Branding Strategy Insider

Top Twelve Branding Keys For 2012

The 12th year of the 21st century is close upon us, bringing not just a new slate, but also a sense of significance: the very number 12 commands a lot of attention, in different ways. 

For product brands it’s a unit of trade – 12 units to a dozen, said to be cheaper than other number sets. Service brands can identify with the 12 labors of Hercules. For readers there’s Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Virgil’s 12 books of the Aeneid, and the Bible’s 12 Apostles. Music? There’s the holiday’s 12 drummers drumming and 12 studio albums released by the Beatles. 

Once on celluloid, now digitally viewed, there are popular films: 12 Angry Men, Twelve O’clock High, and who can forget The Dirty Dozen. And whether an early or late adopter, there are 12 function keys on a computer and 12 “buttons” on telephonic key pads. Oh, and as everyone knows, there are 12 inches to a foot, 12 ribs to a chest, and 12 months to the year, with 12 associated constellations – those star configurations once thought to be portents of the things to come. 

But as this is the 21st century, we prefer to rely upon the validated power of predictive loyalty and engagement metrics. Those, incidentally, allow marketers to measure the direction and velocity of consumer values and expectations at least 12 months in advance of the marketplace. 

So we offer up 12 trends for 2012. Because success comes from acting on a trend when it’s identified – not waiting for market highs and lows. These 12 will have direct consequences to the success, or failure, of next year’s branding, engagement, and marketing efforts. 

1) Value Is the Deal 

Differentiated and believable brand meaning – emotional, rational, functional, and experiential – becomes a more effective and profitable surrogate for value than low-lower-lowest pricing strategies. But only the consumer gets to say how "valuable" is actually defined. Employ effective systems to listen to them and then figure out ways to tune in the consumer’s frequency. 

Top Ten Branding Keys For 2011

 
1. Learn everything about your customers. Understand them at a deep level. Know what motivates them. Know what they aspire to and what they fear.

2. Stand for something important to your customers. Let them know that you share their values.

3. Interact with your customers as if they were your partners. Respect them. Listen to them. Collaborate with them. Co-create new products and services with them.

4. Grow with your current customers. Identify how you can meet more and more of their needs. It is much less expensive to sell a current customer one more thing than it is to gain a new customer.

5. Innovate. Don’t rest on your laurels. Anticipate your customers’ needs. Give them something that they would really appreciate but perhaps had never conceived of before.

Infusing Trends Into Your Brand

 
Brands are built on cultural DNA and therefore, must evolve with the times and shifting consumer desires. To successfully navigate such turbulent waters, we recommend for marketers to steward brands through a "trend process", recognizing that the brand essence resides in quintessential equities - visual, sensorial, experiential and personality - that create truly emotional bonds with consumers. 

For over more than a decade, we have refined a "Brand Effervescent Trend Forecasting Process" that funnels macro trends into a brand essence.

Each higher trend level feeds the one below in a 10-step brand development process.

Applying Trends to Brands

While every project presents its own challenges, this process can help marketers apply the right trend to a brand's living space.

1. Trend Signals 
Seek visionaries; stay future focused. Big discoveries can come from the fringe, unfamiliar territory that can even elicit a touch of fear.

11 Branding And Marketing Trends For 2011

Author Ursula Le Guin wrote that “legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak.” What Ms. Le Guin left out were consumers. Consumers speak too. Volumes if you know how to read them.

Predictive loyalty metrics allow marketers to decipher consumers’ emotions, expectations, and imminent behaviors in the marketplace. Happily, I am an authority on customer loyalty. And, as real loyalty metrics measure the direction and velocity of consumer values 12 to 18 months in advance of the marketplace, they allow me to identify future trends with uncanny accuracy.

Having examined these measures in 4Q2010, here's 11 trends for marketers in 2011. Interestingly, in symbolism and spiritualism, the number 11 is said to possess qualities related to intuition, honesty, understanding and, is also supposed to represent the ideal. The number is said to provide both insight and inspiration. For marketers, these 11 trends will have direct consequences to the success – or failure – of next year’s branding and marketing efforts.

1) Value is What the Consumer Says It Is

Excessive spending, even on sale items, will continue to be replaced by a reason-to-buy at all. Only the consumer can tell you for sure. The appearance of ubiquity will be trouble for brands with no authentic meaning, whether high or low-end.

