The Importance of Consistency When Executing Your Marketing Strategy

Humans like consistency in our conversations. And what is a marketing campaign if not a conversation with customers?

Inconsistent marketing is confusing for the customer. If there are inconsistencies in the execution of your strategy, it won’t achieve its goals.

Let me take you through why consistency is important, why marketing strategies lose consistency and how you can produce perfectly consistent campaigns to wow your customers.

Why is marketing consistency important?

To explain the importance of consistency, let’s first take a look at the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

In 2010, a BP oil rig called the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. The effects on the Gulf ecosystem were devastating and continue to this day.

BP got a lot of backlash because of this disaster. That was to be expected - no brand could cause such a huge amount of damage and get away with it.

However, much of the criticism focused on BP’s own branding. At the time, BP was trying hard to present itself as an eco-friendly brand. In the light of the disaster, the inconsistencies between their green marketing and their ecocidal practices were starkly exposed, and enraged Twitter users wasted no time in pointing this out.

Within hours of the disaster, the top organic result when searching ‘BP PR’ was a parody account called @BPglobalPR, which laid into BP’s ‘BPcares’ hashtag.

And BPGlobalPR were far from alone. Others dug up eco-friendly marketing tweets from the BP team and highlighted their hypocrisy:

All in all, BP’s marketing didn’t match their practices, and the result wasn’t just outrage over a horrendous oil spill - it was also a huge loss of trust in the company’s messaging as a whole.

So, consistency is important in ways that go beyond tone of voice and color schemes. Everything has to be consistent - from your brand’s core values to the font on your website.

By contrast, Specsavers, in association with Tangerine Communications, recently brought out a beautifully consistent campaign.

Their billboard, designed like a traditional optician’s chart, displayed the English football chant ‘It’s coming home’ in letters of decreasing size. The message not only capitalized on Euro football fever – it was also completely consistent with both Specsavers’ tongue-in-cheek brand voice, and their purpose as opticians.

The result was a billboard that was instantly associated with Specsavers, and which made people stop, read and smile as they saw it.

As the Specsavers example shows, consistency in marketing helps to produce incredible campaigns.

How do strategies lose consistency?

As I point out in my new book, Marketing Strategy: Overcome Common Pitfalls And Create Effective Marketing, there are some common reasons why a strategy might lose consistency. These are:

• Lack of a clearly defined brand message: If the people within the organization aren’t 100% clear about what you’re doing, what you want to achieve and what the benefits are for the customer, it’s impossible for everyone to pull together and create consistent marketing.
• Departments working in silos: This is a really common issue in marketing - especially now that we’re all working remotely! Think of sales teams and marketing teams. Both have a vital role to play in the execution of any strategy, but often they don’t share their insights with one another. From the customer’s perspective, this results in a jarring difference between the message they’ve heard from marketing and the experience they get from sales.

As I put it in my book:

How can we make sure marketing strategies are consistent?

So, consistency is very important, and very easy to lose.

Luckily, it’s also easy to maintain. Here are some of the most effective ways to make sure that your strategy remains consistent at every touchpoint:

• Make sure your internal messaging is consistent: Everything, from values and goals to visuals needs to be consistent inside your brand as well as outside. This makes it a lot easier for employees to present a consistent face to the customer.
• Find your brand’s voice: Your brand’s voice will be unique and recognizable. It should encompass your brand’s values, and appeal to your brand’s audience. If you’re not sure what your brand’s voice should sound like, try conducting a brand audit. Look at what your brand’s values, goals and beliefs are. Look at what your customers respond to. Your voice should resonate with both of these factors.
• Set out and distribute brand guidelines: These should cover everything from your brand’s colors to the ‘feel’ of your messaging. Ideally, these guidelines should also be short, easy to understand, well-controlled and contain examples. Once you’ve nailed your guidelines, share them out among your teams. You want people to be able to quickly and easily refer to your guidelines if they’re not sure about anything.

Consistency is the key to clarity, trust and customer loyalty. It might at times make you feel like you’ve got no room to try out different voices or looks - but the right brand guidelines will leave you plenty of room to flex without losing consistency.

Remember - what’s important is that the customer’s experience matches your brand’s promise. Marketing consistency is a huge part of what makes that possible.