Your brand is your brokerage’s signature and casts a personality on the business by helping people understand your brokerage’s aspiration. Your brand has character, a tone of voice, a look and a method of behaving across the different avenues of communication. The number one rule of branding in commercial real estate marketing, and in all business marketing, really, is brand consistency.

What is a brand?

Your brand is your brokerage’s proposition. It’s a message you want to send to your clients and prospective client about what you do and how you do it differently from others in your industry. Within your brand there may be sub-messages and values that are associated with the central message, revolving around the same idea. How you communicate these messages creates your brand. This process positions your firm in the subconscious of the marketplace.

What is brand consistency?

Brand consistency involves your brokerage communicating messages in a way that accentuates your core values and proposition. An example of this is a single logo always being used in the same way on all marketing materials, or the same font being used with the same colors. Your brand should have its own unique look and feel so that people will recognize it as your brokerage’s signature to immediately distinguish you from other competing brokerages.

Keep in mind that branding is not just using the same logo consistently. It’s the image that it establishes. It’s about ensuring that your marketing and communication materials have the same message and that it all looks, sounds and even smells consistent. The way your website looks, the quality of paper you use and your website structure, content and imagery all need to be consistent so that you keep consumers’ trust in your brand and its message.

Why is brand consistency important?

With brand consistency, comes recognition and with recognition comes confidence, trust and familiarity. Customers are more loyal to your brand when they can recognize it and appreciate what it stands for. It has been said that people may need to be exposed to a brand 17 times before they are ready to make a purchase. This is why it’s crucial that your brand executes the message clearly, consistently and concisely.

Brand consistency takes time to master before it really starts to work for your CRE brokerage. When developing your brand, you need to think long-term and choose to relay a message that you will stick with in the future. Brands such as Apple, McDonald’s, Nike  are market leaders because they have years of consistency to back them and they developed long term goals for their branding and have kept it consistent.

Think of your brand as your multi-media representation that will promote your brokerage in all forms of marketing communications. You want this image and the message it presents to be something that truly represents the foundation and goals of your brokerage. Maintaining brand consistency will gain your client's trust and generate more business for your brokerage once you have established that consistent brand that is easily recognizable.