2) Brand, Meet Value

Brands will increasingly become a surrogate for “value.” What makes goods and services valuable will increasingly be what’s wrapped up in the brand and what consumers believe the brand means.

3) Zappos-ification

Marketers will have to comprehend what really drives their categoy, know what consumers really expect, and where to focus both process and brand efforts. Yes, Zappos sells shoes – but their brand equity lies primarily in the emotional driver of “service” – how they get shoes to customers and accept returns.

Brand Marketing's New Reality

If for one reason or another, you’d slept through the past five years, only to find yourself suddenly awake in August 2010, you’d quickly realize the world of advertising and marketing has fundamentally changed in three major ways. First, subconscious or subliminal communication (and research) has become part of the vocabulary of most marketers.

Second, power has shifted from brand owners to consumers - even the most powerful brands know that successful campaigns have to systematically engage consumers, who will in turn use their mighty word of mouth to spread the messages opposed to relying on big media budgets do the work.

Third, 2010 is shaping up to be dominated by guilt. Guilt for spending money in the midst of a debilitating global recession, guilt for polluting the world, and finally, parental guilt, as kids increasingly engage in their own online world, far removed from traditional values that were previously the exclusive domain of the family.

So what does this mean for a marketer in 2010? Don’t fall into the trap of believing that conventional research will do the trick. More than 80% of all the decisions we make every day are decided upon in our non-conscious part of the brain. Now if we can trust these numbers, and every study indicates that we can, then 2010 will be the year where marketers will be forced to investigate alternative research methodologies that tap into the subconscious processes involved in decision making.

2010 Brings Brands 10 Golden Digital Opportunities

Looking ahead to 2010, marketers will be facing Olympic hurdles that will require steadfast agility just to stay in the game, much less to hit the finish line ahead of the competition. Here are 10 ideas, wrapped in Olympic glory that should deliver the gold.

1. Social Media: A Marathon, Not a Sprint

Hoping to become fast friends with their targets, a lot of brands rushed into Facebook and Twitter in the last 24 months without investing sufficient time or resources. In 2010, savvy marketers will increase their commitment to social media by first listening and then offering up a steady stream of engaging content that their fans actually want. This will be particularly true for B2B brands, only 38% of whom included social media in their 2008 marketing plans (vs. 71% for B2C brands). With one comScore study indicating that branded social media activities can have a multiplier effect on search results, there is even a quantifiable rationale for brands to up the social media ante in 2010.

2. Mash-Ups: Taking Inspiration from Biathlons

A few innovative marketers took a shot at mash-ups in 2009. E.P. Carrillo, a new cigar manufacturer, created a mesmerizing Twitter and Google Maps mash-up for its "coming soon" site that tracks cigar tweets from around the world. In 2010, these kinds of mash-ups will become smoking hot as marketers look to extend the value of their social media activities. Recognizing that tech-savvy consumers glide seamlessly between personal and business, online and offline, mobile and desktop, farsighted marketers will bring together formerly disparate elements into a cohesive and self-perpetuating social media experience.

3. App Happy: On Your Mark, Get Set, Go Crazy

Given the success a handful of marketers enjoyed with their "apps" in 2009, expect a blaze of new entries in 2010. iPhone apps that provide demonstrable utility like Kraft's iFood Assistant recipe finder and Benjamin Moore's color matcher will continue to gain traction. Expect more app's that integrate with other social media like the Gap StyleMixer that allows you to mix and match clothes and share them with friends on Facebook. And don't forget the non-iPhone universe. The steakhouse Maloney and Porcelli cooked up a humorous and somewhat deviant web-based app at Expense A Steak that extrudes faux expense reports with stunning verisimilitude.

9 Digital Trends For 2010

1: Facebook replaces personal email

Question: Google has it, Hoover has it (in the UK anyway), TiVo had it, lost it and has somewhat got it back. Xerox had it, but nobody really cares anymore. So what is it?

It's when a brand name becomes the verb associated with its use. So rather than searching, you Google, or TiVo when digital recording a television show. Arguably an even more powerful synonym is when a brand becomes a noun, such as Polaroid, for instant developed photographs, although that didn't end so well.

The newest one would seem to Facebook, although it has too meanings.

'I Facebooked you' could mean that you the person has added you as a Facebook friend or they sent you a private message though Facebook. The latter would seem to be of more interest as no-one has really owned this type of communication before. No brand ever became synonymous with email. To Hotmail or Gmail someone just never happened.

