Showing posts with label branding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label branding. Show all posts

Thursday, 27 August 2020

BRANDS CANNOT BE ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE

It was once said that a brand could only be one of three things – better, different or cheaper. That said, a brand can also be ‘new’, which is helpful but, of course, only temporary.  In the service economy ‘faster’ can also be brand positioning. Lastly, if a brand fits into none of these categories it could be considered “doomed.”

 

Admittedly this seems overly simplistic. But for every contested brand category, the dominant brands clearly fits into this classification.  Take airlines for example. Emirates and Virgin are positioned as better. Spirit and West Jet are cheaper and Southwest is different. 

 

As demonstrated in the adjacent Venn diagram, brand positioning can overlap. There are indeed well crafted power brands that occupy two circles. As consumers, it takes us minimally two planes of improvement in order to choose a particular brand or business for its value proposition. Think Tesla, which many see as both better and different. Or, Old Navy, which may be seen by many as both cheaper and different.  While certainly possible, there are few examples of better and cheaper.

 

What is impossible is to occupy all three circles simultaneously. Moreover, why would a brand want to be all three?  If, for example, your brand is perceived as both better and different you can charge a premium price so it would be foolish to throw away this well-earned margin by also claiming to be cheaper.  Let us also agree that (in most cases) “cheaper” positioning is a ‘race to the bottom’ with increasing commoditization and diminishing returns. 

 

“Better” might entail a high level of expectations surrounding design as it relates to your product. It might also represent a superior service professional who is providing the direct client interface. It could mean that it’s the “full service,” highest value package to all customers and that you drop the lower-range product offerings. It could factor in a seamless user experience in your app, or perhaps even a customization level that was previously unavailable.

 

Figure out what “better” means to you, as well as to the customers you serve – because this will mean different things to different people.  Your answer just has to arrive at the fact that it’s far superior to your current version, your competitors, and to the status quo.  This, if you’d like to change any sort of consumer behavior by offering a better option.

 

In today's world the pace of innovation, change and growth have gotten so much faster, that even if you checked all three boxes (of, faster, better, and cheaper) these are no longer sufficient to guarantee success in the on-demand economy.  Especially as new D2C brands are shaking up the landscape.

 

No matter which position you choose– figure out what your brand is, internalize it, and then stick with that plan to continuously surprise and delight your clients. Ultimately, while you may not be able to dictate brand positioning to your potential customers you can still influence your audiences with a strategic brand narrative to mold their opinion over time.  Need some help crafting you perfect positioning?  We can help

 

Wednesday, 9 October 2019

MEDIA 2025 | THE CONNECTED SOCIETY


Today, the term "media" can mean different things to different people. Ultimately, however, media is mass communication regarded collectively. Media today can be the message, the medium, or the messenger; and to complicate things, the lines between them are becoming very blurry. 



Social Media is participatory and connected. One might argue that once all media is participatory and connected that the term 'social' is redundant. Media is simply media. The future of social media, therefore, is a discussion on the future of media itself. To that end, social will just be folded into the broader marketing discipline.



Social Media today is focused on driving real-time engagement, (unedited and unfiltered) live streaming video, Virtual Reality (VR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Internet of Things (IoT), social commerce, mobile wallets, metadata, search/visibility, data-driven decisions, content marketing and mobile devices. 



Moving into 2019, more and more users are using messenger apps (e.g. Facebook Messenger, Slack, and WhatsApp) but there's still a lot of growing happening for social networks. Social platforms, social customs, and communication standards are all in a constant process of evolution.



Transparency is the new black, and there is a clear shift from talking at the world to making the world talk. To wit, most branded content in the next years will come from consumers, and user-generated content will far exceed branded content. The next wave of media apps will help filter the clutter. 



Ultimately, everything that can be connected to the Internet will be (i.e. homes, humans/ wearable tech, TVs, cars, jet engines, locomotives, lights, appliances, etc.) Everything from cars to coffee cups will be connected to the Internet by 2025.

That said, people will care increasingly more about culture than products. 



MOVING AHEAD

The future of media is inextricably linked to technology. The promise of technology was always to improve the way people live and to make our lives simpler and easier. Around the world, people are utilising technology to create new communities, engage across boundaries, make the world more inclusive, and change the way we interact. This transformation is happening everywhere and in every culture, country, and industry. 



