Brand consistency: Your secret weapon in telecoms marketing
Telecoms and IoT companies are powering our digital age, contributing to an unprecedented barrage of information. The average person consumes 74 gigabytes of information every day. That’s the equivalent of 15,000 printed books, or 74 hours of continuous video streaming.
For telecoms businesses, this presents a dual challenge: How do you stay top of mind across multiple platforms, while also ensuring your audience recognises you in this data-saturated landscape?
Irregular messaging, visuals, and tone can erode customer trust and blur your brand’s identity. Which is why ensuring brand consistency is your secret weapon for building recognition and loyalty.
In this post, we’ll explore practical strategies for maintaining a unified brand, ensuring your channel customers always recognise and trust you – regardless of where they encounter your brand amongst the digital noise.
What is brand consistency?
Brand consistency means delivering a cohesive and recognisable experience across all touchpoints, from digital platforms to physical spaces. Every interaction should feel intentional, familiar, and unmistakably aligned with your brand.
Let’s break it down into three key pillars:
01
Brand messaging
Your messaging is your brand’s story, packed with passion and purpose. Share your journey and make it relatable – remember, people love a good story! Keep it clear, engaging, and true to who you are.
02
Tone of voice
Your tone of voice is your brand’s personality – are you the witty friend, the tech-savvy mentor, or the down-to-earth buddy? A tone of voice guide for your team will ensure your voice is consistent across all communications.
03
Visual identity
Your logo, colours, and fonts should all work harmoniously to create a look that embodies “you”. Devising a style guide, complete with colour codes and design rules, pulls your visuals together.
So, what does this look like in practice?
Let’s consider how brand consistency (or the lack of it) plays out in real customer interactions. Imagine you’re a telecoms provider reaching out to customers across multiple touchpoints: your website, customer service, sales teams etc.
In the first scenario, a customer visits your website and encounters clear, professional messaging about your services, only to experience a casual tone and different messaging when speaking to your sales team. Then, when they receive their first bill, the design and messaging are completely different once again.
In contrast, a competitor delivers a seamless, consistent experience across all touchpoints – from website and sales interactions to billing. This alignment reassures the customer, leaving them feeling more satisfied with the overall experience and making them more likely to do business with them again.
A consistent brand presence builds confidence and trust, making it easier for customers to choose you over others in the marketplace.
Why is brand consistency important for telecoms businesses?
To apply this in practice, look at your digital touchpoints. Your website often serves as the first point of contact, so its design, navigation, and content needs to reflect your brand’s look and feel.
Then consider social media, where 75% of users go to find out more about a brand. Using a content calendar can help manage this balance across LinkedIn, X, and any other platforms you use.
Consistency here is crucial, especially as 76% of consumers research online before engaging further. By aligning these elements across key touchpoints, you create a cohesive, trustworthy brand that resonates with your audience wherever they engage with you.
Strengthening essential brand awareness
Design consistency is essential for building your brand awareness. It’s not just about polished visuals, it’s about unifying familiar design elements like colours, logos, and taglines that bolster loyalty and repeat engagement. Look at brands like Apple, Google, and Nike – they excel at using consistent design to boost recognition and stick in people’s minds.
A handy exercise to test for brand consistency is to take a screenshot of your advertising or product and remove the logo. A good brand will still hold its presence in the market. Would you still know it was McDonalds without the Golden Arches? How about hearing Nike’s, “Just Do It” slogan – would you make the connection?
Brand consistency done well
Recently, EE unveiled their biggest brand launch in over a decade. Their brand messaging emphasises innovation, customer-centricity, and inclusivity, while their tone of voice is friendly, confident, and supportive, aiming to engage and inspire customers with a dynamic approach to technology.
Their visual identity features a bold colour palette of bright yellow and green, sleek typography, and modern imagery, reflecting a youthful, energetic brand. The new identity develops these key elements, adopting their logo mark’s shape as a new highlight in their imagery, implementing their dotted style in their typography, and bringing the brand to life through their imagery.
By using what the customer knows and loves about them, EE have managed to take their brand to the next level while still being front of mind and easily recognisable.
Aim for evolution, not revolution
In stark contrast, Tropicana’s 2009 rebrand was a disaster. They elected to replace their best-selling orange juice packaging with a new design in the North American market. But they overlooked the fact that, fundamentally, people don’t like sudden change. When they overhauled their products’ exterior, customers feared the inside had also changed.
Tropicana’s new imagery shifted from a natural orange with a straw poking out the top, to a glass of juice. Sales dropped by 20% in the two months after the rebrand, resulting in a $30m loss. The company quickly reverted to their old packaging when they realised the rebrand had backfired.
More recently, Tropicana have made a light-touch change, refining their well-known brand into something more modern yet instantly recognisable. With the new yet familiar logo and packaging, the company has worked hard to win back the consumers’ trust they once lost.
Give your customers a compass
A consistent brand presence builds confidence and trust, making it easier for customers to choose you over others in the marketplace.
In a crowded marketplace, it’s the compass that guides customers back to you time and again. Now’s the time to audit your brand across all channels, refining and unifying your tone, messaging, and visuals if needed.
Invest in brand consistency, and watch your recognition, loyalty, and revenue soar.
Craig’s background is in telecoms and video gaming where he worked with clients like Sony, Activision, and Warner Bros. His specialty is motion – if it needs animating, Craig will make it move.
