Brand consistency at every touchpoint
Every interaction with your company is an opportunity to reinforce your brand and provide value in that moment. You invest a lot of time and money into crafting your company’s brand presence, and it’s much more than your logo and visual identity. It’s really a promise to your audience; a commitment to deliver on certain values, experiences, and expectations.
Depending on your organization, your audiences can include your customers, employees, partners, community, and other stakeholders. Every person in these segments is both receiving your message about what to expect, and also having their own experience interacting with your organization. The closer these two versions are to each other, the more aligned your brand experience is.
Think of the messages from a major consumer brand like Apple. Their implied promise is that Apple products will be easy to use, elegant, and well designed.
Steve Jobs had unwavering dedication to detail, insisting that even the unseen components of the Macintosh be designed beautifully:
“I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though no one’s going to see it…you’ll know it’s there…for you to sleep well at night…the quality has to be carried all the way through”
-Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson
"Steve Jobs y Wozniak" by javimolinacas is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.
This philosophy permeates every facet of Apple’s business, from product launch events to the shopping experience, solidifying their brand's integrity and trustworthiness. For existing customers, transitioning to new products has minimal friction. When support is needed, employees take ownership in solving problems and communicating timelines and expectations. Apple knows these are the moments that reinforce the brand’s values, and make a customer’s next Apple purchase a no-brainer.
Compare this to the last time you had to deal with a company that placed you on hold for an hour for a support issue, and showed little motivation in finding a solution to your problem when you finally got through to someone. There’s a big difference between telling customers “Your call is important to us” and investing in the process to actually show it.
Applying this to your company
Even when you’re not a household name, you’re still putting out signals about your brand and what people should expect from it. These signals are found everywhere from the description of your values and culture on your About page, to the way you pitch your value proposition in your marketing materials.
According to research from Qualitrics and ServiceNow, 43% of customers are at least somewhat likely to switch brands after only a single negative customer service interaction.
There is opportunity at every major touchpoint. Put conversely, every key interaction you don’t invest in creates a divide between what you say and what you do.
Consider some of the touchpoints a customers may have with your company:
Visiting your site
Receiving your marketing emails
Seeing your ads and PR content
Visiting your physical location, or interacting with your company at an event
Receiving outbound sales messages
Sales conversations
Product packaging and unboxing
Product activation and onboarding experience
Customer support
Social media
Renewing contracts
Cancelling a subscription
Let’s say your public-facing brand image conveys your company as helpful, approachable, and friendly. In that case your sales and marketing emails should echo this sentiment and address questions that your prospects have at each stage of the buyer journey. The delivery shouldn’t come off as aggressive, desperate, or indifferent. Every time someone opens your email or takes a call, they should gain something valuable they didn’t have before.
Delivering value at these points not only reinforces your message but also yields downstream benefits such as reduced churn, higher renewal rates, and increased word-of-mouth referrals. The ease with which a customer can cancel a subscription service represents follow-through on the brand promise all the way to the end. If a sizeable chunk of revenue is coming from people not being able to cancel their plans without jumping through hoops, those dollars are not indicative of product-market fit anyway.
Your audience includes employees
The same thing goes for another key audience segment: your employees. Consider the ways they might interact with your organization and how it can shape opinions:
Recruiter outreach
Interview process and negotiations
Training and Onboarding
1 on 1s
Quarterly/annual reviews
Company meetings
Physical office environment
Policies around distributed work and async communication
Conflict management
Employment agreement terminations
As with customers, it’s more cost effective to retain an employee than to recruit and onboard someone new. Take the interview process for example. An organization that wants to convey values of trust and communication can do this by proactively sharing the salary range with candidates, and communicating what the interview process looks like. This signals that the organization is thoughtful about finding the right-fit candidates for roles, and is aware of the time investment from all parties.
Those that don’t end up making the final cut are still likely to still have a positive impression of the company and its standards. Whereas a study by CareerArc found that 72% of candidates who have had a poor experience report having shared that experience online or with someone else.
After an employee has been hired, company meetings are an effective way to further demonstrate the culture and values. When leaders welcome tough questions in meetings and take ownership of their decisions, it positively reinforces an employees’ decision to join that organization.
When someone exits the organization, how they are treated on the way out is just as important as how they are treated on the way in. Not only does this impact how someone reflects back on their experience with an employer, the way management speaks about ex-employees sends a message to current employees about how they will be valued in the future.
Conclusion
When you are competing for attention, consideration, and market share, consistency through every touchpoint matters in building a long-lasting brand. The same applies to brand and values touchpoints within your organization. Identifying and optimizing these interactions for consistency has real business impact to your revenue, retention, and employee productivity. Remember, it’s not just what you say, but how you deliver.