Delivering Consistent Brand Experiences Every Time

“You need to treat this like you’re McDonald’s, where every time I walk through the doors, no matter where I’m at, the burger and fries taste the same.”

This came from a conversation with a long-time client whose team is growing rapidly, serving clients across the United States. The message was simple. Delivering consistent brand experiences every time matters.

Envision this with us. You and your brand are McDonald’s. You have a team of individuals who provide your product/service to your customers. Maybe you’re doing that locally or possibly across the country. Your goal, just like McDonald’s, is simple. Every time someone engages with your brand, it “tastes the same.”

Too often, we’re diluting our brands with every individual we add to our teams. Sounds weird, right? Our people are the most valuable resource we have. They’re the face of the brand to customers, and they’re the ones delivering the products/services we offer. How can they be diluting our brands at the same time?

Let us share a quick, real-world example. We’re getting ready to onboard a new web developer to the OrangeBall team and are excited to be making this move. We’re most excited about this individual’s personality and, based on some work we’ve already done together, how they show up. They are a great fit for our culture; clients will love working with them.

That said, as a brand, we need to ensure that every time this new developer works on a project or interacts with a client, that experience “tastes the same.” There are processes and methods to how we show up at OrangeBall, guiding everything from how we work alongside clients to how we deliver our products/services… the same as how McDonald’s consistently makes burgers and fries.

We call this the OrangeBall Way.

With that in mind, how we onboard this new teammate and how we teach them to deliver a consistent OrangeBall experience are essential to their success and ours. If we skip this step or do it halfway, they will deliver the experience as they see fit. That could be fine, but their way will likely differ from the OrangeBall Way. The result? Inconsistency, or put another way, “This tastes different.”

We see this all of the time in our agency’s work with brands. One of the key areas we focus on from the marketing side in our Bootcamps is leading teams through learning to speak with a consistent language and vocabulary. There’s a way that brands talk about themselves, and just like making burgers and fries, there needs to be consistency throughout each organization on what that language is. One message, one way. The alternative is many diverging flavors and the need for brand experiences to be clarified.

Call-to-Action

Spend some time answering this question, “What’s our way?” How do we deliver our products/services? How do we talk about our brand? How do we maintain consistency in our processes? Define your way, and then spend some time making sure your team is aligned around your way.