Who am I?

The brand iden­ti­ty no longer on­ly con­sists of the lo­go and the iden­ti­ty sys­tem. With new and dif­fer­ent touch­points, a brand can not on­ly be ex­pe­ri­enced vi­su­al­ly, but with all sens­es. Con­se­quent­ly, a brand faces new chal­lenges when it comes to pre­sent­ing their iden­ti­ty  to the out­side world.

Back to Basics

Un­til re­cent­ly, it was dig­i­tal­iza­tion and so­cial me­dia that changed mar­ket­ing and brand­ing. Then big da­ta came along. Now and in the fu­ture, how­ev­er, one thing will be key: a deep un­der­stand­ing of how the consumer’s brain func­tions. Neu­ro­sci­en­tists, psy­chol­o­gists, and be­hav­ioral econ­o­mists are work­ing hard to un­der­stand how the sub­con­scious im­pacts de­ci­sions. Fur­ther, they want to find out why con­sumers build up loy­al­ty to cer­tain brands.  With grow­ing at­ten­tion on this top­ic, brands in the fu­ture will be built in a way that they will align in per­fect har­mo­ny with the consumer’s brain.

Millennials in power- but don’t call us that

The tech-affine mil­len­ni­als will ac­count for the ma­jor­i­ty of pur­chas­ing pow­er in the com­ing years, which calls for a re­struc­tured way of think­ing. Ac­cord­ing to the Glob­al Web In­dex, 4 out of 10 mil­len­ni­als use so­cial me­dia to con­sume en­ter­tain­ing con­tent. Al­so, they main­ly con­sume con­tent on the move, which makes mo­bile ex­pe­ri­ences im­por­tant. In ad­di­tion to the mo­bile-first ap­proach, au­then­tic­i­ty above all is what ties a mil­len­ni­al to a brand. Iron­i­cal­ly, mil­len­ni­als do not like to be gen­er­al­ized as a gen­er­a­tion. At the mo­ment, many brands make the mis­take of in­clud­ing clichés about mil­len­ni­als in cam­paigns. An hon­est and trans­par­ent brand that stands by its prin­ci­ples is much more ap­pre­ci­at­ed.

Social Media and the Cancelled Culture

Soon you will be able to rate every­thing and every­one on­line. Does this give the cus­tomer the ul­ti­mate con­trol and can he/she, there­fore, lead the ac­tions of a com­pa­ny?

Con­sumers de­mand trans­paren­cy on so­cial me­dia. Af­ter a faux pas, com­pa­nies can quick­ly be “can­celed” by strong opin­ions on so­cial me­dia, which re­sem­bles some­what of a dig­i­tal death­blow. That is why a brand needs to show that it is mean­ing­ful. Ac­tions should be tak­en for the com­mon good and not for turnover. At least, that’s how it’s sup­posed to seem. TOMS Shoes are a great ex­am­ple of pur­pose dri­ven mar­ket­ing: for each pair sold, they do­nate an­oth­er pair of shoes to chil­dren in need. This works be­cause on the one hand the con­sumer has the feel­ing that the brand is trust­wor­thy and on the oth­er hand that he/she has done a good deed as well. This pur­pose dri­ven mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy will be­come more and more rel­e­vant with the in­creas­ing at­ten­tion to sus­tain­able con­sump­tion, leav­ing brands with­out sus­tain­able goals and ac­tions be­hind.

Hu­mans are made to make con­nec­tions. If a con­sumer can­not make the con­nec­tion be­tween the val­ues and the per­for­mance of the brand, he/she is lost. For this rea­son, it is im­por­tant to at­tach great im­por­tance to show­ing this con­nec­tion clear­ly and dis­tinct­ly to the out­side world. This needs to be done through the brand iden­ti­ty, while si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly try­ing to en­gage with new tar­get groups and main­tain­ing au­then­tic­i­ty.

For more in­sights and re­al­ized projects in this area, vis­it  http://www.brandsoul.ch/?lang=en