So the interesting and overlooked disruption of Facebook is its displacement of personal email as a communication tool. Completely permission based, no SPAM (yet), and no address book required - your friends are already on Facebook.

Top Ten Integrated Marketing Trends for 2010

1. Less will get done: until we learn to do more with less.

While the year 2009 was marked as the 'great recession', we won't feel its full effects until 2010. Both marketers and their marketing services agency partners are dealing with reduced resources in terms of head-count and budgets. We won't likely see enough breakthroughs in the marketplace, simply because marketers and agencies alike have to remain focused on 'getting the work out the door'. The only way to 'do more with less' is to align resources toward a single and powerful integrated marketing solution. Individual marketing tactics will simply become marginalized and highly tactical with 'less'.

2. Marketers will mistakenly 'whack' a medium of the marketing mix.

With reduced marketing budgets, 'something has to give'. Unfortunately, marketers are making wholesale cuts to specific marketing/media channels in the process. We've seen the most dramatic cuts occur in print media: newspapers and magazines. I caution marketers to consider whether the remaining media in the market mix can compensate for the cuts. For example, does the internet behave like print? Is the consumer experience the same in both media? Are the message formats the same? The answer is a clear NO. Reduced resources should not come at the expense of an integrated, multi-channel mix.

3. Marketers rush to employ 'social networking' strategies.

Marketers are in a mad rush to enter the social networking space with 'tweets', 'widgets', 'apps' and 'fan pages'. However, social networking is not a marketing tactic; nor is it a surrogate for the brand's social experience. It is not a line item on a marketing plan, a specific channel, or a form of content. Rather, it is an outcome. And, no single channel has a lock on the 'social' nature of content. Most any medium can serve as the 'originating' medium in a journey that can take a great piece of content across channels and into vast networks of hearts and minds.

5 Retail Marketing Trends for 2010

1) Inconspicuous Consumption

Consumers respond to the social moment by taking consumption into the closet. As when we talk about going to Fred's (in-store restaurant), not Barney's. Or, ask to have new purchases shipped, rather than be seen carrying a branded shopping bag. Or, decide to have shoes repaired and last year's jacket altered. Spending as a covert activity. No bragging rights.

2) The Dyslexic Dilemma

It's a "b." No. It's a "d." Consumers stall in their tracks, trying to figure out what to do, right now. Are we heading out of the woods, or perhaps a bit deeper into it. The moment to watch: What happens when unemployment hits 10 percent at the exact moment the Dow tops 10,000. That deer-in-the-headlights look on the consumers' face: Now or not yet? What is the real barometer of economic health? Dare I buy a peach?

3) Private Labeling

The number one brands thrive, innovating, advertising and product improving. But, the number 2s and 3s stop striving, unable to compete with performance advances or on price. Into the vacuum steps Private Label. No longer just "okay, available and cheap," these grocery aisle invaders are well-branded, feature rich and are oh-so-profitable for the stores. Say goodbye to familiar but moribund household names; say hello to snazzy new entrants that shave quarters off the check-out total without sacrifice. (Store brands in play at Walmart pictured above)

10 Branding and Marketing Trends for 2010

Niels Bohr once noted that "prediction is very difficult, especially about the future," but then he didn't have access to predictive loyalty metrics. Happily, we do. And, as they measure the direction and velocity of consumer values 12 to 18 months in advance of the marketplace and consumer articulations of category needs and expectations, they identify future trends with uncanny accuracy.

Having examined these measures, we offer 10 trends for marketers for 2010 that will have direct consequences to the success - or failure – of next year's branding and marketing efforts.

1) Value is the new black

Consumer spending, even on sale items, will continue to be replaced by a reason-to-buy at all. This spells trouble for brands with no authentic meaning, whether high-end or low.

2) Brands increasingly a surrogate for "value"

What makes goods and services valuable will increasingly be what's wrapped up in the brand and what it stands for. Why J Crew instead of The Gap? J Crew stands for a new era in careful chic --being smart and stylish. The first family's support of the brand doesn't hurt either.

3) Brand differentiation is Brand Value

The unique meaning of a brand will increase in importance as generic features continue to plague the brand landscape. Awareness as a meaningful market force has long been obsolete, and differentiation will be critical for success --meaning sales and profitability.