Integrated mobile devices like Google Glass and the Apple Watch are already taking major steps to eliminate the gap between "technology" and "life." What is clear is that we have quickly evolved from the age of industrialisation to the connected society. 



The connected society transforms everything. Information and communications technology (ICT) and big data are also fuelling the rise of a new economy in which new market actors – commercial, "indiepreneurial," and crowd-sourced – are empowered with new models of production and exchange, as well as automated, frictionless and highly personalised consumption. 



In this new economy, consumers become curators rather than receivers, products give way to services, and consumers adopt more and more complex roles as citizens, users, co-creators, specialists, and actors. Collaboration, crowdfunding, crafting and sharing are just some of the hallmarks of the modern, involved consumer. 



The connected society encourages a rise of meritocracy and the formation of a creative elite. Within this order, merit is increasingly defined by a new set of emerging values, such as knowledge, transparency, fairness, quality of experience, authenticity, sociality, healthiness, and simplicity. The ability to make informed choices, to a very large extent, will drive the consumers of the connected society. 



Fast-forward to the future, and we should see global media usage continue on its upward trajectory. By 2020, eMarketer projects that 2.44 billion of the world's population will be on connected networks. Media usage will be ubiquitous, seamless, and integrated into our daily lives in a multitude of ways. 



The ways we both input and observe media will also shift. Holographic displays will be shifting into the mainstream and keyboards on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones will become increasingly irrelevant, as interactions on what was once called social media will largely be voice-controlled. 



Driven by continued advancements in technology and rapid rollouts of commercial products, the future will be shaped by an information ecosystem that's increasingly more intuitive, anticipatory, transparent and personalised. Some very fundamental human activities like learning, thinking, working, and being "present" with others will be transformed by these changes. 



Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing will also play an integral role in shaping the future. Over time, the computer itself - whatever its form factor - will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day. Your phone, for example, will proactively bring up the right documents, schedule and map your meetings, let people know if you are late, suggest responses to messages, handle your payments and expenses. Technology won't just serve as tools for you, but they'll even serve as your stand-in in some cases.



Even today, Google scans your texts; understands the context and supplies readymade human-like responses for you ("Cute dog!" and "That's good!"). Not just when you were sent words, but even when you were sent pictures. Just imagine how much more dynamic and robust these technologies will become.



As a result, Social Media will become far more specialised and personalised to the actual needs and interests of each audience member. By 2025, social media sites will have adapted their platform for each user so that it would appear by today's standards that people live in their own universe. 



Social Media platforms will compete to maintain their share of the audience. Users of social media will gradually only expose themselves to news that affects them. Future platforms will be even more equipped to predict exactly what users will need to keep them engaged. 



Social media platforms will connect advertisers with potential customers by using multiple regression analysis and correlation analysis. When a consumer behaves differently than the formula predicted, the formula will automatically adjust. The connected society will know when you are tired, hungry, thirsty, stressed, or even low on Vitamin C. 



In the connected society envisioned in 2025 people will increasingly seek out a sense of belonging and social media platforms will provide "fireplaces" for people to gather around and topics for interaction, conversation and relationship building. Products, services and brands will be instilled with meaning more through the crowd than through branding and marketing efforts. 



Products and services infused with a social component of some kind can more easily move from product/service status to an experience. For the 2025 consumer, the experience will always be more original than the actual product or service.



This means that consumers will be looking for original experiences delivered by humans and which are embedded in a social context, rather than searching for specific products and services. Subsequently, value will be grafted onto products and services by how a network of users – or a network of peers – decides to use them.



Human beings are inherently social animals, and we are ultimately at the centre of our own universes. On average, people spend 60 percent of conversations talking about themselves—and this figure jumps to 80 per cent when communicating via social media platforms.



As a result, our social media platforms will increasingly place us at the centre of our unique, personalised ecosystem. In 2025, parents won't be complaining about their children spending too much time texting. Rather, they'll be complaining that their son or daughter seldom steps out of their own self-made virtual-world.



Social Media in 2025 will be a ubiquitous enabler, producer and facilitator that shift the consumer from receiver to curator. This is a natural evolution to a sharing economy and change in values, preferring services and access to function, rather than ownership. This means that businesses will have to engage and collaborate with users in different roles (rather than merely as passive consumers.)



