The Brand Union

Branding As We Know It Is No Longer

From: The Economist’s ‘Big Rethink 2012′ Conference
By: Sue Daun, Head of Brand Experience & JR Little, Senior Strategist, The Brand Union London

Branding as we know it is no longer. Things have changed.

Consumers are now armed with knowledge and technology. They want to have an active role in charting the course of your brand. They are highly skeptical, have high expectations, and want to share their point of view with immediacy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There is no rest, no relief and no room for complacent brands. Things are moving fast, and delivering the brand in the present moment is critical.

As brand owners, shapers, and makers, we no longer have complete control.

In the past, successful brand projects were goal-oriented, often taking the form of a launch. These projects advanced step by step, culminating in a set of brand guidelines that we pushed out to our employees and consumers. Those days are over – or they should be.

Instead of imposing brand guidelines on others, we need to foster a dialogue to which employees and consumers can contribute. No longer can a brand expect to reach its destination by developing a fixed set of milestones between point A and point B. Linear thinking and dogmatic consistency is no longer enough now that consumers are hungry for brands that continuously evolve in real-time.

A brand’s journey is no longer one-dimensional. Consumers and employees are impacting on this journey. They create shockwaves, pulses and provocations that can and should drive success into richer territories.

Today, it is no surprise that you need to invite and involve your employees and consumers from the start of any brand- building initiative. You must embrace the challenges these groups pose, and the creative contributions they have to offer. But how can you embed this inclusive mentality in the structure of the brand – how do you guideline this?

Accept that once you start your brand-building journey, your goals will change. Your initial goals are guideposts and the journey will be more successful if you constantly evaluate your progress, take advantage of new opportunities and adjust to changing consumer needs. If you adapt with your audiences’ needs and inputs, the outcome will be better than what you could have planned on your own.

We are encouraging clients to take their cues from the non-profit sector. Mission-led organisations, like non-profits, are adaptable, but remain true to their core beliefs. Vision-led marketing teams get caught up on the old-school end-goal thinking and forget that the game has changed. It’s all about the journey and developing rapport along the way.

In order to establish this way of thinking in your business, there are 4 key considerations.

Know your Truth: Your truth is a fixed element; the core of what your brand is about. A core needs to be appealing, believable and valued. Look back at what made your brand great to start with. Talk to those closest to the brand, establish what the brand perception is from speaking with consumers and employees and delve into the brand’s history. Define the tenets of your story.

You might think that this advice is only relevant to dynamic, technology-centric businesses that are constantly replacing outdated products with new ones. However, it is also applicable to businesses, like Hermès, that painstakingly perfect every aspect of the brand experience, rather than rushing to capitalize a new trend. Hermès has established itself through a few key iconic products and a belief in quality, hand-craftsmanship, and the idea that if it is worth making, it is worth taking time to do it right. This fixed belief permeates every piece of the experience from the new Rive Gauche store in Paris to the online experience to the Birkin bag, and has done so for over one hundred years. These fixed elements of the brand provide its foundation, but the brand’s structure aboveground can take many shapes. Defining how a brand’s fixed beliefs can manifest drives the rich content that the consumers crave.

Of course, the content and stories you create must be…

Relevant: Your stories must imbue your brand’s truth, but they also need to adapt in personality, tone and touchpoint to ensure your values are heard, embraced and shared by the relevant parties (or ‘segments’, if you like that word better). Brand personalities, like human personalities, are adapted to suit the audience; it’s what makes someone interesting to listen to at a party. Absolut has established its fixed elements (tenets), but it has also demonstrated a key part to real- time branding – an adaptive personality – which allows it to get the brand right for its target audience, changing with them.

Absolut is quite clear on what they are about: Swedish-ness, design-oriented, an unexpected creative personality, and clarity of product. But the way they express these qualities is tailored to different audiences. For example, world travellers and thought leaders interact with unique activations and special editions in Duty Free; the arts community interacts with the brand through highly respected projects and collaborations; regional consumers feel a sense of affiliation with the brand through city series bottles and activations; and limited edition ‘more premium’ products help reach and influence thought leaders.

We’ve discussed finding your truth and remaining relevant. But it’s also important to…

Experiment: Content, such as promotional material, is critical to the success of a branding project, but brands cannot create masses of content and expect their message to resonate. Folks at The Coca Cola Company, for example, have realized they can no longer pay their way to greatness. Their shift in strategy towards ‘content excellence’ is key to delivering stories that take on a life of their own through the consumer to the level that consumers actively participate in the story from the start. They have a voice that is embraced and provoked in Coke 24/7.

The Coca Cola Company is actively integrating its values into brand storytelling. Simultaneously, Coca Cola embraces the creative thinking of its consumers while working on the assumption that consumer interaction with the brand will provoke brand content to be as catchy and contagious as possible.

Successful branding is not about creating more and more stuff, but about challenging the norm. It’s about measuring your successes and failures and replicating the successes in other markets and categories to maximise wins.

Engage: Speed and efficiency are essential components of a branding campaign, but traditional approaches to producing and distributing content can sometimes hinder and even kill great ideas before they have developed. By limiting creation of content to your marketers, you may miss out on the opportunity to unlock other creative minds available to you, such as consumers and your wider employee base.

77% of US CEOs are revising strategies in response to consumer demand (PWC 2012 Global CEO survey).

You only need to look at Google, one of the world’s most formidable search engines, to see the benefits of allowing a little imperfection. Many are familiar with the ‘80/20’ rule. In fact, there are many 80/20 rules, but we’d like to entertain a new kind of 80/20 model. This model allows for 20% less-than-perfect experimentation and uses consumers and employees to continually challenge, create and share the platforms that are launched. Some of these platforms fail and that is ok. Google is a business that is continuously experimenting. Rather than spending years perfecting, consumer- testing and refining before taking a product live, Google gets their ideas out there 80% right. They ask their consumers to test-drive products in real-time, rather than killing ideas at their inception. Products are allowed to grow and morph to reach success, and once they have reached their potential, may give way to newer products, as in the case of Google Buzz, which helped create Google+.

Summary

1. Truth, which consists of your brand’s fixed elements, is essential to branding in real-time. A clear purpose drives a brand’s truth. All stories and content should embrace it at their heart. Releasing these truths into the world should be the brand’s mission, not a task.
2. Be Relevant. Consider consumer and employee desires from the beginning of the journey, not just at the end. Enable dialogue and allow room for flexibility throughout your brand project to ensure you are not target fixated. The same story can be told three or four different ways depending on the audience, place and time. As the stories, content and brand evolve, share with a wider audience. Make sure your message is reaching its target. Dynamic brand guides allow action, evolution and refinement to be captured, shared and incorporated along the journey.
3. Experiment. Creative thinking can lead to innovations that result in growth. Experimentation provokes and invites dialogue, which in turn offers insights into consumer experiences of the brand and the brand’s promotional materials. This process ultimately leads to innovation. It is truly dynamic and needs to be monitored, evolved, fed with new content, and shared in new ways. To facilitate the process, consider integrating touchpoints from other categories into your business.
4. Engage employees and their ideas. Such engagement should be valued and encouraged. Nurture it. Build it into the business culture. Establish an approach that shares and celebrates both successes and failures quickly throughout the company.

Branding is a journey that does not follow a clearly delineated path. In order to make the journey as successful as possible, walk alongside your consumers; don’t let them beat you to the destination.