Event brand consistency at the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games

Following the growing appreciation for the coherency of brands received by numerous stakeholder groups (i.e. the brand image) (for example, the media and the public), the achievement of brand consistency has increasingly come to be considered a priority in today’s business environment (Madhavaram, Badrinarayanan & McDonald, 2005). The increasing awareness of a wider audience that brands now have access to – caused by the proliferation of media (traditional and digital) and the gradual power shift in communications from organisation to stakeholders –, have underlined the need to reduce the polyphony of perceptions that might exist around a brand, in order for a coherent and consistent brand identity to be achieved (Duncan & Moriarty, 1997); that is, quite simply, the creation and maintenance of a strong brand identity-image link (Srivastava, 2011). The assumption here then is that if consistency and coherency are achieved, this can have a direct impact upon an organisation’s communications campaign effectiveness and the brand’s market-based and financial performance (Luxton, Reid & Mavondo, 2015). Yet, despite the perceived importance of such an accomplishment, there have been relatively few studies that have sought to determine whether brand consistency is ever in fact realised. With that in mind then, the aim of this study was to investigate the brand consistency of ‘the sports world’s most powerful brand’, the Olympic brand (Seguin & O’Reilly, 2008, p.62), and specifically, that of the London 2012 Olympic Games.