Social Media will continue to create and connect new communities, engage across boundaries, make the world more inclusive and fundamentally change the way we live. As William Gibson espoused, (Neuromancer, 1984) this brave new world will be "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation."


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Monday, 7 October 2019

THE CONSUMER-CENTRIC BRAND EXPERIENCE


Everyone understands that the experience needs to be consumer-centric’ today. Experience is any sensory, mental or emotional interaction with a brand. It means the product, service, content and ads. Creating and distributing these experiences efficiently are the key to building an emotional relationship with consumers.

Probably the simplest, most useful way to think about brands is as mental associative networks, a psychological construct that goes back to Aristotle. Each encounter with a brand potentially adds to and changes a complex associative network in our brains, linking the brand to other images, experiences, and feelings.

For any brand experience to become part of the right associative network, the brand must be easily and uniquely identified - so distinctive assets such as logos, characters, colours, slogans, or tunes are of central importance in making brand experiences effective.
It helps if the associations are ones we find mostly pleasant or attractive rather than repellent. But probably even more important is the number, range, and intensity of the associations, because this will increase the probability that the brand will come to mind in a wide range of contexts. This, at any rate, is my understanding of the theory of ‘mental availability’. What does such a theory imply for marketers?

Firstly, that scale is important; the more effective impressions you deliver to more people, the better. Big brands are bigger because more people buy them. Powerful communications of any sort will have little impact unless, through whatever means, they reach a mass audience. And because brands compete for mental availability, this must be proportional to what others are doing; also maintained through time, because otherwise the associations created tend to decay, or be supplanted.

Secondly, all impressions must be fluently linked to the brand - consistency in the use of distinctive assets or ‘fluent devices’ is essential.

Thirdly, apart from consistency in the use of distinctive assets, it is more important for brand impressions to be interesting, appealing, or in some way stimulating, than to be constrained by adherence to a narrow script. Brands could learn from entertainers who flourish by continually surprising their audiences with something new and unexpected, sometimes even controversially (think David Bowie, Madonna, Mylie Cyrus).

All this can be done through paid-for advertising, which has the disadvantage of high cost, but still offers high control and guaranteed scale. It can be done through the delivery of the service itself, whether personal or digitised (Amazon’s success is partly due to the ease and reliability of its user interface, and increasingly to the ubiquity of its name and logo in our lives).

But service is often more fallible in its delivery and a bad experience of service more damaging than a boring advert. It can be done through packaging, and through product design, as Apple has shown. And it can be done by anyone who knows how to create news, even if this involves being controversial – a core skill, like it or not, of Donald Trump.


None of this is really new. It’s how brands and celebrities have grown and prospered since the time of Phineas T. Barnum. Only the range of available media continually increases, and the complexity of the synergy between them. But even a century ago there was plenty of scope for creating ‘brand experiences’ across multiple channels, as William Hesketh Lever demonstrated:

In the 1890s he published the Sunlight Year book, an annual reference work and guide to life which was given away free to schools and to users who saved enough Sunlight cartons – something we should now grandly call ‘content’. In 1887 Lever Bros. announced that it would give £2000 to the ‘religious and benevolent institution’ that most customers voted for (votes on the back of a Sunlight box only) – what we should now call ‘Cause Related Marketing’.

When the RNLI won, he presented them with a lifeboat called ‘Sunlight Number One’, and then commissioned engravings of it in a choppy sea, the name plate highly prominent, which he sent to the Illustrated London News. [from The Anatomy of Humbug]

This year’s Cannes Gold Lion for ‘brand experience and activation’ went to Microsoft’s Xbox for designing a console that could be used by the disabled. The ‘Changing the game’ campaign apparently achieved ‘$35m of earned media’ and Xbox’s ‘social voice increased by 246%’. All good publicity for the brand:  but after all, the most significant marketing element of the campaign was a chunk of good old, paid-for, two minute mass TV advertising, aired during Superbowl (estimated cost: $21m) - not so different, perhaps, from Mr Lever publicising his lifeboat.  

Is ‘brand experience’ a helpful concept to explain what’s been done here? Or is it in danger of becoming a fashionable buzzword at the intersection of technological innovation, ‘brand purpose’, and that perennial blob of vagueness, ‘creativity’?

But perhaps brand experience can still offer us a useful new perspective,-especially for twenty-first century brands which, it’s often said, somehow play by different rules – or at least use different techniques. To explore this thought, I reflected further on a brand already mentioned – Amazon.

