When people complain to me about the brand they currently have… or speak wistfully about the brand they wish they had, two words come up over and over again:
Cohesive and Consistent.
Although we all generally know what these words mean, in the context of building a brand, and being a brand owner who is proud of the way they’re showing up in the world – this idea of consistency and a cohesive ‘whole’ is by far the most sought-after qualities that business owners feel they need… and with good reason.
As a business, building a brand is usually optional.
You don’t have to put in time, energy and capital to intentionally ‘build’ a brand. Since your brand is basically your reputation (or as I like to say ‘what people say about you when you’re not in the room) you might end up with one that you may or may not have intended for or invested in (like the way coca-cola started-out). And if you’re competing on price, or the only person with a patent to make a particular widget, you don’t really need invest in a brand, since that’s not why people are buying from you.
But for nearly all businesses...
Especially those with products and services that are very similar to their competitors, or for players in very saturated markets, building a brand is the most powerful way to create a sustainable competitive advantage. In these cases, all the reasons that make a brand worth building and worth continuing to invest in, stem from the brand’s ability to show up in a way that is consistent.
Consistent action aligned with the values the brand espouses…
Consistent visuals that are recognizable and memorable, and
Consistently present in the places where their customers and competitors are.
For personal brands, or what we like to call ‘Founder-Driven brands (brands that are not necessarily ‘personal’ but strongly reflect the values, personality and vision of the Founder) – consistency between the founder and the brand is also very important. If you experience the Founder in person, on stage, in the media, or online, that experience must be consistent with what you’d expect based on the brand you know and love, and vice versa.
But when consistency is discussed, there is rarely any reference to what truly matters when it comes to the ways consistency impacts the business’ bottom-line.
Is it enough to have a memorable and recognizable logo or signature colour?
Is it enough to use the same fonts everywhere?
Is it enough to have a short, strong tagline?
What about pricing: MAP or MSRP? Is a protected price-point enough?
The Consistency that matters most is Psychological
Consistency in the elements above is of course helpful, and the more of them you have, the stronger your brand is likely to be over time… but the true measure of consistency that actually helps earn profit, increase market share, inspire positive word-of-mouth and strengthen customer affinity is the psychological kind.
Psychological Consistency
Psychological Consistency is a phrase I coined while building and testing the Colour Brand® Method. Colour Brand® is a proprietary branding methodology that I created using tools like Applied Colour Psychology (more on that in a minute) and Archetypes to build a psychology-based framework that makes it fast and easy to create brands that show up everywhere consistently, leading to a more predictable impact.
What is it?
When the impact your band has is more predictable (in other words your brand actually feels to others like you need it to in order to drive the behavior you want) then you can generally improve every metric that matters in the business: increasing conversions, engagement, referrals, and profitability… and decreasing costs, churn, complaints, and refunds. Psychological Consistency is not just about what you say and do, it’s also about creating an emotional experience that is consistent with what you say and do, all the way through your customer’s journey: from the first impression through consideration, purchase, after-sales, and beyond.
How does it Work?
For a brand to create a consistent emotional experience, they must understand not just the conscious experience of their customers, but the unconscious experience as well.
The conscious stuff will be the most noticeable: good design, clear copy, social proof, easy navigation, the ‘right’ price points, etc.
The unconscious stuff is more nuanced: is there harmony or discord between the way your design and colours make people feel and the way you describe yourself as a brand? Is the experience of being in your store or on your website consistent with what I would expect at your price-point, or does it feel ‘too cheap’ or ‘too expensive’ for what you’re charging? Do the images you’re using make me feel the way the colours and/or copy do or is there an uncomfortable gap?
Understanding and crafting the unconscious experience your brand provides can be quite tricky because
a) No one teaches us how, and
b) It’s hard to measure: the way our brains and biases work, our emotional experiences often aren’t easily identified, named or expressed with language.
But most of all,
c) We don’t prioritize it: Since we like to think we’re very rational, logical beings, we don’t like to believe the truth: which is that all of us humans operate 99% unconsciously, and all of our decisions are made emotionally. We don’t want to believe that the unconscious stuff is what is really driving behavior, but it is.
Psychology-Driven Marketing
Psychology-driven marketing certainly isn’t new: Thanks to guys like Edward Bernays and Jeff Walker, there has been widespread adoption of psychology-driven sales techniques.
