Branding Strategy Insider

Brand Management Of The Future

We all know the fundamental issue: consumers are suffering from attention deficit disorder brought on by too much choice. Now the moral imperatives brought on by concerns over global warming—to buy local, to buy green—are layered on top of an already bewildering variety of alternatives. People are recognizing that every purchase decision has consequences, but figuring out what the consequences really are is tough. 

In theory, new media give consumers control over this complex world. When people can rouse themselves to use them, search engines, product ratings and social networks can help shoppers make better purchase decisions, but in reality the online world of search and word of mouth is just as complex and confusing as the offline world. As a result, I believe that people will still be drawn to a simple, straightforward brand promise. If they find that a brand lives up to its promise, they are likely to stick with it. Why make another decision? If and when a brand exceeds their expectations, they are likely to recommend it to others. Advocacy will spread the word more effectively than search engine rankings or branded TV shows. 

That said, a brand still needs to make its promise heard, and people need to find that promise personally relevant. They need to feel they can trust the company behind the brand to act in their best interests. Given the diversity of interests out there, many brands will need to align themselves with ever-narrower communities. If a brand cannot maintain broad, mass-market appeal, then it will have to focus on the needs of specific segments of consumers, which may be defined more by shared attitudes than demographics. A brand that can serve the needs of a specific target group better than any other can compensate for lack of mass appeal and trade volume by charging a premium price. 

Branding: The Next Generation

The concept of branding is already undergoing dramatic changes. New technologies have allowed us to go beyond mass production and to mass customize brands. Currently brand manufacturers own their brands. This is changing. In the future brands will increasingly be owned by the consumer. The first signs of this shift appeared in the late 1990s. I documented this phenomenon in my book BRANDchild and named it MSP -- Me Selling Proposition.

In the 1950s branding belonged to the USP -- the Unique Selling Proposition. This ensured that the physical product, rather than the brand, was the core differential. By the 1960s we began seeing the first signs of true Emotional Selling Proposition (ESP) brands. Similar products were perceived as different primarily because of an emotional attachment. Think of Coke and Pepsi. The consumer tends to drink the "label" rather than the cola. During the 1980s the Organizational Selling Proposition (OSP) emerged. The organization or corporation behind the brand in fact became the brand. It was the organization's philosophy that distinguished it from others. For many years Nike subscribed to this form of branding. The internal spirit of the company was so strong that its employees became the main ambassadors for its brand.

By the 1990s brands had gained enormous strength in their own right, and the Brand Selling Proposition (BSP) took over. The brand was stronger than the physical dimensions of the product. Think Harry Potter, Pokemon, Disney, or M&M's. The brand name is found on sheets and toothbrushes, wallpaper and makeup sets. Books and movies aside, the consumer has become more fixated on the brand than the stories.

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

The Future of Consumer Behavior

A typical 21-year-old has played 5,000 hours of computer games, exchanged 25,000 emails, SMSs and chat messages, has used a cellphone some 10,000 times and spent 3,500 hours online. Surprised? Well that’s your future consumer.

When I conducted the ‘BRANDchild’ research for my book of same name – the world’s largest study on kids and their relationship with brands - one of the results which took me most by surprise was the number of channels kids are able to handle at the same time. Where adults are able to manage 1.7 media channels at the same time, say, watching TV and reading a magazine, kids can give attention to an astounding 5.4 channels at the same time. To illustrate this multi-tasking, they can watch TV, send SMS messages, surf the net, chat on MSN, listen to music and even devote 0.4 of their simultaneous communications repertoire to homework.

But even more surprisingly, when I recently repeated the study, three years on, not only had the number of channels kids handled at once increased by 0.2, but adult capacity for dealing with multiple channels had increased by close to 0.1. It seems, therefore, that the ever-evolving media environment is not only influencing the younger generation. It is affecting us all and we are all making adaptations to it. This leads to this question: what behavioral changes will we see in future generations vis-à-vis communications strategies and media use?

The answer is straightforward. A lot. But here are two key developments you can expect to deal with in handling future generations of consumer behavior:

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.