WHAT KEEPS YOUR BRAND FROM BLOOMING?
Years ago, I had an interview at the newly opened New York office of the Fallon ad agency, whose work I always admired. The person heading the strategy department asked me, “Why do you love Fallon so much?
I remember promptly saying “Fallon makes people love brands through its extraordinary creative work.” He smiled and said, “Yes, that may be true. But people don’t have to love a brand to buy it.”
He had just given me a marketing lesson that I have never forgotten. Indeed, the fact that people have a negative perception of a brand does not necessarily mean they will not buy it. After all, purchasing behavior is shaped by many different factors, not just brand image. (brand preference vs. purchasing preference)
Strong brands are those that perform well across the dimensions that matter: image, purchase preference, loyalty, and advocacy. To solve a problem facing your brand or business — and, as I pointed out above, that problem does not always reveal itself through declining sales — we need to go through a three-step process: Define the problem; Define the solution; Put the solution into action.
Defining the problem, however, is only possible by taking a close and rigorous look at the ecosystem of the business and the brand. We call this process "Brand Audit".
When I worked at JWT (once existed before mega-mergers), this process was referred to as "Total Branding". In essence, it was the process through which we defined the brand strategy.
The delicate part of this process is being able to identify and focus on what truly matters within the complex web of information gathered through research. And the most critical factor here— the one that can ultimately make the difference — is the human judgment behind the process: the ability to evaluate, interpret, reason, intuit, and draw on experience.
Yes, the age of AI may be giving us the opportunity to become more democratic and productive from a creative standpoint. But is that enough to guarantee success?
A recent study conducted among some of the world’s leading marketing professionals, TikTok for Business Europe, reveals that the skill most often perceived as lacking within marketing teams today is strategy development.
Before publishing any content, you should be asking yourself one fundamental question: "Is this content aligned with our brand strategy?".
Brand strategy, above all, reveals what your brand truly means at its core. Its role is to define that underlying meaning and articulate it in the right wordings that would resonate with customers, employees, managers, founders, etc.
It does not make you better, but the only; which matters the most in an over-crowded, fiercely competitive marketplace that suffers from the risk of sameness and mediocrity of products. If this work is not done properly, every creative execution, every piece of communication, every marketing initiative will ultimately be inefficient.