My own ‘brand experience’ of Amazon comes in many, various forms. Let me adopt the format of Jeremy’s imaginary brand: I buy a new printer, and my favourite brand of shaving soap, through Amazon: the experience is simple and seamless and the products arrive next day. But the experience is also annoying –pop-ups push me to subscribe to Amazon Prime, or to donate to charity. The website is functional but not attractive, not even completely user-friendly, though it is familiar.

Amazon boxes arrive at my home, branded with the smile logo; later, I take them to the dump for recycling. I notice that the people who deliver them often seem harassed and under pressure. I read about how such people are exploited by today’s ‘gig economy’. I read about how Amazon are still planning to deliver by drone, and think this a terrible idea. I hear a lot about how Amazon don’t pay enough taxes. Some of my friends refuse to use Amazon on principle, but I still do because it’s so easy and reliable. When they send the wrong thing, it can be quickly sorted out on the phone – usually a refund with no questions asked....

This could go on for some time – Amazon is ubiquitous and a part of my daily life. No one else’s experience will be identical to mine, though I imagine many will be similar. Yet the experiences are very mixed. Practical, functional benefits are mixed with much that makes me uneasy.

Oddly, I haven’t even mentioned how Amazon ‘personalises’ my experience by recommending things. Perhaps because it’s now so normal I take it for granted; perhaps because the recommendations are seldom very interesting, and sometimes bizarre. Yet it’s all part of the brand experience.

Amazon, as a brand, is enormously successful to the extent that it almost constitutes a monopoly – not in the sense of an illegal cartel, but simply that its scale and efficiency mean it has no serious rivals (outside China). But even if such rivals exist, I as a consumer never think about them.

So Amazon’s dominance can once again be reduced, ultimately, to two factors: mental and physical availability. I think automatically of Amazon; I can instantly and easily buy through it. And nothing else comes close. A hundred years ago, in the United States, something similar could have been said of the Sears Roebuck Catalogue.

Jeff Bezos never assumed that his platform would dominate the market; he knew he had to work at it. Interviewed in 1997, he said, “there's nothing about our model that can't be copied over time. But you know, McDonald's got copied. And it still built a huge, multibillion-dollar company. A lot of it comes down to the brand name. Brand names are more important on-line than they are in the physical world.”

This is refreshingly old school. Bezos didn’t talk about brand values, or brand purpose, or indeed brand experience. He talked about the brand name, the trademark, the ownable thing that distinguishes Amazon from anyone else trying to offer something similar. Because frankly, any business aiming to compete with Amazon would almost certainly have values, purpose, and a set of experiences that would be pretty similar to Amazon’s.

Then he says: Brand names are more important online. OK, this was 1997 and Google was still a research project at Stanford, but he was right then and he’s right today: the most important search engine is still the one in your head, even though most digitally oriented marketers seem to think targeting and getting clicks are all that matters. 

For me, the most telling chart in the 2018 AA Case study that won Gold in the IPA Effectiveness Awards showed how Google searches for ‘AA’ collapsed over a very few years, as the brand put all its money into short term activation. All their measures of marketing efficiency looked brilliant, but almost too late they realised their mental availability was vanishing, and they were haemorrhaging customers. Fortunately, they were able to recover by reverting to heavy TV advertising with a strong emotional appeal and a distinctive asset – a singing baby. It’s an old trick but it still works!

Yes, brands need to be aware of their many ‘touch points’ but they must also accept that they can’t control them all. That need not matter, as long as they focus on the ones that they can. Amazon flourishes despite bad PR; the AA averted disaster by following classic principles of brand advertising. But if ‘brand experience’ becomes a fashionable buzzword that distracts marketers from such fundamental truths, it risks doing more harm than good.


Monday, 15 July 2019

BRANDED BREAKTHROUGH - NOT ALL ADS ARE CREATED EQUAL

The best ads are enjoyable. They educate, entertaining, and inspire. They are memorable, capture our attention, and connect with the consumer on an emotional level. They make the brand central to the story.



That said, in 2018 analysis of the Adtrack database from Kantar shows that in 2018, 77% of ads failed to resonate with consumers. Incidentally, the categories which consistently had the highest recall are carbonated soft drinks, fast food (QSR) restaurants, CPG, banking, and alcoholic beverages. What’s clear is that, while capturing the consumers attention is imperative, it must result in brand recall. 



