When it comes to building your brand, the process is not all that different from building a house. 

The bricks are the individual stories that help to highlight your unique selling proposition. They are the points that you highlight when promoting your organization to listeners and potential customers. 

Generally, you highlight only one brick at a time and work to make each story emotionally connect with your audience.

When you build a house, however, you cannot rely only on the bricks. 

Imagine trying to create a home where it consisted of simply one brick placed on top of another. The home would be extremely unstable. There would be nothing tying the bricks together to keep them from moving and shifting. When you build a home, the mortar is just as important.

In branding, the same concept applies. 

But what does mortar look like in terms of brands, and why is it so critical?

What is brand mortar?

When you promote your organization, you need to make sure that commonalities run through your promotions. Your strategy and your strategy-based message should all permeate the stories that you promote to your listeners.

Consistency throughout the messages should make them easy for listeners to link together while increased frequency of messages ensures that they remain on the mind of your customers.

Brand mortar is your consistency. It is the voice, jingle, or whatever else you use to tie your branding together and help customers make the connection between your different stories so that they begin to build a more solid picture of your brand.

Why is brand consistency important?

Brand consistency helps customers connect your brand across multiple promotions and channels. Just a few of the benefits you will receive include:

• Building brand awareness - By using the same colors, logos, catchphrases, and other traits, you give customers something that they can link together across your promotions.
• Increasing Trust - Your consistency across different advertisements helps customers feel more familiar with your brand and your advertising. In return, this familiarity helps to build trust. When customers prepare to make a purchase, they feel more inclined to turn towards your organization, which they feel like they already know.
• Setting your organization apart - Not only do you want your customers to clearly see how the different ads should be joined together to create an impression of your brand, but you also want them to see what sets you apart from the competition. Consistencies that help to create a unique brand proposition give customers a reason to remember you and build positive associations with your business.
• Increasing the effectiveness of each ad - When customers can clearly make connections between your ads on different channels and at different times, then the ads themselves will do a better job of impacting customer perceptions and associations.
• Building loyalty among your customers - Consistency in marketing and customer stories provides you with the opportunity to brand yourself as dependable and increase trust. When this is paired with outstanding customer service, it helps to create loyalty.

How does mortar increase consistency?

Regardless of the story that you are conveying to your audience, you want the messaging in your ads to remain consistent. This means that the overarching idea that you want customers to pick up on should remain the same. Your logo, jingle, the voice used in radio promotions, colors used in visual promotions, and similar attributes should be consistent.

You want to use a strategy to determine what remains constant versus what might change between advertisements. What you select will be determined by your branding strategy. The parts of your organization that you promote to help you stand out from the crowd in the eyes of customers should be used regularly throughout your ads.

You want to make sure that the different advertisements you use-- the different bricks-- will be related to each other. They should link together based on targeting common customers with common pain points. This will ensure that the mortar you used to hold them together will make sense and have the largest impact. By differentiating between the mortar and brick used for different customers, it will become more clear where ads should be unique and where they should remain consistent over time.

A company that fails to use mortar when building a house will quickly find themselves with a tumbling house, and a brand that does not use mortar to tie their stories together will mess up their ability to engage users. Consistency helps to bring all of your different stories together, building associations and your reputation.