Achieving Brand Consistency Before Trying to Scale

In episode 124 of the Customers Who Click podcast I spoke with Ruthie Sterrett, founder of the Consistency Corner. Ruthie helps brands establish the foundations of the marketing strategy to ensure consistency. As someone who has worked in startups as well as those larger established businesses, I can say from firsthand experience that consistency is key. If you keep changing branding, changing design style, tone of voice, or if you just dont have this in the first place, its all a lot more difficult! What you all have to remember is what's your brand promise? What is the outcome that you're giving to your customers, either through the in-store or online experience. What you want your customers to feel is such an important way of thinking about brand and consistency. If you’re not focused there, its impossible to create that feeling in your customers, and so they wont build that emotional attachment to your business. Ruthie is the Founder of the Consistency Corner, you can find her on LinkedIn or head over to https://www.ruthiesterrett.com/.

Key highlights:

11:25 - 25:18 - How Does Ruthie Keep Customers Clicking? - You’ve got to really nail your branding, and be really consistent with it. But this doesnt just apply to one single person, it applies to the business as a whole. Every touchpoint a consumer has with your brand should feel like its your brand. The whole business needs to be on board with it. If that message or brand experience isnt there, then a lot more campaigns fall flat because they seem out of place and random.

25:26 - 32:40 - How Can You Identify Voice of Customer? - Speak to your customers. Interview them, call them, get on the sales floor or into customer service for a few days. Really experience what its like on the front line, and get that feedback from them. This is something I do all the time with my clients, Im always speaking to their customers so we can hear what they actually want from the brand.

What you’ll also find out, is simply what information they’re looking for on your website, which might not be very visible or obvious. I’ve lost track of the number of websites i’ve reviewed where customers have been asking about their shipping & returns policies.

33:06 - 43:58 - What Are the Common Mistakes Brands Make - Too many brands lean on the product itself to do the selling. They talk about its features, and maybe if they’ve done a good job, they talk about how it helps customers. But not often enough is the brand story really pushed through, the customers arent engaged by the product or brand, and so it comes down to comparing one product to another, not one brand to a product.

There will be dozens of competing products out there, its not enough to just explain how your product works.

44:06 - Who Would Ruthie Like to Take For Lunch in the D2C Marketing World?

Heidi Zack, founder of Third Love.

45:01 - Ruthie’s Must-Have Ecommerce Tools:

Marketing Made Simple

If you’d like to hear more from Ruthie, you can connect with her on LinkedIn or head over to https://www.ruthiesterrett.com/