When you’re working on marketing and promoting your food business day in and day out, it’s normal to start to feel like you’re repeating yourself and to worry that you may sound boring. However, consistency is a vital part of building a strong brand.
Today on the Real Food Brands Marketing Podcast, host and Food Brand Strategist Katie Mleziva explains why consistency is such a crucial component of a successful brand strategy.
Why Repetition Is a Good Thing
When you’re typing up social media content or looking through marketing messages, it’s normal to feel like you’re repeating yourself too much. After all, we’re spending all day looking at nothing but these visuals and messages, but our consumers don’t see them nearly as often as we do. In fact, seeing the same thing from your brand multiple times is important for your audience because it activates their familiarity bias—our tendency to like what we’re already familiar with.
Instead, let’s flip the script and get excited about creating intentional consistency. Every tactic or decision you make is an opportunity to create brand cohesion. If you’re not disciplined about sticking to your brand strategy, how will you know if it’s working? Marketing efforts can take time to build momentum, and results aren’t always going to come immediately. Crafting consistent messages and visuals within your brand guidelines allows you to be creative without reinventing the wheel every time. Sometimes testing a small change or two is just what you need to keep things interesting to refine your content over time.
The One Room Test
This exercise is designed to help you identify your gaps and opportunities. Essentially, put all of your marketing materials together in one room and see if they make sense together. Your packaging, your tradeshow booths, your social media, your website—everything! Is the tone consistent? The colors and fonts? The contents?
If you need help defining or refining your food business brand strategy so you know what to talk about consistently, reach to Katie at katie@realfoodbrands.com for a helpful checklist, and consider signing up for her three-day course offered through the Food Finance Institute’s Edible Alpha program, Building a Brand That Stands Out. It’s going to be 3 days of productive fun where we’ll talk about defining, or refining, your brand strategy by looking at those 3 C’s – Competitor, Consumer, and Company.
Now, let’s go shake up shopping carts!
In This Episode:
- What Katie has learned in 3 years of consistently recording this podcast.
- Why consistency is one of the best tools in your brand strategy toolbox.
- How to get started with brand strategy.
- Why it’s normal to worry about being boring when you’re really brand building.
- What you need to keep in mind about how often your audience sees your messaging.
- Examples of companies that bring their brands to life in a consistent way.
- How to do a One Room Test to see how cohesive your brand is today and how to address inconsistencies you find.
Quotes:
“We may start to get tired of seeing things related to our brand day in and out, but even our biggest fans don’t see it or think about it nearly as often as we do” – @RealFoodBrands
“People like to be surprised and delighted, but at the same time they want to know what they can expect from a brand.” – @RealFoodBrands
Resources:
- NEW! 3 Day Live Small Group Program
- Podcast Ep #64: [Brand Strategy Series] Setting Your Food Business Apart Step 1: The Competitive Snapshot
- Podcast Ep #65: [Brand Strategy Series] Setting Your Food Business Apart Step 2: Identifying Your Ideal Consumer
- Podcast Ep #66: [Brand Strategy Series] Setting Your Food Business Apart Step 3: Company Strategy
- Real Food Brands Marketing Roundtable Facebook Group
- Connect with Katie on Instagram
- Get Your Free Brand Strategy Checkup