BUSINESS BUILDING
BRANDING NEEDS TO BE DELIVERED CONSISTENTLY TO INCREASE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION BY MELISSA STEINKEN
Continuity creates trust for customers. It’s the same principle for body shop operators with 2–5 locations and body shop operators with 10 or more locations. How do you expect a customer to become familiar with your brand if it’s not cohesive? Take McDonald’s, for an example. You know that if you pull into the drive-thru of any McDonald’s in the U.S., you could get a Happy Meal or a large Diet Coke and medium fries. These are staples to the fast food chain. But, there’s still some nuance. For example, customers going to McDonald’s franchises in southern states might always expect to order a large sweet tea (a southern staple). Customers can expect the same consistency in service and quality of product but each location has its own little bit of local flavor. Body shops are no different. A customer should be able to expect a certain level of service and quality repair regardless of the location. But, each shop’s “staples” might look a bit different. Melanie Spring, chief storyteller at Melanie Spring Productions and creator of Bite-Sized Branding, shares how to build a cohesive brand strategy for your business. 12
THE MSO PROJECT | SEPTEMBER 2020
1. CREATE A BRAND BOOK.
When body shops follow the same guidelines across locations, then customers can anticipate the same level of service, Spring says. She advises creating a guidebook for employees to reference. This “brand book” should contain the company’s logo, style, voice, content and all the other ancillary materials as well. Make sure it is as specific as possible describing how the company writes sentences and what punctuation is preferred. The guide can be as long as 25 pages or just shorter style guides. “There are two different styles of brand books,” Spring says. “One you can use to train and the other can be used for more of a stylistic perspective and that can be just a couple of pages.”
GETTY IMAGES
Boosting a Brand