To ensure ads are optimized, focus on the following:

1.     ATTENTION

2.     BRAND LINK

3.     MESSAGE



ATTENTION

Consumers do not remember the expected. Therefore, educate, entertain and/or inspire -- but defy convention. Do something different. Take a risk. Most brand managers shy away from this path because it has higher-risk. That said, with higher-risk there is higher reward.



A timeless example of this was DDB’s (1959) Volkswagen campaign “Think Small”. At the time there was a notable trend towards larger cars in the United States and “thinking big”.  Bigger was definitely seen as better. We have previously discussed truth and authenticity as brand attributes, but this campaign is an excellent example. This campaign was in effect, the exact opposite of how cars were marketed at the time.



Speaking of entertaining, another effective technique to gain attention is to provide (someone) with amusement or enjoyment. It’s why consumers engage media in the first place. So, make your ad part of the entertainment. Incidentally, humour is not the only way to connect with consumers. A great, inspired example is Canadian Tire’s “We All Play for Canada” Olympic (CSR) campaign’s “First Skate” ad which tells the touching story of a father fashioning a sledge for his paraplegic son.



Brands need to remain ‘top of mind’ - so find ways to drive popular culture. Budweiser’s ‘Wassup’ commercial is an excellent example. Originally premiered during NBC’s Monday Night Football in December 1999, the campaign became a pop-culture catchphrase and won the Cannes Grand Prix award and was inducted into the CLIO Hall of Fame.



The ad creative also needs to be matched to the appropriate media. If you knew, for example, that 78% of all engagement with the video you created would be via mobile on Facebook, would you not optimize the video for that channel?  Alternatively, if you knew your print ad would only be extended to billboards, would you not optimize for vehicles speeding by at 80 kms per hour? Of course you would.



You should also be thinking about virality. Specifically, what makes something sharable? There is a wealth of information available of the science of making things go viral and even a great TED Talk by BuzzFeed's Publisher, Dao Nguyen. As an aside, there are a number of (largely unconscious) variables involved in what makes brands stand the test of time, which we have previously discussed at length.



BRAND LINK

The highest brand link comes from connecting your brand closer to the climax of the ad’s story. By brand we ideally mean USP or brand truth.  So, don’t just make your brand central to the story - make it the driver of the story itself. 



Another useful way to tell a compelling human-interest story is to connect with your target audience using a meaningful consumer insight or find an emotional story to demonstrate how the consumer engages your brand.



But arguably, the single most important element in telling your brand story is to amplify what sets you apart from everyone else. Call it whatever you like - USP or brand truth, consumer benefit (or insert the buzzword du jour.) The point is to identify what makes your brand unique and different and weave that into your story (with a strong visual cue.)



MESSAGE

You probably already know this, however, when brand equity is measured it is based upon what the consumer believes (not what you want them to believe.) To this end, communication is not what is said, rather it is what is heard. The best brand communication therefore occurs when you focus on the one benefit that moves consumers.  It’s about telling the story behind your brand purpose.



Ask yourself, if you could tell the consumer one thing about your product or service - what would it be?  Remember also that the more messages you put into your ad, the less likely it is that consumers recall your primary message. *Millward-Brown data demonstrates that when an ad has more than one message the consumer recall drops by 37%.



Ultimately, try to move from a functional to an emotional benefit. Why? Because triggering an emotional reaction, whether joy, sadness, humour or sympathy, should be the goal of any creative.

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Saturday, 6 April 2019

The Changing Face of Wealth Management Brands

As we are sure you’re aware, consumers have become increasingly connected and data-driven. They use the Internet to research and buy products and services, and their use of social media is disrupting patterns of loyalty, creating new forms of commercial communities and recreating the purchasing process.

Companies can no longer focus on the “where” and the “who” of selling. They are unable to continue only targeting “emerging markets” or certain demographic groups. Instead, they must pay new attention to the “how” and the “why” of consumption. The always-on, networked consumer is the new “how”, and the independent, cooperative and socially conscientious consumer is the “why”.

It is, therefore, imperative that companies invest in capabilities that help them better understand and act on these changes. That includes embracing advanced analytic tools that interpret rapidly changing data and assist in identifying opportunities.

