A strong brand is not the result of ubiqutious marketing but delivering on a highly desired customer experience.
If you’re thinking about developing or transforming your brand, design the customer experience first. When the experience delivers on the promise you make to your customers, skepticism is removed and trust is created. Strong brands have the marketing baked into the experience they create for customers.
Strong brands walk before they talk.
Saying it’s so won’t make it so. The customer experience is the promise delivered. This is how brands build trust. Trust is the only real competitive advantage.
Most leaders think of creating or transforming a brand as a marketing issue.
Many times I’ve seen marketing executives embark on a branding imitative from a visual design and marketing communications perspective. Their mission is to talk first–create awareness and demand in the marketplace.
This is old school 20th century thinking.
In a digitally driven, hyper cluttered 21st century marketplace with rapidly diminishing attention spans, nobody has time to see and hear your messages at all.
With so much emphasis and energy on data to predict the customer journey, everything is now about conversions. Marketing is not a strategy.
Strategy is understanding where you compete and how you compete and how relevant your promise is to the way customers (people) actually live their lives.
Strong brands add value to the life of customers, rather than adding more functions and features to products. Your balance sheet and sales funnel have nothing whatsoever to do with how consumers demand new value and live their lives.
Begin your business transformation and brand development initiatives by mapping your promise to the lives of customer first. The most important characteristic of an enduring brand is relevance.
To remain relevant, your brand must continuously innovate new value that inspires people. This doesn’t mean inventing a new thing, but rather a new meaning.
Eventually, when you do follow-up with new logos, taglines, packaging, and digital marketing tactics and communications, customers won’t be skeptical and more likely to share your marketing message for you because they have emotionally bought into your vision rather than merely buying your product.
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