One of the biggest stories to come out of the marketing/brand management world in the past week was the decision made by retailer Men’s Wearhouse to drop company founder & advertising spokesman George Zimmer from their marketing communications. Zimmer’s identity is closely tied to the Men’s Wearhouse brand. It will take a while for that to change.
There are a lot of angles that one can take in evaluating this story, but brand consistency is one I see as applicable.
Brand consistency is something that the best brands habitually incorporate into their marketing messaging. Coca-Cola is a great example of this, as their consistency in marketing communication is remarkable. Although their ads change over time, the general themes expressed in the ads do not. Coca-Cola is known for reinforcing the ideas of happiness, togetherness and refreshment in ads across the globe.
The idea of a central set of themes that are malleable is an idea that works, more so in the present than ever, as the number of marketing channels have grown, requiring a presence in more places. When a brand maintains a presence in multiple channels, there are multiple nuances in each channel, increasing complexity via greater numbers of marketing processes. These marketing processes often have a way of bogging down a brand and creating marketing inefficiencies that stifle brand marketing productivity. The stifled brand marketing productivity manifests itself in organizations through the pain of ineffective content management, optimization and distribution across channels. A consequence of the pain is often the undesirable combination of increased marketing costs and reduced revenue and market share.
Gleanster Research has indicated that organizations they classify as Top Performers are 7 times more likely than Everyone Else to invest in centralized, multi-channel marketing tools across corporate & regional marketing. Additionally, Top Performers are 8 times less likely than Everyone Else to rank brand consistency as a top challenge. When those two data points are evaluated together, it becomes clear that a key part of achieving brand consistency while rising to high levels of corporate performance is through the use of a Distributed Marketing Platform.
The platform affords a company an opportunity to integrate marketing communications across channels and across levels of the organization. In many organizations, corporate level marketers are the stewards of the brand, and sales are coordinated at the local level. When there is an organizational structure like this, alignment between corporate and local entities is of paramount importance. An example of the alignment is the automated campaign scheduling of our Social Media Marketing module. With automated campaign scheduling, Corporate marketing publishes pre-approved social media campaigns. Then, local agents can opt-in to a campaign and the software posts the content to the selected sites at the scheduled times. It is social media marketing made easy. It increases marketing efficiency and harmony in messaging between entities. The perceived feel of the brand from the target audience is consistent. Consistency is a hallmark of top performers.
If you’d like to reap the benefits of greater brand consistency, contact us today!