Brand Discovery 2021: Ron Baker on Brand Continuity

Ron Baker shares his expertise on the business case for brand continuity, why and how to do it. He's deeply knowledgeable and passionate about branding, and he gave us some great insights wrapped up in a very entertaining package.

And he didn't even say any swear words, which is a pretty big deal.

Transcript:

I'm Ron Baker, I'm the founder and president of Rizen Creative. We've been in the Treasure Valley for almost 19 years. We are a digital branding company for underdogs. I won't go into a lot of great detail on the background of this, my aim is to be as considerate of your 15 minute period as possible. I'll be happy to answer plenty of questions at the end. So I will do my best to get through this.

Brand continuity is my topic. You'll find no topic better in my wheelhouse. If you want to have a 10 hour conversation with me, there are people on this call that have been privy to my, to my exhaustive behavior when it comes to talking about this. But I will say this, that it's in my personal opinion, being in the branding space, as long as I have, it's probably the singular single most important thing when it comes to ensuring that your value of your brand not only sustains but grows. So, like I said, I'm going to do this in as much as 15 minutes as possible.

What is Brand Continuity?

So first and foremost, brand continuity is the idea that all communication channels between your brand, that being you, you the individuals that are either owners or managers of your businesses. The brand is you. And your customers should look and feel like they are coming from the same place. This is all very very basic concepts, but I want to make sure that I get that out there in the open first. So that way, when you hear me preach a little bit, you'll know why.

So continuity, not consistency, is the hallmark of great brands. Thank you Forbes magazine for making this point. And I think that branders and marketers have a tendency to over pontificate about how important branding is.

But the fact of the matter is we are living in a day and age now more than ever, where access to your brand is everywhere. You live in social media, you live online, you live in a variety of places. So anyone can research you at any given moment. You have to be on target. You have to have that continuity, it's not about consistency.

I'll try to clarify that point as we go through. And to that point, everyone on this call probably knows this, so forgive me if it sounds like a third grade lesson, but it's a critical lesson. And that simply is that you control your narrative. Meaning that you have to be sure to be telling the same brand story.

Brand story is at the height of all things branding.

If your narrative is consistent in terms of how people talk about you, as well as how your employees talk, how you convey your message inside of your own narratives; through your marketing materials, your website, so on and so forth. If there is continuity and all that, congratulations, you are a great brand.

However, I will tell you that more often than not, you could do a better job. We all could, me included. This gentleman, Marty Neumeier, is one of my, I wouldn't say heroes, but he certainly is a mentor from afar.

He has a book called The Brand Gap. I highly recommend anyone that has even a remote interest in branding should get this book. It's a really easy read, but I think what it does is it really simplifies in certain ways the importance of branding and I keep this thing almost next to my bed. So it's kind of embarrassing to say that that would be a nighttime read. But this quote really hits home for me.

So what's vacant from this quote, that's so critical is you. We're talking about the customer, we're talking about the person on the other end. And so, as we speak to consistency, your job is to be consistent in how you roll out your brand, how you communicate your brand. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter all that you do, if your customer doesn't get it. So if they don't have a great gut feeling about you, there's a chance that there's a misfire.

Who owns your brand?

So I put this up here, because I think it's a very critical point. You are not the owner of your brand, your customer is. So what makes a brand memorable? I put the five sentences up here just for the sake of just making that point. It isn't just about one thing in branding, it's about everything.

The role of sense in brand continuity

To me sense is critical when it comes to branding. It isn't just about what your business card looks like. So it's critical to make this point from a consistency perspective. If you think about senses when it comes to your branding you're halfway there.

So where do we start? Is it with the logo? I put a question mark on that, because it's so easy to say "if we have a great logo, then we've got a great brand" and it's not quite right. And it doesn't matter whether it's at the beginning, or it's at the end, branding isn't logo.

What is Branding anyway?

Let's just be very clear on that point, branding is what you see here on screen. This is just a menagerie of nonsense. It's not nonsense, it's all great stuff. But the point is that everything, I won't go into listing everything here, in terms of telling you what's on screen, you can see it for yourself. While the logo is at the center of that.

