Consistency – the key to building a successful brand

Simon Chard explains how consistent work can transform your business in the first of two parts on why consistency is key for building a brand.

Welcome back to episode seven of Building a Brand! Over the next couple of months, I’m going to be doing a deep dive into two parts of what I think is the most important part of building a successful brand and a successful company – consistency.

This month, I’ll be talking about how consistency can improve your brand directly. Next month, I’m going to be talking about how consistency can improve your personal development so that you can deliver on your brand in the best way possible, and you can turn up for your brand in the best way possible.

Recognition

This month, we’re going to be talking about how consistency will improve the outcomes that your brand is able to deliver to its customers. This is broken up into five individual sections.

The first one is all around recognition, so brand colour, brand logo brand style. I’ve talked about these a little bit in previous episodes. But all of those are incredibly important for brand recognition and familiarity.

If I ask which brand the colour red is associated with, you will probably say Coca-Cola. If I ask which brand a tick is associated with, you’re going to say Nike. All of these things have been built over many, many years. They’re very considered as a lot of thought has gone into them and there’s a real science behind it.

Try and implement some of those things that you see with the most well-known legacy brands. Try and bring those into your own personal brand and your own business brands.

Trust and reliability

The next point is around trust and reliability. When you are repeating the same message and providing the same customer service over and over again, you become known for that.

Let’s say you’re a cosmetic dentist and you want to be known for high-end aesthetic dentistry: the only way to achieve that is by consistently showing up displaying your work. You need to be displaying high quality work time and time again over a number of years.

This can’t be rushed – consistency takes time and effort. You can’t do it with that without one or both of those. So you want to be showing up time and time again. People like Michael Apa, for example, have been doing this for many, many years – even before I started. They’re known for high end cosmetic dentistry with their personal brand.

Brand equity

The next one is brand equity. This is where your brand actually has more value than the core products that it provides.

Look at Red Bull, for example. Red Bull sells an energy drink – probably not one that you’d want to drink in reality when looking at the ingredients. But what Red Bull actually sells is a whole image and persona of adventure: the idea that Red Bull gives you wings.

It’s linked with the Formula One and the X Games and snowboarding and skydiving. For all these really exciting amazing things that people are super passionate about, Red Bull is always there. The link with Red Bull is not just a product they sell. It’s actually how they make you feel and what’s associated with it and its brand equity.

This is something that you can build into your own brands as well.

Cohesion

The next one is a cohesive customer experience. So most brands nowadays live both online and offline. Creating consistency across both of those environments will help to improve the way that your brand turns up.

We call this ‘phygital’, or physical and digital. It’s really important in dentistry because a lot of our first customer touch points are online. We want to make sure that we’re delivering an online presence and an in-person presence with the same degree of care and consideration.

That’s a really important one when it comes to running your own dental practice or a chain of dental practices.

Strong culture

The final point is a strong cultural system. What I mean by that is building up consistencies through the way you deliver your services. Or that you deliver your your products in a way that means whoever the consumer or the customer speaks to within the business is singing off the same hymn sheet.

This comes from core values. This comes from having a really strong brand culture where everyone in the business knows why that brand exists. For us at Parla, for example, we are there to eradicate single use plastic from oral care. That’s our brand mission. Everyone in the business knows it and we have a number of core brand values around that as well.

Building that system means that whether you speak to the operations executive or me as a founder, you’re going to get the same degree of passion and intensity and drive. This will leave you with the feeling of what that brand is all about.

It’s the same with your dental practice. If you have a new dentist and you have a really clear core value system in place, even a new employee is going to be able to deliver in a way that reflects how your brand wants to show up to that patient.

So as I say, consistency across the board when it comes to building a personal brand is so important. I really hope that was useful. Next month, we’re going to be going into how building consistent habits in your own life can actually help you to deliver on your brand growth aspirations. I’ll see you on the next one!

Catch up with Simon’s previous Building a Brand columns:

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