There are certainly good times to consider diversifying your brand, but equally there are times when such a strategy should be avoided. Here are three situations when your brand shouldn’t go there.

A weak brand shouldn’t attempt to diversify. It’s tempting to think that changing sector and/or shifting into another part of the same sector is a great way to bolster a brand that is struggling. Offer current customers new places to experience the brand, the thinking goes, and collect new customers along the way. Unfortunately, the effect is often quite the opposite. The brand becomes more confusing to everyone and what strength the brand does have is distracted through venturing into unfamiliar territory. If you are going to expand your brand’s presence, always do so from a position of strength and carry that through into your broader presence. Otherwise your initiative will be seen for what it really is – revenue hunting.

If you are going to diversify, don’t simply bring a variation of the same idea to the new market. By doing this, you are, in effect, simply adding to the noise. If you cannot enter a market with a specific and distinctive point of view – one that draws on what you’ve achieved as a brand to change what consumers can expect in a sector – chances are you have no place being there. Recently, Chipotle decided to expand into the burger sector with a offer called Tasty Made. The problem is that, according to social media, they have simply brought another variation of a well established product to a well established market. There are some product variations to be sure, but what seems to be lacking is a fundamentally different philosophy and approach that would enable the brand to add value in a sector where value is often defined by volume.

Finally, if you are going to diversify, don’t expand into an area where growth is stalled, either because the market itself is saturated or because consumer interest is waning. In the case of Tasty Made, for example, while fast food and fast casual are significant players in the restaurant sector, and hamburgers account for over 30% of industry sales, this is still a very full market, with high quality competitors and low compound growth forecast over the medium term.

Standing out in such a market is always going to be difficult. The critical judgment for any brand looking to expand into new sectors, therefore, is not only that it can apply its philosophy and skills to that sector, but that the sector has tangible demand and untapped potential.

Diversification presents paradoxical pressures. On the one hand, brands have no choice but to seek out and explore new territories in their bid to stay relevant and interesting. Brands that don’t do this will only ever find themselves in situations where they are defending or receding, and they will be confined to the dynamics and growth patterns of the sector that they have aligned themselves with. At the same time, when they do diversify, brands must be very careful to do so within the competitive capabilities of the brand itself and at a pace that the wider business can absorb and add value to.

I have one question when marketing teams tell me they want to take their brand into new places, and it’s a question I apply not just to new sectors but also to new regions: Why will you be welcomed? Because, in the end, successful diversification of product or footprint is not about where your brand wants to participate, where it feels it is entitled to make a profit because others are doing so, or where it wishes to move because it’s run out of ideas where it is. Diversification is about the response your new presence will generate. If you’re not acting to excite buyers, you have no place being there.

Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

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Thanks to everyone who participated in my recent survey to determine which brand should be named Great Brand of the Year.  The results are in!  You voted as follows:

#3 — Amazon (which received 11.8% of the votes)

#2 — Netflix (12.6%)

#1 — drumroll please…Apple (13.4%)

Although the survey is unscientific and Apple beat out its closest rivals by just a percentage point or two, there’s good reason for Apple to be named the Great Brand of the Year.  Among Apple’s accolades and achievements are:

• Around $635 billion in market cap — the largest of any U.S. company
• The highest sales per square foot of any retailer at $5,546, according to eMarketer
• #1 in Interbrand’s 2016 ranking of Best Global Brands, with $178 billion in brand value
• #1 in FutureBrand’s Index of Global Top 100 Companies
• #2 in Brand Z’s 2016 Most Powerful Brand list, with $229 billion in brand value**
• #5 Tenet’s list of 2016 Most Powerful Brands based on the CoreBrand Index
• #1 in Satmetrix’s Net Promoter Score for laptops and tablets and #2 for smartphones
• #1 in J.D. Power’s 2016 Smartwatch Device Satisfaction Report
• The winner in Boston Consulting Group Survey of America’s Favorite Brand
• The news Apple announced at its annual conference in September wasn’t as ground-breaking as in years past, but the new iPhone 7 has benefited from the talk-value of removing the headphone jack as well as Samsung’s debacle with its Galaxy Note 7
• And, just last week, it announced the first major overhaul to the MacBook Pro family in more than four years.

2017 holds the promise of being an even bigger year for Apple, as the iPhone reaches its 10 year anniversary and rumors of its “mixed reality” functionality abound.  For now, Apple is the winner of the 2016 Great Brand of the Year survey.

