The importance of one brand image and identity is important not only for your company in distinguishing yourself from your competition but also to hold onto your consumers – to not confuse them and to be perceived as a strong, united entity. Consistency in your brand builds trust, whether we are talking about traditional media or new.
Take for example Coca-Cola… they have had the same logo since 1885, that’s 125 years. Everyone knows Coca-Cola and can recognize their logo by the script font, the color, its use, etc. Kameron Hurley discussed a logo survey where segments of the Coca-Cola logo were taken and only the color was changed and most people could not identify it. When they pulled a segment from the actual logo, it was easily identifiable. This shows that the simplest f modifications to your brand can affect the way your audience perceives you.
Pepsi, Coke’s main competition, has changed or modified their logo about 11 times in 125 years while Coke has maintained brand consistency. This may account for the way that Coke has taken over the market and Pepsi has continually struggled to keep up. You don’t want to dilute your brand or confuse your consumers by not maintaining a steady brand identity. Consumers build a relationship with your brand and your image is a huge part of that relationship.
Your brand image or identity stretches far beyond just traditional media or your logo; today, websites are a vital part of brand image. When people want to search for information about your company, more often than not they will type in “yourorganization.com” or do a Google search that will ultimately bring you back to your site as well. You want to reflect the same message, the same image, and your logo in the website as you would in TV advertisements, magazines, customer service or your product in general.
Also, as I’ve discussed in my previous post, Social Media Strategies, you also want to coordinate your internal teams such as IT, marketing, and corporate communication teams in order to better assist in your company’s strategies to reach your overarching goal. As with everything else, your audience will only see you as one entity and will get confused by different messages coming from different silos within your organization.
H&R Block is a great example of how an organization should coordinate their brand silos around one specific goal, therefore one message, on entity, on brand identity. Their viral marketing campaign is targeted at people who do taxes themselves- they want to help that specific audience. They utilize an integrated social media approach, working with the entire company, to produce digital tax solutions in order to establish their singular brand image. In the video below Amy Worley from H&R Block discusses their leap into their social media strategy and the importance of one brand image.
Wow the Coca Cola brand imaging is so true. I clicked on the site and looked at the green, blue, and black letters of the coke logo and if I had not known it was coke, I would NEVER have been able to tell. But as soon as that fourth red A appeared, it was no doubt the Coca Cola “a”.
Something that might be interesting to study are those little polls that show up on front pages of Yahoo and AOL’s homepage, where they make you guess which brand is the real one and which is the faker? They give you two images side by side of a brand which are slightly altered, and you take a quiz to see if you can guess the correct brand. One that I remember in particular is Pepsi’s logo, where they gave you the circular symbol with the colors ordered red, white, blue, and then the same circular symbol with the colors ordered blue, white, red. Some of them can be quite tricky. http://www.logoquiz.net/ <– that's a cool site where it makes you guess which brand it partially shown.
That’s a crazy game… It’s wierd to see how you really identify with a brand or company and what you really recongize.
I think you hit the nail right on the head with this post Aaren. Coke happens to be my favorite drink of all time and I’d like to believe that I could recognize their brand anywhere. However, if I walked into a convenience store and went to the refrigerators to grab a Coke and I didn’t see the classic red bottle wrapping with the white font, I don’t know if I would be able to find my favorite drink. Just thinking about this made your point resonate that much more clearly with me.
This is such a great point. Relating it back to the Coke vs. Pepsi brand recognition point that you discussed, I remember the most recent change that Pepsi went through. I went into the store to buy Pepsi (and Pepsi products) and I did not recognize them at first. The change threw me for a loop and when I first saw the bottles, I thought they were a generic brand at first so I kept looking for the image I knew and it was no where to be found. I think that it is very smart of Coca-Cola to keep their brand and image consistent because, like you said, sometimes changing it (especially too much) can cause you to lose customers over time – they begin to lose trust in your product.