Businesses should also consider adopting more agile business models and partnerships to improve their strategic and operational responsiveness. These steps can help them, for example, to deliver more tailored services and to shift from traditional products to the more experiential offerings that consumers expect today.

We are in a moment of unprecedented experimentation. Consumers are far more open to test-driving new brands, products, and experiences today (and the phenomenon is global.) This context is redefining how consumers trust brands. With near-infinite access to resources, consumers no longer rely on centralised institutions for direction.

Moreover, consumers are willing to try almost anything when their networks are also experimenting and when a brand’s reputation stays intact. This means that a brand’s illustrious history is less critical to cultivating consumer trust than its ability to feel personal. But a willingness to experiment can all too quickly morph into a state of mindless distraction where messages don’t register with consumers and the barrier for creating powerful emotional memories rises.

Companies that bank on consumers’ “almost infinite appetite for distractions” (credit to Aldous Huxley) are only successful when they also offer the remedy of product curation that eases consumer decision stress. This is the modern tug of war between consumers’ pursuit of novelty and craving for familiarity.

FINANCIAL SERVICES + WEALTH MANAGEMENT
The wealth management industry is in the midst of significant change. As the industry is re-shaped, one positive outcome will be that more people will have access to a greater quantity and quality of investment strategies and advice that was traditionally reserved for high net worth individuals. Two drivers that will accelerate this democratisation of wealth management are a shift in investor preferences and advances in technology.

The younger generation of investors typically likes digital solutions, demands convenience and desires transparency and control over their finances. Those preferences are also increasingly shared by other demographic groups. The user experience they desire is shaped by their experiences with companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon. The result is a growing need for wealth management offerings that deliver tailored investment advice, are accessible through multiple channels, allow for social/peer input, and are intuitive to use.

Technology has already disrupted and transformed industries such as transportation, travel and many others. It has already had an impact on wealth management and will continue to transform it. Access to more data, the ability to quickly convert that information into useful models and algorithms, and applying that intelligence to decision making enables science to play a more significant role in investing.

By using technology to simplify asset allocation, facilitate exchange-traded funds (ETF) or mutual fund research and selection, and deliver other common investment activities, costs can be reduced and services made more affordable.

Another significant trend is that as smartphones and tablets become ubiquitous, clients expect to be able to monitor their portfolio, undertake research, transact and get advice – all in real time and on-the-go.

The demand for mobile app services is so acute that 80% of high net worth individuals under 40 years of age indicated they would leave their wealth management firm if it fails to provide an integrated-channel experience. It’s clear that modern technology allows for fiduciary advice to be delivered affordably, at scale, in real-time and with exceptional client experience.

Companies such as Wealthfront, WealthSimple, Nutmeg, and Betterment have successfully raised millions of dollars and used that funding to take their technology-driven solutions to market and rapidly build significant asset bases. Traditional players such as Schwab and Vanguard have responded with their own advisory tools.

Whether you believe the startups or the traditional players will lead the industry into the future, investors will still want exceptional user experiences and advanced security across all channels. Solutions such as mobile app development platforms can be strategically used to ensure design and back-end services of mobile wealth management apps meet all of the user experience, security, regulatory and compliance requirements for both investors and asset managers. 

It is the convergence of demographic trends and advances in technology that provide a unique opportunity for previously underserved market segments to benefit from the democratisation of wealth management. For those who could not previously afford a personal financial advisor or weren’t as comfortable with human-based advice, there are now more options to achieve their financial and life goals.

Some so-called “Robo advisors” or automated advisors are already gaining traction and attracting new clients, but future innovations in service are certain to provide additional opportunities to reach more wealth bands. There will always be a place for human-based advice to complement science-based advice, but it’s exciting that high-quality advice, regardless of the form it takes, will be available to more and more people.

It’s clear that there are forces and innovations changing how consumers invest. As a result, established wealth management providers have worked hard to extend their products and services to customers who've moved onto digital touch points. They are evolving product-focused approaches to digital-centric strategies and services designed around customer outcomes.

This new paradigm earns loyalty by delivering consistently excellent experiences across flexible and extensible platforms, enhanced by third-party apps and integrated channels.

Digital technologies empower customers like never before, transforming their relationships with wealth management providers and their use of financial products and services. The speed that customers embrace new touch points and service models is only getting faster, blindsiding traditional companies that still struggle to adapt.