Everyone who voted and provided their email address was entered to win an autographed copy of my book What Great Brands Do and the winner is Ted Spencer (who voted for Airbnb) — congratulations!

Thanks again for participating!

related:

Apple’s Most Innovative Product Isn’t A Product At All

Brands to Watch in 2016

Vote for Great Brand of the Year

The post apple is the great brand of the year appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.

Reports of TV advertising’s death are greatly exaggerated. Addressable TV is the next step in mass marketing to consumers; here’s a look at what it means for finding the right audience,
measurability, and more.

Airtasker, Australia’s no.1 local services marketplace, is set to hit primetime TV with the launch of Like a Boss — its first major advertising campaign.

The campaign will launch on September 18 and will feature on Network Seven Sydney during the airing of the AFL Grand Final broadcast and the premiere of the new season of the X-Factor. Versions of the campaign will also run nationally across out of home (billboard advertising), online video, digital, and over social.

It serves as the Sydney-based startup’s first major advertising campaign, launching off the back of Seven West Media’s strategic investment in the company earlier this year.

“The phrase ‘Like a Boss’ is all about empowerment. Whether you’re looking for more flexibility or control in the way you work, or if you need a helping hand to get more done in life, Airtasker can help,” said Simon Reynolds, Airtasker VP Marketing.

“Our community members found a great feeling of accomplishment when using Airtasker, to the point where they just might break into dance. So we wanted to bring this to life in our first major marketing campaign.”

“This campaign marks a major shift in our approach. We’ve been relying on word of mouth for growth, but are now using our brand to move our growth beyond “in-the-know” early adopters, and into the mainstream,”

Airtasker CEO and co-founder Tim Fung said: “Our community members have been along for the ride with us since day one, particularly the growing number that use Airtasker as a main source of income.”

“With tens of thousands of Australians using Airtasker to earn money or get things done each month, we hope this campaign and the themes it covers resonates with all of them. And like us, they get a little laugh out of it too.”

The Like a Boss campaign was created by U Don’t Know Us (UDKU), a creative innovation agency that specialises in helping corporates innovate and startups compete at scale.

The agency, founded by ad agency and management consulting executives, has flown under the radar since their formation three years ago. This advertising push from Airtasker serves as their first formal public campaign.

“This is the first time we’ve been able to claim credit for our work,” UDKU partner and co-founder Colin Jowell said.

“To now, we’ve been working on projects like concept stores, prototypes and customer experience innovation strategy-hardly the kinds of things that our clients want to alert their competitors to in advance.”

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Client: Airtasker
Campaign: Like A Boss
Title: Cynthia & Derek

Agency: U Don’t Know Us (UDKU)
Managing Partner: U Don’t Know Us
Creative Director: U Don’t Know Us
Account Director: U Don’t Know Us
Agency Producer: U Don’t Know Us

Production Company: Goodoil
Director: Matt Kamen
Executive Producer: Sam Long
Producer: Michael Cody
DOP: Crighton Bone
Production Designer: Guy Treadgold
Editor: Dan Lee – The Butchery
Post Production: The Refinery
Sound: Rumble Studios

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); –ADVERTISEMENT–

At this year’s TEDWomen conference, we tried out some new ideas for accommodating attendees with small children. Beyond a lactation room, for instance, we offered a list of local, vetted caregiver services to call upon, a free livestream pass for caregivers, a free breast-milk shipping service, and a suite at a nearby hotel where attendees and caregivers with small children could gather and watch the livestream together.

We did not, however, reverse our grownups-only policy. That’s because, simply put, our attendees have been vocal about us maintaining it.

But in our attempt to accommodate all our audiences, we fell short: A newborn was turned away from TEDWomen last week, and the disappointed mother wondered how an organization like TED could leave her with so few options.

That disappointment touches a nerve here at TED. Many of us are parents, and there’s no denying that many of the moving ideas shared on stage last week — ones that demanded a healthier world for babies and their parents — prompt us to ask: How can TED do its part to set a new standard?

We haven’t figured this out yet, but we are trying — and listening. We’ve been in touch with parents from this event and others to help us take a hard look at how we can better support parents of babies and small children. We recognize the importance of getting this right. Stay tuned.

