Branding Strategy Insider

The Future of Branding

The Future of Brand Management: My Prognostications:

•    Building emotional connection will be key
•    Brands will focus more on creating/engineering the total customer experience
•    Customer-relevant innovation will be a key success factor
•    Outstanding customer service will also be a key success factor
•    Hiring the right employees and creating the appropriate culture will be essential
•    More and more, brands will co-create the customer experience with the customer
•    More and more, brands will need to "stand for something" to survive
•    Strong brands will not only "stand for something," they will also provide forums for people who believe in what the brands stand for
•    Organizations whose employees become consultants to and friends and partners with their customers will be the most successful
•    One-on-one marketing will become more and more important
•    The Internet will also become increasingly important as a brand building vehicle
•    For larger organizations, customer relationship management (CRM) will become a critical success factor
•    Fast, flexible and agile organizations will increasingly "win" in the digital age

US: Dropping the Ball on Green Issues

Greetings from LA, where I am working on a major consulting assignment.

The contrast in climates between the cold, wind-battered island that I left behind and the calm, sunny skies of California could not be more pronounced. Even more striking, however, is the contrast between the US approach to climate change and the one I am accustomed to in Britain.

It's hard to avoid the issue in the UK. Switch on the TV and you are confronted with numerous features about the topic. Parliament is regularly debating the nation's response to climate change and most of our major brands are beginning to alter their approaches to respond to the issues too.

Tesco is the latest to take action; the retailer is to discount energy-efficient products, reduce its reliance on air freight and install wind turbines on top of its stores as part of a £500m green initiative announced earlier this year.

Here in the US, however, the climate-change debate is significantly less developed. The government is almost silent on the issue and most major companies are extremely reticent about confronting global warming.

This past January in Detroit, Van E Jolissaint, chief economist at Chrysler, made headlines with some comments he made at a recent automotive conference.

The Future of Marketing

Marketing isn’t what it used to be. In 2003, advertising spending across the world increased on average by 3.6% - however the returns from that spend decreased by 3.4%. Not a surprising fact considering that the average consumer who’s reached the ripe old age of 65 in Britain would have been exposed to at least one million television commercials. And the number in the U.S. and Australia is even higher. When you stop and do the sums, this equates to watching television commercials for eight hours every day, seven days a week for a mind-boggling three years! 

Given the low return on advertising investment, we are forced to conclude that advertising, as we know it, no longer works. Something new is required. I’m suggesting three new pathways. 

Sensory Branding
The world of advertising needs to go back to basics. Today 99% of all communication is based on what we see and what we hear. One may ask about what we smell, taste and feel – particularly in light of the fact that  75% of our emotions are connected to what we smell rather than what we see and hear. Marketing seems to have generally neglected this very important sense at its own peril considering that branding is all about building emotional relationships between a product and the consumer.

I call this concept of appealing to all the senses Sensory Branding – a topic you’ll hear much more about as I share the findings from the world’s largest study ever conducted on brands and our five senses as part of project BRAND sense. The results are nothing short of startling, and for the first time they offer proof that in order to survive, branding has to expand its two-dimension approach and become a five-dimensional concept.

Fast and Fearless – the Future is Blogs

You can’t avoid them – the blogs. They’re so plentiful that the opinions they offer are influencing our daily news reports. Given the evident potency of blogs, therefore, the question is should blogs remain within their current sphere of influence, helping individuals to share their personal opinions on the world, or should they be adopted by brands as communication tools?

The fact is that the marriage between blogs and brands is no longer a vision. Personality brands, like Seth Godin or Tom Peters, have been blogging for some time. And brands like Weight watchers, LEGO, Apple or Harley Davidson already appear on a frequent basis, not on behalf of their brand-builders, but promoted by their fans.

This raises a potential danger: gradually the control over brand messages is being drawn away from brand builders and being redirected by consumers. So should brands begin investing in posting their own frequent blogs on the net, representing their points of view and personalities? Could you imagine Disney blogging its fans about its characters, Nokia about its latest products or Microsoft about its virus issues?

Yes, I’ll bet you can. The action would probably help brands get closer to their consumers by reaching right into those core communities of fans. But exploiting this avenue takes commitment.

The 10 New Rules of Branding

1) Brands that influence culture sell more; culture is the new catalyst for growth.
Look at Google. They are changing the way we behave online. Nike is a brand that has become a part of all culture. If you get into that split screen, you become part of the lexicon of life.

2) A brand with no point of view has no point; full-flavor branding is in, vanilla is out.
Love or hate Fox News, you know where it stands on issues. And Ben & Jerry's is more than just ice cream; it's a company that stands for a cause. Younger consumers have grown up in a consumer world. They're flexing their muscle, and they want their brands to stand for something.

3) Today's consumer is leading from the front; this is the smartest generation to have ever walked the planet.
Today's consumers are more discriminating and more experimental. They have very strong opinions on brands, and a lot of brands are getting consumers involved. Take Converse and the Converse Gallery, where consumers can make a 24-second film that will run on their site. It's consumer-generated creativity and a natural savviness.

4) Customize wherever and whenever you can; customization is tomorrow's killer whale.
The second advent of the Internet has consumers wanting something all their own. Consumers say, 'I need something that is mine, not mass-produced for everybody.' The best example is Apple's iTunes Website. Instead of buying a CD, consumers are buying the tracks they want and putting them on their iPods. Look at Starbucks, which creates whatever beverage a consumer wants, and Nike, which allows you to design a shoe online.

5) Forget the transaction, just give me an experience; the mandate is simple: Wow them every day, every way.
Apple and Coach found that the best way to give consumers a brand experience wasn't just to sell product in store but to control the entire experience. This is why they build stores in major cities. Looking for the other brands to soon be involved in the ‘experience.’

Branding Trends

A current trend in some companies is to include the human resource function as a part (and in support) of the marketing function.  Michael Porter’s customer value chain concept is based on the thought that every activity a company performs should add to customer value, or it should be eliminated.  If a company has chosen the right promises for its brands, the concept should be adapted so that all company activities should contribute to the delivery of brand promises or be eliminated.  This includes operations, logistics, marketing and sales, human resource management, organization design, technology development, procurement, etc.