People often think about brands in terms of their most visible elements: the logo, the website, the packaging or the advertising. These are important, but brands are rarely built through one spectacular piece of communication. They are built through a large number of smaller encounters.
Each occasion on which somebody comes into contact with the company is a brand touchpoint, and almost anything can become one.
The obvious touchpoints — and the ones people forget
Some are deliberately designed and therefore easy to recognise as branding: identity, website, packaging, advertising, signage, brochures, exhibitions, presentations, social media and email campaigns. Naturally, these deserve attention.
The customer does not stop experiencing the brand when the designer stops designing.
The quotation you send is a touchpoint. So is the invoice. The wording of an error message, the telephone menu, the person answering reception, the box the product arrives in, the instructions inside it, the follow-up email, the company vehicle and the recruitment advert all communicate something about the organisation.
The list becomes rather long rather quickly:
- website and mobile experience
- proposals, quotations and invoices
- packaging and delivery
- email and transactional messages
- reception and telephone contact
- customer service
- signage, vehicles and environments
- presentations and sales material
- online reviews and customer portals
- recruitment and employee communication
Not all of these need to look identical. They do, however, need to make sense together.
Your product is also part of the brand
There is a temptation to separate “the brand” from “the thing we sell”. Customers generally do not. The quality of the product, its price, the way it is delivered and whether it fulfils its promise probably influence the brand more than many communications campaigns ever will.
The visual identity establishes expectations. Reality eventually gets the deciding vote.
Digital has multiplied the number of encounters
The customer journey is less tidy than it used to be. Someone may discover a company through a search result, visit the website on a phone, check reviews, find an old LinkedIn post, download a document, receive an automated email and then speak to an actual human being. From the customer’s point of view, all of that belongs to the same organisation.
Consistency does not mean sameness
A billboard is not a website, packaging is not an invoice and Instagram is not a technical manual. The job is not to make every piece of communication look identical. The job is to make it feel as though it belongs to the same organisation.
Recognition can come from typography, language, hierarchy, imagery, tone, behaviour or simply a shared level of professionalism. A strong brand should remain recognisable when adapted. Otherwise it is not really a system; it is a template.
The problems often live between departments
Many brand problems appear in the gaps. Marketing says one thing, sales says another, the website describes an offer operations no longer deliver, or recruitment presents a culture employees do not recognise. Individually, every department may be doing a perfectly reasonable job. Collectively, the company feels confused.
A useful test is to follow one of your own customer journeys from beginning to end, then ask one question: Does this all feel like the same company? If it does, the brand is probably doing more work than you realise. If it does not, the opportunity may be considerably larger than simply redesigning the logo.
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