Personal integrity means behaving consistently with your beliefs. “I’ll take the bins out tonight,” “The annual report will be on your desk by 9am,” “That mint slice is absolutely the last biscuit I will eat today.” Being a responsible householder, delivering your work commitments on time, staying healthy. It’s about knowing what you believe in, acting on your beliefs and accepting the consequences of your actions.
The same applies to the challenge of brand building – having clearly defined values, and delivering on your brand promise with no excuses. Integrity in the brand experience means things look like they should, sound like they should, feel like they should and behave like they should. All the time.
Maintaining brand integrity is as much about making sure every employee knows what your brand stands for and delivers a consistent brand experience across all touch points, as it is about advertising and promotion. The absolute key here is consistency.
Let’s look at Virgin, a brand often held up as one that consistently delivers on its promise – “to be genuine, fun, contemporary, and different in everything we do at a reasonable price.” Not surprisingly, the brand promise goes a lot further than seating passengers in planes. It’s about building a relationship on an emotional level and delivering on the promise it makes to you – in mass communications you are exposed to, in your booking experience, at check in, in the air, and after – every interaction must deliver on that core promise.
As brand and marketing expert and author Philip Kotler states, “brand integrity is about fulfilling what is claimed through the positioning and brand value through solid differentiation. It is about being credible to your promise and establishing the trust of the consumers to your brand. The target of brand integrity is the spirit of the consumers.”
So, why do we need to maintain brand integrity? In one word – trust. People want to know what they are getting. If they chose you because they liked the cut of your jib, then you give them what they expected, then they can trust that you’ll do it again, so they’ll come back.
At Cuckoo, our promise is to bring brands and customers together using smart strategies, captivating content and distinctive experiences. Every time.