It’s likely that these traditional tactics are, at least in part, to blame.
Try stepping away from the screen and using experiential methods such as launch events. To gauge how effective new branding tactics might be, lean on your veteran followers for feedback — your mentor or longtime blog reader will be able to see your efforts through a lens you can’t, and they can tie them back to what you’ve done before.
3. Sync up on- and offline.
Whether you’re interacting with people in person or via social media channels, your tone and personality should remain consistent. That doesn’t mean there can’t be slight adjustments. Many brands feature a lively Twitter presence, while their LinkedIn posts are a bit more professional and reserved. That’s okay — desirable, even — but a fundamental principle of social branding is that you should never sound like two completely different brands across separate channels.
Take another step toward connecting communication efforts by bringing real-life news into your online presence. When you’re nominated for an award or attending a conference, let your followers know. If people love the help they’ve received, encourage them to leave a review or testimonial online. This connection should go the other way, too: When people interact with your brand solely through social media or email communications, it’s easy for them to view you as a faceless digital entity. Make an effort to introduce them to the real person behind the products and services, from discussing your hobbies to sharing pictures of your pets. The “digital you” should be deeply human, not the robotic version of your true self.
And encourage your people to become digital brand ambassadors. When they share your news, it has greater visibility and credibility.
4. Choose partners carefully.
If you find yourself reaching out to every influencer with more than a thousand followers, you’re probably doing it wrong. Digital marketing is not about big digits when it comes to measuring influence; it’s measuring the right digits. Influencer marketing can provide big returns, but only when it’s done in alignment with your brand’s message. Approach a potential partnership carefully, looking at an influencer’s engagement rate with his or her current audience, plus the growth rate of that audience. Of course, an audience of a million people isn’t worthwhile if it doesn’t include your people. If you’re a cybersecurity expert, access to Brian Krebs’ Twitter audience of 255,000 would be much more valuable than reaching Kim Kardashian’s 60.8 million.
Don’t go straight to the top of the influencer food chain. Find a candidate who can grow with you. More and more brands are opting to make influencer partnerships a long-term proposition instead of relying on a one-off product feature or spotlight. As a result, influencer audiences are able to watch the relationship grow organically over time. Find the right brand representative, and you can tap into years of growth beyond a single Snapchat post that will vanish in seconds.
Dollar Shave Club’s consistent brand messaging wasn’t a fortunate accident. It takes intention to align a brand’s story, tone, and aesthetic across all channels (including social branding and other digital tools). But research shows that consistency, combined with authenticity in your brand ambassadors, is the ultimate branding rocket fuel.
William Arruda is the cofounder of CareerBlast and co-creator of the free video course: The Insider’s Guide to Getting Noticed and Promoted.