But other than manipulation in direct copy and pressure applied in the sales process (mostly through tools like urgency, scarcity, reciprocity and other fear-based tactics) most of us are not taught how to work with the language of the unconscious beyond messaging, when it comes to building our entire brand.
Ultimately the advantage of building a psychologically consistent brand (instead of just using psychological tactics in your copy, promotions, sales pages and launches) is that everywhere you go, everything you say and do, you’re effortlessly creating a harmonious emotional experience which builds trust, credibility, affinity, loyalty and so much more.
If you do the way we advocate, then you’re doing it with joy… by making people feel good, instead of exploiting their fear and insecurities.
Best of all, when you build a psychologically consistent brand, you can be much more confident that the impact you’re having is more predictable. You wont have to measure because you’ll see the results (often almost instantly!)
More Predictable Impact
For too long too as business owners we’ve simply had to take the ‘spaghetti at the wall’ approach not just to marketing, but to branding too. This means we have had to settle for a brand that is simply beautiful, or just memorable as ‘good enough’ to contribute to their Return on Investment (ROI).
But for those of us who want to measure everything we invest in, how can we possibly know the ROI of of building and maintaining a brand? We sort of know it works, but we’re not sure why?
Furthermore, how do we know if our brand is working well – if its contribution to our business is worth continuing to invest in?
Years ago when I was working day-to-day in Dog is Good®, the brand I co-founded back in 2006, one of my partners and I used to debate this exact issue quite often: When we had cash to invest, he always prioritized infrastructure (like buying shelves for the warehouse) and I was the primary advocate for building the brand (like adding hang tags to our tee shorts to tell the brand story). It’s tough because there are very good reasons to invest in both.
And while it may always be tricky to track the exact metrics and growth a great brand provides, experts agree that it’s possibly the most important strategy to invest in when growing a business:
“Your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business.
- Steve Forbes, Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Magazine
The advantage of building a psychologically consistent brand, is that you can see and feel the benefits straight away…
How do you know if your brand is psychologically consistent ?
If your brand is psychologically consistent, you will have higher than average of everything good: email open and click-rates, higher conversion-rates, DM’s and emails about how people are connecting with your messaging, colours or promotions, press getting in touch out of nowhere, exciting partner, sponsor or speaking opportunities dropping in… chances are either you have one aspect of your marketing so dialled-in that you don’t need a brand, or you’ve got a pretty psychologically consistent one.
You probably know who you are, how to express yourself in ways that have strong emotional resonance, and you’re consistent in doing-so. Chances are people know who you are and you continue to re-enforce what they expect from you.
Not Being Psychologically Consistent looks like…
If you feel like you’re shouting into the void, you’re hearing crickets, the marketing you’re investing in doesn’t seem to be resonating or working, and/or your website, social channels or in-person sales channels aren’t performing well: you almost definitely have a psychological consistency problem. Perhaps experts have even mentioned that the brand probably needs some work? But perhaps you’ve been a bit too distracted with products and services or marketing tactics to really hear it.
Now to be fair, there’s a good chance you might also have a numbers problem (sales is just numbers game after all, right?) But I can tell you for a fact, from 20 years of hard-earned experience with companies and budgets and marketing plans of all scopes and sizes… it is much easier and cheaper to ‘build an audience’ or get better/cheaper conversions from ads, or just about anything you invest in to ‘get the numbers’ if your brand is psychologically consistent first.
Too many Founders fall into the fallacy of believing that if they like their brand, it’s working… or it’s just the tactics that aren’t working ( like Instagram or email or ads) when in fact, the brand is all over the place. Even if you have anecdotal evidence like ‘people tell me they like my logo’ (which by the way I’ve heard from many business owners who have absolutely horrific logos)... your brand might still need major help. Sorry to be the one to tell you this, but people will usually tell you what they think you want to hear.
I am often the unpopular one dishing out the hard truths
The hard truth is, even if you have great instincts. Even if people tell you they like what you’re doing with your brand… you probably have plenty of room for more psychological consistency.
What I had found over nearly 15 years of working with Founders and teams in start-ups, SME’s, non-profits, and multinational market leaders is that far too much decision-making is based on the whims of a leader, leadership team, a design agency or single designer. What I watched happen over and over again, was decisions that should have been driven by strategy were made based on personal preference (or in many cases, personal aversions to smart strategic choices).
But what most business owners don’t know, is that the problem here, is also the solution.
