To get an idea of just how important brand consistency is, think about your business like a restaurant. When someone comes into a restaurant, it's because they expect one thing: good food. If they didn't, they wouldn't be there. If they go in expecting good food and they don't get it, they're almost certainly not coming back. Not only that, but they're going to tell a friend. Then, that friend will tell two more friends... and so on, and so forth. 

The same concept is also critically important in terms of your supply chain, where consistency often equals reliability, which often equals value in the eyes of your customers. Make no mistake: if you haven't already begun to prioritize brand consistency as a larger part of your supply chain strategy, now would be the time to start.

The Ripple Effect of Brand Consistency

Before you dive deeper into why brand consistency is such an important part of your supply chain strategy, it's necessary to talk a little more about the power of brand consistency in general. Essentially, brand consistency has to do with all of the things that affect how a person feels about your company. Regardless of how they choose to make contact, what shape that interaction takes or even what types of marketing collateral they're exposed to, everything - from the way your employees carry themselves to your website to your services and even your perspective - needs to feel like it all came from the same basic place.

In a lot of ways, it's important to think about brand consistency less as something that exists within your business and more as something that exists totally in the minds of your customers.

It's also something that is proven to impact nearly every aspect of your organization. Consider the following statistics for proof of that:

• Brand consistency is also one of the major ways that you build an audience, something that over 70% of B2B marketers say is more valuable than even direct sales. 
• Based on that, it should come as no surprise that 77% of B2B leaders say that this type of brand consistency is absolutely critical to their current and future growth.
• On average, the revenue increase that is often directly attributed to presenting your brand in a consistent way is roughly 23%. 

But why is brand consistency such a critical part of your supply chain strategy in particular? That's easy - one recent study revealed that it takes someone five to seven impressions on average to remember your brand at all.

Keep Your Brand Predictable

When you stop for a moment to think about just how many opportunities someone has to experience your brand in a supply chain situation, and how many potential channels you need to control, it becomes easy to see why brand consistency is not something you can achieve without it becoming an organic part of your larger efforts. 

But for supply chain managers everywhere, the true power of brand consistency comes by way of a few incredibly simple theories. As we've already established, having your brand presented as consistently as possible across your entire supply chain can help with A) brand awareness (meaning that more people are aware you exist in the first place), and B) positive brand recognition (meaning that the people who are aware that you exist think favorably of you).

If your branding doesn't create a seamless experience across all parts of the supply chain, people aren't really sure what they're getting into. You're too unpredictable in an environment where stability and dependability is a high priority - almost more so than most other industries.

The more people that know who you are and have a favorable opinion of what you do and how you do it, the more people will want to actively do business with you. Stats or no stats, it really doesn't have to be much more complicated than that.

Brand consistency is an important part of doing business, but it is especially so in terms of your supply chain. You always want someone to think favorably about your brand whenever it is brought up in conversation, whenever they see a piece of marketing collateral or whenever they're trying to figure out who can help them solve the problem of today. Without prioritizing brand consistency, however, this doesn't just become difficult to guarantee - it's almost impossible.