In Branding, Consistency Matters

Whenever we start a brand strategy project we have a singular focus. We're in pursuit of the brand essence, the single unique concept at the core of your brand that is the foundation of your overall brand strategy. Our goal is to find an essence that will allow us to craft a memory of the brand that has both emotional resonance and staying power.

This work is exciting and essential. It requires a strong sense of curiosity, an ability to analyze data, a lot of hard work. And it leads to more exciting and essential things like developing stunning visuals or core messaging.

This work is one of the reasons why I remain so excited about branding after 15 years. And yet, it's only half of the work.

There's a simple truth that all brand experts know: A great brand strategy only matters if it's implemented with ruthless consistency. Curating a brand memory is great, but it requires persistence.

Why Consistency Matters More Today

Ok, perhaps that subhead was a bit misleading. Consistency has always been incredibly important to an effective brand, but it used to be easier. Over the last 75 years the information ecosystem has been on a continual trajectory from being narrowly centralized and controlled to increasing fragmentation (although not necessarily openness as large companies like Google, ChatGPT, and other sundry algorithmic services control what information we see and hear).

This fragmentation has led to multiple factors that make the need for consistency more vital than ever:

• Noise is at an all time high: There's a lot of debate about how many brand messages someone sees in a day. Most people think it's between 4,000-10,000. Regardless of the actual number, the fact remains that most people are sifting through an endless feed of information, with each message only receiving a fraction of a second of attention. Just think about the last time you doom scrolled on Instagram.

• We don't know who to trust, or who's being paid, or who's an expert: As I discussed earlier this year on my podcast about the Edelman Trust Barometer, trust is at an all time low. I have a strong conviction that a driver of this is that more and more product promotion that you see is a paid promotion...even if it doesn't seem like it. In the healthcare space in which we work this is coupled with the fact that the democratization of content publishing means incorrect information is easy to publish and even easier to make appear authoritative.
• The machines, the machines, the machines: In a few short years we've arrived at the place that I preached against for numerous years throughout the 2010s:  creating content that is solely for machines. AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are forcing everyone to hustle to create content those platforms will like so that their content will be served. This can lead to a plague of uninspired content. Regardless of how compelling and human your answer engine optimization efforts are, we all must confront the harsh truth that much of it will appear divorced from context in a chat window in the future.
  

The Antidote

The antidote to these three overwhelming factors is nothing as exciting as the initial brand strategy work, but it's arguably more important.

That antidote is consistency.

Last week Rob Myerson wrote an interesting piece on why he doesn't want marketers to talk about storytelling anymore. His piece is a commentary on an article written by Mark Ritson in Adweek. Rob get's so much in his commentary correct. I thought this point was especially poignant:

"It's (storytelling) bandied about with no concern for what a story actually is. Real stories have characters, arcs, and endings. Most of what marketers call storytelling has none of those things, much less all of them. The people who actually make stories for a living (novelists, filmmakers, children's book authors) would probably like their word back."

This is so true. Even if some of us like to think about what our brand story is, the antidote to the fragmentation that I mentioned above is being persistent about sharing and reaffirming your brand positioning across every engagement point with your audience—both marketing and otherwise.

I've always said this is difficult work because it requires marketers who are naturally creative and feel the urge to come up with new ideas, to stay focused and be repetitive.

The Map As A Model

Rob Myerson mentions the concept of brand worldbuilding in the his post as the solution to storytelling. The great Ian Lurie has also been talking about this for more than a decade . And if we are going to think of ourselves as world builders, I think a map is the best metaphor to think about as you architect those worlds.

A map provides a mental model in which we can consider the many and varied places that people may engage with us, and then architect what message we want to convey at each of those places. By being consistent and coordinated with those messages we can help our audiences gain a comprehensive picture or memory of who our brand is and what we are all about, one small engagement at a time. 

And eventually, as people develop this memory, they can decide whether our brand is one that they want to develop authentic connection with. Many will say no, but if you're persistent, the right ones will say yes.

So, what are the points on the map that you should focus on? If you're in healthcare delivery I think the list has to include the following (check out an excellent conversation I had with Gail Findlay-Shirras on our podcast about this earlier this year):

• Patient engagement communications
• Clinical experience
• Executive speaking opportunities and thought leadership
• Billing process
• Marketing materials
• Social media
• Website

The healthtech space is similar but different (another podcast to recommend is my conversation with Saige Carpenter about the PointClickCare rebrand):

• Product demos
• Within the product itself
• Customer success interactions
• Business development, sales meetings, and conversations
• Marketing materials
• Social media
• Website

These are by no means exhaustive. But they hopefully give you an idea of all the different places that you must be taking into consideration as you think about where you need your brand strategy to infiltrate and influence—and where you need to craft an experience that is consistent and resonant.

Tools To Help Build Consistency

So, how do we achieve this consistency? The simple answer is hard work and persistence, but there are definitely a few tools to help you along the way. Here are some of my favorites:

• Branded behaviors: We tend to be pretty good at keeping things consistent across website and marketing materials...or at least we focus on it a bit more. It's with people that things get a little more messy. That's where branded behaviors come in. This is a set of 3-5 specific behaviors that are easy to remember and can be lived out by everyone on your team, including executives and clinicians. By defining specific ways that your team can act to stay on brand you can give them some really practical ways to make your brand experience consistent. You can listen to a whole podcast about this here.
• Apply a brand filter to everything: Whenever we create a brand strategy for someone we develop a simple 5-question brand filter that can be used to evaluate any initiative or decision to determine if it is on brand. You can read a full post about it here. It's one of the easiest ways to build in consistency across every point of your map.
• Regular human check-ins: There are clear points where the brand or marketing team has to hand off the brand to other teams in the organization. In healthcare delivery it may be the clinical team. In healthtech, it's often product or biz dev. As brand marketing leaders we must cultivate consistent conversations with these teams to cultivate a shared ownership of brand experience as well as a culture of constant improvement.
• Leverage data and iterate: As you get rolling with your efforts to improve brand consistency, choose 3-5 metrics to use to measure success. Review them often. And most of all, accept that you aren't going to be perfect. Each time you review the metrics you have the opportunity to learn and improve. Take it.

To close, I'll restate something I said at the beginning.

There's a simple truth that all brand experts know: A great brand strategy only matters if it's implemented with ruthless consistency. Curating a brand memory is great work, but it requires persistence.