According to Forrester Research, “Superior service and low or no fees are more important to customers than specific banking products themselves. To acquire and retain customers in a competitive field, wealth management companies must build trustworthiness and invest in support capabilities to ensure that they remain relevant in customers' lives.“

As wealth management products and services move into the consumer arena, they will need to create brand identities with an emotional bond between the consumer and the product. Inadvertently, these identities will, therefore, shift to the social meanings consumers have attached to the wealth management product or service.

THE CONSUMERS PAIN POINTS
Most of us seem to understand the inherent value of saving for our future. However, wealth management seems like something for people with more (notable) disposable income. None of us ever seem to have enough to save for our future and there is always something unexpected to pay for.

What’s clear is that people have considerable anxiety about managing their finances.  Moreover, the fact that wealth management products and services are largely considered to be complex, complicated, intimidating and confusing – and you begin to see the challenge.

POSITIONING
As a result of the evolving landscape and consumer, the trend is to reinforce positioning as a Wealth Management brand that understands clients’ struggles and can help them relax with its simple solutions. This while showing the positive side of investing, thus, shifting the consumer from feelings of financial anxiety to demonstrating a path to success.

By partnering with the brand, consumers are optimistic because they have found a path to financial success, stability, and peace of mind.  Savvy brands, therefore, need to cut through the noise and focus on the broader human lifestyle experience while empowering people to have control over their finances. They can do this by showing they have products that solve the anxieties of consumers who value clarity, simplicity, flexibility, and accessibility. The importance of bringing a more human perspective to the world of finance cannot be overstated.

Resources


 

Thursday, 14 December 2017

Brand Strategy: Politics And Purpose

Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner advert was a car wreck, but its social conscience insight was sound. That insight is that lifestyles are the central focus of brands today.  Ergo, politics and lifestyles can no longer be treated separately. 

So, what’s a brand to do in an increasingly polarising world?  Stay neutral and risk becoming irrelevant or wade into the debate and risk a backlash? 

Nowhere is this division more evident than in the US, under Donald Trump’s presidency. Just a sniff of partisanship could rouse pitch-fork-wielding masses, as numerous brands have discovered. Also, any brand hoping to lay low until better times arrive will be waiting a long time for three reasons. The first is social media, which is amplifying people’s fears and entrenching their beliefs. The second is the lack of accountability among those in power and the third is rising inequality across the world.

The fact that brands are more comfortable getting active politically today is an extension of a larger trend to use morality as marketing. Brands today are taking that to another level, tapping into our sense of what’s right and wrong.

By advocating for causes and incorporating them into their business models, brands allow consumers to vote with their wallets on the kind of world they want to support. These feel-good purchases of self-expression have earned a catchy name: cause-sumption.

These are admittedly heavy subjects for a soap brand or sportswear label to contend with. But those that have spent the past decade differentiating themselves through purpose and cultural relevance can’t go back to saying: ‘It’s all about the product.’ So, what can they do?

Increasingly there is a responsibility to make a social stand on the things that your consumer base cares about. The brands that got to grips with the new political lifestyle vocabulary most successfully were those that picked specific social issues – as opposed to overtly political ones – tied to their stated purpose.

None of this guarantees an easy ride, but an honest position that reinforces a brand’s purpose can be very profitable. In the first ten years of Dove’s Real Beauty campaign, from 2004-2014, sales reportedly grew from $2.5 billion to $4 billion, and the award-winning “Evolution” ad spot earned an estimated $150 million worth of media time.

Ultimately, the pros of cause-sumption marketing often outweigh the cons, making for memorable brand messages that connect well with consumers. And the revenue speaks for itself.

THE BIG PICTURE
Without a doubt, a brand that takes a political stance risks irritating consumers who disagree. But it’s also an opportunity to stand up for values that are consistent with the brand’s messaging, earning further respect from consumers who are increasingly looking to vote with their wallets.

Just remember - if you don’t stand for something, you stand for nothing. Brands should, therefore, be politically active to the extent that doing so is consistent with their values, messaging, and worldview. The key is knowing when to speak up and when to stay silent - and there is a fine line between political activism that feels meaningful versus selfish.

Once you determine why consumers and employees feel an affinity for your brand, it will become clear whether or not that affinity is relevant to the political issue at hand.