The reason so many brands are bad at psychological consistency - is the same reason they can learn how master it: personality types.
Over my career I’ve been baffled by how brands can engage (expensive) expert teams, agencies and creative consultants like me to advise them – then make choices in the opposite direction of that advice!? Even worse, often the choice they go with isn’t down to consumer research or a better strategy from somewhere else, it’s because of the personal opinion of a single decision-maker or worst of all, ‘death by committee’: the dilution of a great idea into a terrible due to the need to appease multiple decision-makers.
Personality Types Causing Conflict
For example, in a tech startup I built a brand for, I spent nearly 6 months going back and forth with the UI/UX designer about grey hex codes (tints and shades of grey to be used in the app interface) – she insisted these greys needed to be cold (blue-based) and I was insisting, based on the psychology of the brand, the existing brand guidelines (already in use everywhere else), that these greys needed to be warm (yellow-based).
Why does this happen? Who is Right?
Theoretically you could argue (like she did) that most big tech brands associated with great user experience (like Apple) will often use white and cold greys to build a very clean design environment and user experience. Maybe you’d agree and the cool greys look better to you?
It’s not just tech designers that will insist that this is unequivocally the ‘correct’ way to design – architects and very modern interior designers are also very famously convinced of the superiority of white-leading monochrome. Even a lot of consumers would agree, simply based on what they’re used to seeing represented in slick tech brands and apps. But are they Right?
Well yes they are right. But they’re also wrong…
To find the truth about whether the ‘Apple’ + ‘Architect’ way is best let’s briefly explore some very easy to digest colour physics.
Applied Colour Psychology
All colour can be divided into four groups: first we split all colour into two groups: blue-based and yellow-based colours. Then, split those two groups into two groups each: based on ‘intensity’ (colours which are clear, light and bright vs. colours which become subdued by adding black or grey to them).
Split this way you end up with the following four groups:
- Cool-based colours with nothing added
- Warm-based colours with nothing added
- Cool-based colours with black/grey added
- Warm-based colours with black/grey added
But here's where this gets really interesting(and very useful)...
If you break all people down into 4 groups based on Carl Jung’s personality types: using on one hand a measure of introversion/extroversion and then ‘intensity’ - and then test each group for their preference among each of the 4 colour groups, you’ll find a very strong, statistically relevant correlation between each personality type and one group of colours.
For example Type 1 tends to prefer Colour group 2, Type 2 prefers colour group 3 and so on. In other words… your colour preferences are likely to be based on your personality type.
This is the basis of Applied Colour Psychology.
So, if we bring this full-circle back to my experience with the app designer, it’s easy to see why she was so sure about her position and her greys being correct: Not only did she have plenty of examples like Apple as reference points, but her personality type has a strong preference for blue-based colours. The warm yellow-based greys I was suggesting simply looked and felt wrong to her.
So was she right?
Well, the most important point here, is that this app wasn’t about her. It wasn’t about me either... but it was my job to advocate for the psychological consistency of the brand. She is a great designer, but the psychology and personality of the brand had already be set, and it was a warm brand, building colour harmony using yellow-based colours. It wasn’t up for negotiation at the point of building the app.
While she was right, the blue-based greys felt crisp, clean and premium: that’s not who the brand was trying to be. These colours feel cold and uncaring compared to all the brand’s other assets and touch-points, as well as the messaging, imagery and points of differentiation the brand was working hard to emphasize, which were all about warmth, caring and being different than those ‘cool, impersonal tech bro’ apps. Additionally, the brand’s primary turquoise is warm, and simply doesn’t harmonize as well with the cooler greys.
Can you see it?
Colour is an extremely powerful element in building psychological consistency (and I’d argue, one of the most important due to its potency), but it’s certainly not the only one.
In the Joy Makeovers we specialize in for brands and businesses, our primary goal always is to create psychological consistency, and creating colour harmony is an important part of that. But it starts with truly knowing who you are, and how you need people to feel to buy from you.
How do you want your brand to make people feel? Is it working?
More Resources:
+ Explore the 'before and after' of some our brands.
+ Check out Colours that Convert for some Psychological Consistency 'quick fixes' for your website.
+ Listen to Season 1 of the Joy First podcast, and learn how to use the psychology of colour as a tool for more joy.
+ Apply Now to have us build a psychologically consistent brand for you.