Certainly that's a pivot point, that's something that people identify with. It's something that they acknowledge. All of these things on here are your responsibilities when it comes to brand. So even right down to your web domain, what does your web domain say about you?

When we rebranded SOLV for instance, one of the things we talked really closely about was the importance of making them conversational. We live in a day and age where what you see on screen is all great and good, but it's quite cold and it's quite digital. And if you can humanize things, it makes you more approachable. And in their case, as a business, they are service oriented business. So it's critical for them to be able to be approachable. And so we called them simply The SOLV Group.com. And the premise behind that was is that identifying them as a group, number one makes them seem like they're more than just one individual.

Be Mindful of ALL Your Brand Touchpoints

I put a lot of different things in here, certainly social media, but I also think about things like, how do your people answer the phone?

When you do this very simple test, I encourage you by this. But if you have a business and you go by a certain name. If you're going to say it, then be it. Don't tell mixed messages.

More aspects of brand continuity

So be very very thoughtful about how you hear your employees speak when they answer the phone, how you speak when you talk to others. Whether it be in an elevator pitch or what have you, be mindful of that. Because while it seems like an insignificant detail, it's the littlest of details that can have the most significant impact.

I'll add one more thing to this conversation. And that is email signature. Again, think of your brand. Your brand is a house full of different things. It's not your logo. If you have a company with a number of employees and you're sending out email, by a bunch of different individuals and you have three or four different email signatures that are going out, you are running the risk of that first impression falling flat. When somebody gets emails from multiple people inside your organization and they see a misrepresentation of your logo, or someone's using God-forbid Comic Sans or something like that. The fact of the matter is it's a degration of your brand.

You have to be acutely aware of all those little touch points, because it's so easy for us to be complacent. And if you spend the time to really focus on those little innate details, when the clients, sees that you're building trust with them, there's an inherent trust because of the continuity and all the things that you do.

How people view a consistent brand

It's like, wow, these guys have their act together. They really seem to have a good, clear understanding of what their brand is. All right, again, all those things aside, I'm putting one example in here, just for the sake of this group of something that we had done. Mainly just so that you guys can kind of understand I'm sitting here preaching about all this, but putting it into practice.

Brand consistency vs. brand continuity

The biggest difference between consistency and continuity, consistency I would say would be like, it's the same identity all the way through. Continuity is how do you reapply what you have in brand. Whether it be through speech, whether it be through touch, whether it be through what you see, and do it in a thoughtful way that makes a consumer go, "Wow! This is a very, very thoughtful approach. And I don't feel like I'm getting cookie cutter here. I feel like I'm actually a part of something that really makes sense.".

Sometimes it's like our logo doesn't fit inside of that little circle. Let's say inside my social media application. That's a problem. That's why you work with good branding firms to make sure that there's a solution. So that, that way you look like you have your act together. Your sole focus is ensuring that your client or your customer feels like they can trust you. And when you have your act together. It makes it a whole lot easier for them to do that.

The importance of brand guidelines for continuity

Anyway, I just show you these, everything from like a mobile device, to various, scenarios when it comes to your color usage, your typography, all these things play a critical role in ensuring that you follow some level of guideline. And that guideline ensures that there aren't things that are missed. This is something that is shared then with anyone that has any level of application with the brand, as well as outside vendors. It's mission critical. If this company was working, let's say with The SOLV Group, they would be able to provide these contents directly to SOLV. And SOLV doesn't have to assume anything. Everything is outlined here. Every company at some level or another should have this approach because it ensures that the investment that you make in your brand is not compromised, plain and simple.

So we know it's noisy out there. There's a lot of stuff going on.

Bottom line is that you just have to figure out how to manage the volume. We know that it's noisy out there, but the point of when I say managing your volume is do what you're really good at when it comes to your brand. When it comes to application, when it comes to how you answer the phones or whatever, you don't have to do everything, pick half a dozen things, pick two things. I don't care.

The point simply is whatever it is that you're doing on behalf of your brand, do it with intention and do it consistently with continuity. If you can do that, you are going to elevate the value of your brand hands down.