Brand compliance is a fundamental rule that your brand follows to ensure the masses know exactly what you are about. A yellow letter, a bell, three dots in white, or a castle; these words are enough to ring a bell in your head and let you know which quick-service restaurant we are talking about. That is brand compliance. It is the message your brand gives irrespective of what channel the guest or QSR customer is approaching you from and how many partners or franchises you have across the globe. Although, brand compliance in a QSR is much more than just consistency and the predictability of a QSR brand. It is also what you as a brand stand for and how you position yourself in front of customers.
Brand compliance checklist:
The identity, values and standards of your QSR are dependent on how you align all your brand components to form strong brand compliance that each of your branches follows diligently. In light of that, here is a QSR brand compliance checklist or fast food chain brand compliance checklist:
- Look and feel: ensure that the appearance and management are similar across all your fast food branches and platforms or channels.
- Tonality: the tone and voice of your fast food chain should be distinct and distinguishable among your competitors.
- Design: colour schemes, fonts, graphics, designs and other elements, no matter how small, must be consistent across all branches and platforms to ensure recall.
- Personality: maintaining a similar personality for all your channels as a whole.
- Communication: communicating the same message across all platforms with similar consistency and positioning.
As much as consistency is a huge part of brand compliance it looks at other aspects of your fast food brand in the F&B industry as well. Brand compliance in F&B industry gives you a lot of control over your brand, its identity, your brand narrative and the way your brand is being perceived in the market. Being able to control these aspects of your fast food chain in the F&B industry can save you from unnecessary miscommunication, and backlash from customers and help create a positive image in the F&B market.
Why is brand compliance important in the F&B industry?
A quick service restaurant delivers in a dynamic space which requires attention to detail and immense hard work from the customer-facing and backend team to deliver the same consistency across both frontend and backend service. Along with this, the fast food brand also has to look at working on customer success, customer satisfaction and customer retention to continue to grow. In a market and industry like this, the need for strong customer experience strategies becomes inevitable. Customer experience strategies can help you align the QSR brand voice, QSR brand feelings and QSR brand values to align them to the QSR brand communications, QSR marketing processes and QSR brand assets. If a fast food brand fails to do so, they are set to end up damaging its reputation and lose customer trust.
How do you ensure brand compliance in F&B industry?
Consistent content
A unique identity is what sets you apart as a top QSR brand from your QSR competitors. Creating a unique identity that your customers can remember and recognise is crucial to your growth. This identity must also be a part of all your digital platforms. We have seen even the biggest QSR brand make mistakes that could have been avoided when it came to messaging. We saw a leading soft beevrage/soda company go into losses because their messaging was different across two different channels which led people to run to their competitors swiftly. Having a unique identity across all digital platforms makes it easier for consumers to recognize a brand’s content and messages. Today we have a lot of technology to avoid such brand compliance mistakes. How? Well, all your business activities can be aligned on the same page and through online proofing softwares, you can help each stakeholder and team member look at the same thing without confusion and send the same message across all channels. Customer experience management gives you a centralised process to review and approve each data that is meant to go out and reach your QSR customers.
Brand recognition
Brand compliance for good customer experience helps you avoid trademark infringements. Building brand recognition will help you avoid any such legal run-ins. A brand compliance audit in QSR industry helps you ensure:
- Licensing requirements are adhered to
- Repeated monitoring and managing legal activities like property usage and content accessibility.
- Social media platform policies are adhered to and carried out throughout the company with the same flare.
Client retention
Not only is consistency important when it comes to content it is of utmost importance to maintain consistency in your product and service as well. The F&B industry is constantly interacting with customers and so it is important that the type of product and QSR service you are fleshing out is the same across each branch. In fact, customer experience audits in the F&B industry like the food industry brand audit or food industry compliance audits also look at competitive pricing to help attract customers along with looking at the quality of the products and openness to carrying out F&B operations. Online creative softwares for food and beverage industry used as a part of better decision-making through customer experience surveys to help food companies manage and maintain their challenging workflows and brand guidelines across all platforms.
Avoiding internal negligence and including every silo
It is incorrect that only the marketing team is responsible for the branding compliance of a company. Every silo needs to be equally informed and involved in respecting the brand compliance of food brand. The executive team members must ensure that the compliance activities are being carried out and they should also enforce compliance audits and brand audits to make sure all the areas of brand compliance are being followed. Brand audits and compliance audits are solutions as a part of customer experience management that are being used by all leading food and beverage companies across the globe to make sure that the customer experience they have in place is up to the mark and providing the customers with exactly what they want.
Frequent brand audits and compliance audits with leading customer experience companies is what can save you from losing out on your QSR brand reputation. They will also help you get ahead of challenges in the food and beverage industry that you are currently facing. Sonata CX can help you with its live reporting platform for QSR auditing, QSR compliance audits and QSR brand audits.
Our CX solutions are focused on transforming the total customer experience through surveys, metrics, analytics and auditing by using the CXM framework to combine physical measurements with digital Platformation™ capabilities. We are committed to finding the right customer experience strategy that can lead to a competitive advantage.
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