Brand Identity may start with your logo, but it is much more than just a typeset, a few colours put together, and a small drawing. This is but the mirror of what you wish to reflect. After that, reality has to follow, or you will find out that in no time, your brand identity will lose its appeal.
Here is what you need to do in order to protect that identity and to care for it.
Provide Optimal Customer Service
If your logo is as bright as the sun and the people that answer the calls in your contact center are gloomy, you can forget about them remembering that beautiful yellow or orange on your business cards and at the top of your website.
Your brand identity has got to transpire all the way through to each employee that works inside your firm. Also, you need to use the right tools.
If people call in and they find themselves waiting on the line for long minutes, because you still haven’t moved on from a traditional phone system to a VoIP one by Aircall, you can forget about that sunny state of mind that you want your customers to be in.
Everything is important in customer service, so invest in a modern phone system that will be much more efficient and that will raise your customer service quality by a mile.
Make Sure Your Image is Identical Everywhere
If you want people to buy from your company, they first have to recognized that it is the right one. If you have different images on various platforms, they are bound to get confused and this could be sufficient to pass you up, the next time that they cross your path.
The problem today is that there are so many visibility points in the customers journey, that it is becoming harder to (first) be there and (second) show the right image all the time.
To ensure that there isn’t any issue, you have to study what a customer journey is, in order to learn all the locations where customers may find you, these days.
They will include your website, social media and communication tools (like Skype and WhatsApp), to name but a few of them. Once you have the full list in hand, start making sure that your branding is identical in all of them.
Be Aware of the Little Improvements
There is no such thing as a small detail, when you are in business. Everything that you do should be perfect.
And since perfection lasts only for one second, you need to check on the job that you have previously done, over and over again, for you never know what technology will enable you to do next.
For example, if you go to visit your website, and you don’t find your logo on the tab that you have just opened, you are missing out on a great opportunity to be seen, for as long as your tab is opened on a customer’s computer.
Visibility is so costly these days, when your brand can get it for free, you just can’t miss out on it.
Update slightly Every Five to Ten Years
The best brands modify their logo every once in a while. Car manufacturers do it all the time. Recently, it was Kia that modernized it, and if you look at old models versus new ones, you will automatically see and appreciate the difference.
Of course, a logo should always remain recognizable. Otherwise, people will think you are trying to trick them into thinking that you are a new brand. The goal is only to look in your day and age, and not a company that has remained in another era.
Just make sure to test your new logo version with a large quantity of people, before deciding on the change and bringing it to the public. A logo that is less good looking than the previous one, will leave people wondering why you even did it, in the first place.
Ask Customers for Some Feedback
We never truly know what our customers think of our company, until we simply ask them. We shouldn’t be afraid to do so, either. It is the only way that we can make the company better.
The easiest solution to go about this, is to prepare a small survey for customers to answer, when they go on our website. Or you can send it through an e-mail, explaining that the company wants to find ways to please them best.
One way or another, it needs to be inserted into the communication in a manner that lets people understand that you value their opinion.
This will not only bring back great information for you to care about the brand’s identity, but it will also help you to create better sales strategies, based upon the data collected.
Offer Quality Products and Services
In the end, there is only one way to make sure that people see your brand in a good way, and that is to provide quality products and services.
No matter how much money you spend in marketing and how you invest in your image, if the reality is not there to back it all up, your brand will slowly but surely deteriorate, in the eyes of customers.
Some of the best-known brands have seen losses of customers through a reduction in the quality that they offer. Customers don’t like to be taken for fools.
That is an easy mistake to make these days, with inflation raising the cost of materials needed to create the final product, plus the energy price which is simply going off the roof. But to lower the quality is a sure way to kill the company slowly.
Final Words
If you follow all of these suggestions for your brand, you will be safe in terms of keeping your brand identity clean, in the eyes of your customers. This is a key element in the survival and growth of any company, no matter which industry sector it is part of.
Comments are closed.