This title was adapted from a recent Boston Consulting Group article “Business as usual doesn’t cut it anymore”.
If we will agree that branding is a marketing discipline, then we should take a cue from the fact that the marketing world as its practices suggest are drastically changing. Today’s consumers don’t want to be marketed to; they want to be engaged with. Today’s consumers want to savor experience and share it with others. For example, Coca-Cola with its Share-A-Coke campaign helped us realize this. Consumers want to hear stories and be a part of unfolding ones – Nike, the sportswear brand has revealed this fact time and time again. And especially with their recent #SheRuns campaign which engaged thousands of women who jog at night to share their experiences online via the dedicated campaign platforms on social media. The engagements on this campaign ran into many hundreds of thousands.
Today’s consumers want to hold brands to their promises. They also want brands to help them fulfill their existential needs. It’s like how consumers readily engage with Warby Parker, a ready-to-wear eyewear brand that donates one pair of glasses to less privileged people in need with every pair sold. Asides from the low prices for their products which totally revolutionized their industry, the benefit nature of their offering is one of their main drivers of growth. Warby Parker is currently valued at more than a billion dollars, interesting.
Several references can be made, but one fact holds true; consumer buying styles are changing drastically. Lower prices than your competition doesn’t guarantee sales, consumers want more. With too much crisis and need in the world, and with governments failing in their responsibility to be the forerunners of providing solutions, brands have to step up.
With the fast nature of transformation this era is seeing, and an increasing need for focus, brands are the agents’ people look to offer direction and impact. With traditional industries getting disrupted, and societies gradually lacking values, forward thinking brands are viable alternatives. They exist with purpose and with a grand mission that puts the individual consumer at heart. Forward-thinking brands help customers align their priorities. They offer the best offerings and at affordable prices. They offer the kind of value that connect their audience with something more, be it a community of like minds, an experience beyond status quo, solving a pricking need, or advancing a social impact cause. In all, brands of today should become lighthouses for which their ordinary consumers can use to navigate their journey in this world.
If you’ve been reading carefully, and if you ordinarily pay attention to what the most successful companies in the world are up to, you will see references to global brands like Apple, Nike, Tesla, Amazon, Google, Warby Parker and the likes. And you would have also understood that not all businesses are brands. It takes a certain level of consistency, promise delivery, storytelling, vision and a sense of purpose for businesses to become brands. Some businesses may take longer to transition, while some, with a huge sense of who they are and what they want to achieve, build their businesses as brands from the get go. A certain definition puts it that ‘a brand is what people say it is.’ Another suggests that ‘brands are products of imagination and it’s the experience the brand sells that validates it’.
Creators and mangers should be intentional in creating standards and selling worthy experiences to their consumers, but ultimately those who engage with it are the judges. Are your promises delivered? Are you living up to what you claim to stand for? Is your product solving a pressing need? Do you force the experiences you sell or do you deliver them seamlessly like its first nature? These and many other questions will validate a business’s approach to branding.
In 20 plus years since the internet has entered into its second gear, businesses have been hugely disrupted. Digital technologies and processes are now at the center of the best brands. Brands can now engage with and nurture their audiences online. Social media especially has created a level playing field for brands of all sizes to operate or at least sell and promote their promises. This is storytelling, and a brand that wants to evolve as technology goes into its next gear must invest consciously in it. Also through brand design, strategy and innovation. There’s a nexus between these areas and the work done in engaging them will be what distinguishes a brand, especially as the world adapts fully into the conceptual age.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Ayodeji Abatan is the Chief executive and Visionary of INDUUCE, a creative intelligence consultancy based in Lagos, Nigeria. He founded INDUUCE as a vehicle that helps businesses evolve with core solutions and advisory services in branding, design, strategy & ideation, brand storytelling and innovation. Ayodeji is also the founder of Missiontribe, a growth brand that’s imagining and shaping a world where people are empowered everyday to create and lead their best lives. Ayodeji regularly speaks and writes on branding, design, leadership, and personal mastery.
AYODEJI ABATAN Consultant, INDUUCE
Twitter @induuce @ayodejiabatan