Just a few of the intriguing headlines involving members of the TED community this week:

The cascading effect of small lies. Tali Sharot is the senior author on a paper published in Nature Neuroscience that sheds light on the possible slippery-slope effect of telling small, self-serving lies. Using an fMRI scanning device to monitor the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with emotional response, the researchers found that when participants believed lying was to their benefit, “they were more inclined to dishonesty and their lies escalated over time,” reports The New York Times.  What’s more, as their lying progressed, the response in their amygdalas decreased — and the bigger the decrease, the bigger their next lie would be. The findings suggest that the brain becomes desensitized over time to the negative emotional effects of lying, but Sharot cautions that, while we know the decreased activity is related to lying, whether or not it’s related to a negative emotional reaction is still speculation. Fellow TEDster Dan Ariely is a co-author on the paper. (Watch Tali’s TED Talk and Dan’s TED Talk, and stay tuned for Ariely’s upcoming TED Book.)

What everyday objects tell us about inequality. An initiative of the nonprofit Gapminder, Dollar Street collects photographs of everyday objects from the richest to the poorest households around the world as a way to explore inequality. For the project, a team of photographers photographed up to 155 objects, everything from toothbrushes to toys, in 200 homes in nearly 50 countries, a list that continues to grow. The completely fascinating website, where you can  explore the collection of photographs, launched on October 18. The project is the brainchild of Anna Rosling Rönnlund, who co-founded Gapminder along with TEDsters Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling. (Watch Hans’ and Ola’s TED Talk or read the Ideas article about Dollar Street.)

Robots to the rescue. A joint training exercise between members of the Italian Coast Guard and a team led by TEDster Robin Murphy from Texas A&M’s Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) tested a robot-assisted search and rescue to help safeguard migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Africa to Italy. Lasting 3 days, the exercise tested EMILY, an unmanned surface vehicle that can drive to a group of people in distress and position itself so that the greatest number of people can grab on. The EMILY system was tested in January 2016 to help migrants crossing from Turkey to Greece, and two EMILYs are currently in use by the Hellenic Coast Guard and Hellenic Red Cross; the Hellenic Coast Guard credited CRASAR with recently saving over two dozen refugees trapped in high seas. This new exercise pinpointed differences between migration routes, as well as new ways for robots and humans to interact in the water. (Watch Robin’s TED Talk)

Better diagnostics for pathogens. Richard Baraniuk is the lead author on a study detailing a new diagnostic method that could help slow the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and mitigate infectious disease outbreaks by allowing faster detection of microbes. Typically, bacterial detection requires the use of DNA probes that are target-specific, which means detection can be costly and slow when dealing with new or mutating species. Instead, the new method uses a small number of DNA probes randomly generated that are not target-specific, greatly reducing the cost and time of detection. (Watch Richard’s TED Talk)

Open-source, autonomous vehicles. Sebastian Thrun, the creator of Google’s self-driving car project, is taking the development of autonomous vehicles open-source through his online education startup Udacity. The project, began as an accompaniment to their new autonomous car-engineering course, will make the software driving the car and the data collected by the car available to anyone, for free. With the code needed to begin testing the car written by Udacity engineers, Udacity is now soliciting contributions by giving prizes for the best responses to specific projects, and students in the course are contributing to the project as well, reports the MIT Technology Review. (Watch Sebastian’s TED Talk)

A perpetual spring for honey bees. Neri Oxman and her team have created a synthetic apiary that creates a constant spring-like environment for bees, allowing seasonal honey bees to remain active and producing honey year-round. The apiary regulates light, humidity and temperature to create the optimal environment for the bees’ survival and is set inside a building on the MIT campus, rather than outside. The research offers hope for bees, whose numbers have been steadily declining, by demonstrating their ability to survive in a completely synthetic environment. (Watch Neri’s TED Talk)

New faces at the UN. On October 14, following his appointment as Secretary-General-designate of the UN, António Guterres announced the members of the transition team that will help prepare him to assume his duties on January 1, 2017. Fellow TED speaker Melissa Fleming, now the Head of Communications and spokesperson for the High Commissioner at UNHCR, will act as senior advisor and spokesperson for Guterres. (Watch António’s TED Talk and Melissa’s TED Talk. Plus, read Melissa’s article on 8 practical ways to help refugees.)

Have a news item to share? Write us at [email protected] and you may see it included in this weekly round-up.

Digital marketing experts and marketing automation vendors have likely already told you brands need to pump as much content into the pipeline as quickly as possible. Well, as Geoffrey Colon correctly pointed out this week, quantity does not equal quality.

In fact, at the end of this article, you might be ready to tear up that social media marketing deck entirely. Here’s why.

I have to admit; this is a strange place for me. In 2007 I accepted a new role at Avid Technology, the market leader in software and hardware for the media industry, where I was already neck deep in product marketing for Avid Xpress Pro video editing software. Management had taken notice of my eagerness to engage with our up-and-coming customers on community forums, blogs, and nascent social media channels like MySpace. They offered me the newly created position of eMarketing Manager in order to spread that digital engagement across all of the company’s business units. With that, I became one of the first social media marketing managers in enterprise software and quickly converted our passionate worldwide customer community into a large social media fan base—the largest among our peer group of companies producing tools for the creative media professional.

Fast forward to 2013. We were already experiencing diminishing returns from social media networks, even as the content itself racked up insane impressions for a B2B brand (check out the views of this Pro Tools video from 2010). The squeeze was on. Facebook’s increasingly intelligent algorithmic News Feed and a public stock offering in 2012 left brand marketers with a fast-closing window to reach a collected fan base through organic means. Paid placement was clearly the future of brand awareness on social. Sound familiar?

Now I hate spending money on paid media. And I certainly don’t want to pay for promoted access to customers who’ve already opted-in to receiving communications from me on these platforms. We needed our own platform to publish on and connect with customers. A blog would be a good start, but not a typical company blog, which is often a dumping ground for the PR team and the odd bit of content that doesn’t fit on the corporate site. We needed our own branded storytelling platform with an editorial voice and a Media Publishing strategy. Thus my first marketing newsroom was born. In April 2013, to coincide with the company’s largest global tradeshow, I launched Avid Blogs. Built on self-hosted WordPress, the site served as the new daily storytelling hub where customers could learn what’s new in the world of Avid, explore creative techniques from other users, and discover how to make the most of their investment in Avid systems. In my two and a half years as Editor-in-Chief, Avid Blogs rose to become the most trafficked Avid web property outside of Avid.com proper.

Launching a standalone storytelling site isn’t enough to tear-up the social media plan, a proper marketing newsroom requires three digital disruptions.

1. The willingness of a marketing organization to rethink present and future staffing. My own role changed from Social Media Manager to Editor-in-Chief. In a marketing newsroom, other roles like Field Marketing become Field Reporters, PR Managers add Featured Columnist duties, Demand Generation Specialists become Audience Growth Managers. To succeed with an editorial approach to audience development on owned platforms, organizations must invest in new skills training (visual storytelling) for existing staff and write job descriptions that find candidates who can tell a story, rather than launch a campaign.

2. Stop what you’re doing. You can’t campaign your way to an engaged audience. That email campaign, that infographic, that press release, while part of an “integrated marketing campaign” is NOT how customers are conditioned to consume content. Take a lesson from the biggest consumer media brands and create episodic original content. Think like Netflix with Stranger Things or Amazon Prime Video with Transparent. These are stories told in chapters, over time, with a narrative arc that entertains and builds affinity for the content provider. In your case, you’ll create “edu-tainment’ or content that both entertains and informs.

3. Buy-in from above. Like any transformation, there are those who can understand immediately the benefit of disrupting “business as usual” and others who are highly averse. That buy-in will only come with a plan (‘playbook’ in marketing newsroom parlance) that lays out the editorial strategy, individual responsibilities, technology requirements, interlock with Sales, publishing process, amplification plan, and much more. This is where you tear-up the social media deck! Its replacement, the Marketing Newsroom Playbook, is your daily guide for creating audience you own.

This is a preview of the marketing newsroom framework – The Blake Project’s approach to building highly differentiated brands in a digital world. We’ll outline each of the working parts of the framework in upcoming Branding Strategy Insider articles. Or, experience the marketing newsroom live at The Un-Conference, coming up in May 2017 at The London in West Hollywood.

Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

The personality trait of a disruptive marketer is centered on what, according to Daniel Gilbert, is believed to be the brain’s greatest achievement: “its ability to imagine episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.”

The ability to imagine a future state is the human brain’s most important attribute. And it’s the thing we need to use more of—ignoring the obvious and conventional—in the world today.

Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg noted one way they ascribe to this “future state” forward-thinking philosophy: people who work at Google don’t do it into silos anymore. That would be too conventional in terms of the twenty-first-century definition of a knowledge worker. According to their book How Google Works,  [Google employees] are multidimensional, usually combining technical depth with business savvy and creative air. In other words, they are not knowledge workers, at least not in the traditional sense. They are a new kind of animal, a type we call a “smart creative,” and they are the key to achieving success in the Internet Century.

We know that the brands of the future will look a lot different from the brands of today. However, many brands are taking a long time to figure out exactly what they will look like. And all the while, the clocks are ticking and the business models are being burned to the ground. We know that over the next twenty years, machine intelligence will play a much larger role in value creation. Mobile devices and the Internet of Things will change how we engage with others.

It is only by algorithmically programming all the routine processes that organizations will be able to free up the creative space for differentiated and innovative offerings. The time previously spent “managing machines” and pouring resources into operations will be re-purposed into creative output. This is one reason companies that put more emphasis on free time to explore ideation and innovation have an added advantage in the new economy. Reshaping the economy from one based on knowledge to one based on creativity also involves reshaping the way marketing will work.

Disruptive Marketing…

• Allows you to see things others cannot because they can’t separate themselves from their innate biases—that is, what they perceive as “the right kind of marketing” and what might be unchartered territory as defined by the data.
• Makes it okay for you to be curious, to daydream, to be enthusiastically inefficient, and to allow your mind to wander and tinker with inconvenient facts.
• Is about not following the rules of conventional marketing but, rather, establishing your own rules because the new norms of the creative economy demand it.
• Questions everything you learned from primary school to business school because linear patterns don’t make up the real world we inhabit or the one we must create as a result of technology-inspired behavior.
• Does not explain away data-centricities with excuses like “bad batch of data,” “small sample size,” “not enough data,” and “that’s not our target audience because I have an innate bias that it shouldn’t be.”
• Understands the allure of conventional marketing and the challenge of leaving it behind to forge a new path using disruptive thinking and actions. But the latter can unlock opportunities usually hidden right in front of us that the former is reluctant to identify.
• Is for those who inspired it: data punks, designers, creative hybrids, growth hackers, bandits, delinquents, and business rebels of all shapes and sizes who will reconfirm your knowledge so you can help bring it to others in your organization, whatever the objectives (tech products, consumer packaged goods, industrial design products, innovative ideas, politics, new ways of thinking, philosophies) and whatever you would like to apply it to.
• Helps empower everyone through a rapid and radical time of business turbulence, when if you don’t lead the change and transformation, others—in this case your customers— will lead it for you.
• Rewards those who find and seek new opportunities in creative ways because they have more diligence than intelligence.
• Helps overcome preconceived ideas about what makes marketing work by testing and trying things that are smaller, subtler, and more immersive yet more effective than million-dollar campaigns by big companies like Nike and Coca-Cola.
• Is for thinkers, doers, questioners, and subversive naysayers who realize the most lethal phrase in business is, “But we’ve always done it this way.”

Learn how to keep your brand relevant in the 21^st Century in my new book Disruptive Marketing.

Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

TED Curator Chris Anderson interviews Jonathan Haidt on November 2, 2016 in New York, NY. (Photo: Esiwahomi Ozembhoya / TED)

Watch for this TED Talk to premiere Nov. 8, 2016, on TED.com. A few highlights below:

With less than a week until America casts ballots in what has become one of the most controversial US presidential elections in history, TED invited the social psychologist and expert on the psychology of morality Jonathan Haidt to talk about our divisions — and how we might heal.

In conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson at TED HQ in New York, Haidt drew on a social-science perspective to explain why people on the left and right don’t just disagree with each other these days, they actually think the other side is a threat to the nation.

“We’re tribal — we evolved for tribalism,” Haidt explains. “It’s how we created society. We’re not doomed to always be fighting each other, but we’ll never have world peace.”

On the left, that tribalism has manifested itself with people who want to define their tribe more globally. On the right, the definition stops at local communities and nations. Haidt quotes the UK pollster Stephan Shakespeare, who put it this way: “We are either ‘drawbridge up’ people or ‘drawbridge down’ people.”

Another principle of social science explains why political arguments feel so unreasonable lately: As humans, our intuition comes first, while reason comes second. “Our intelligence actually may have evolved to help us manipulate each other and defend our reputations,” Haidt says. “That’s why you can’t win a political argument with reasoning and evidence.” Add in the internet, he says, and our post-hoc reasoning is ramped up on speed.

So is there a salve for a divided America?

“Both sides are right about something,” Haidt says. “There are a lot of problems in the country, but neither side is capable of seeing them all.” He suggests turning to the ancient wisdom of Buddha, Jesus and Marcus Aurelius for advice on how to drop fear, reframe our differences and stop seeing other people as your enemy. “Be more humble; you don’t know as much as you think,” he says. “Make an effort to meet someone on the other side. Only with people who challenge us can we find the truth.”

“Change is the only constant in life.” So observed the Greek philosopher Heraclitus in the 6^th century BC. It is believed he drew the inspiration for this from observing a river and concluded that “life is like a river” and that nature is in “a state of constant flux.”

He could have just as easily been describing the rapidly changing social-economic conditions in the US and around the world.

Things are in a constant state of flux, from virtually every standpoint. Be it demographic shifts, technological advancements, global connectivity, emerging markets, changing mores, the list goes on. And the changes come with more rapidity.

For today’s brand marketer, the question is not “do we change?” It is “how quickly can we change?” in order to adept to opportunities or challenges that present themselves with increasing speed.

But here’s the paradoxical dilemma. Brands rely on consistency … whether it’s identity, message, quality, presentation, delivery, and so forth. But yet the marketplace, like Heraclitus’ river, is constantly changing. So how do you maintain brand integrity while, at the same time, go with the flow, so to speak?

While you mull that one over, just consider the following two areas that are experiencing rapid, radical change and impacting the vast majority of consumer brands on the market today over the next 10 years.

Technology

• Electric vehicles will surpass internal combustion
• Wireless, hyper connectivity will be the norm
• Biodegradable packaging will be commonplace
• DNA mapping to manage disease risk will happen at birth
• Virtual and augmented reality will become common tools

Demographics

• The middle class continues to shrink
• Women in business leadership continues to grow
• America grows more politically liberal
• Asia replaces Latin America as the largest source of new immigrants
• Life expectancy will continue to increase

And with each bullet listed here, there are hundreds, if not thousands of steps along the way.

Leading the charge in rapid change for marketers is no doubt social media and all things digital. And therein may be part of the key to maintaining brand relevance in a rapidly changing world.

As is often quoted from Peter Drucker, “The business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation.” In our hyper-evolving marketplace with driverless beer trucks, drone deliveries and wearable health monitoring and transmission, no wisdom resonated more.

Brands surely must innovate to survive, but they must also communicate by the means and methods of a changing world, as well. Communication must be conducted by brands as a two-way experience: listening as well as speaking.

Social media provides brands with the engagement platform to stay constantly abreast and relationally connected to a shifting target audience. Research and big data and analysis will also play a larger and larger role as brands keep tabs on customer behaviors, motivations, intents, habits, and the like. In that way, marketing informs R&D of a changing landscape and facilitates the brand’s ability to remain nimble and adaptable in an unceasing cycle of development, assessment and redevelopment.

Unless brands are urgent and intentional about a priority and a process to stay not only current, but ahead of change in their industry, they won’t be around for long. Previously on Branding Strategy Insider, Mark Di Somma shared five questions brands should be asking themselves to reimagine their long-term future:

1. Is there an exciting idea that you can expand into that will give your brand a bigger license to operate? Why will your interpretation of that new idea be distinctive from what others are doing there now or where others may wish to go with a similar idea?

2. What does your new idea open up that you have never seen before? How will the business cope with that, and how quickly? How will consumers adjust to that, and how quickly?

3. What are you trying to preserve? And is that what consumers want for themselves and from you?

4. What’s your timeframe for change – and how did you arrive at that? Is it based on what you feel comfortable with or what the market will demand?

5. If you are making rapid change because your current idea is quickly losing relevance, why were you caught off-guard? Did you not see the warning signs, was everyone in the senior management team playing ostrich or have things moved so fast that you were simply overtaken? And given that, how will you ensure the brand you will be won’t be subject to the same vulnerabilities?

Even old Heraclitus would agree, it’s time to embrace the paradox. Change to stay consistent.

Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

The Blake Project Can Help: Accelerate B2C and B2B Brand Growth Through Powerful Emotional Connections

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers