What will the new year bring brands? From our perspective of the marketing world, at least 365 opportunities.
Opportunities to know your customer better, build stronger bonds, create value only you can deliver, forge new relationships and accelerate growth. Opportunities as large as the future you seek for your brand.
As we surge forward into a new year we thank you Branding Strategy Insider readers for offering your ideas, questions, suggestions, opinions and sometimes opposing views. You have given us the opportunity to grow as authors, educators and brand consultants, and have helped make Branding Strategy Insider the leading resource for marketing oriented leaders and professionals.
Now a look back on the 25 most read thought pieces of 2016 on Branding Strategy Insider. From first person accounts of iconic brand strategy to dramatic shifts in how brands are built and the disruptive marketing trends responsible to what brands need to do to stay relevant, we kept our focus on preparing marketers for what’s now and what’s next and for the journey every brand must take to earn a place in the future.
1. Twenty Motivations That Drive Brand Loyalty: Why do consumers keep brands in their lives? For all the talk that consumers don’t care about brands anymore and that loyalty is a thing of the past, the fact remains that branded goods account for huge swathes of the purchased economy. So what is it that people are attracted to? Here are 20 motivations, in no particular order, for why consumers might not choose the many alternatives being offered them.
2. Ten Disruptive Marketing Trends: Ten disruptive marketing trends that are shaping the future of brand leadership.
3. Ten Uniquely Powerful Brand Strategy Concepts: There are no shortcuts to building successful brands but there are many pathways. Here are ten you may not have considered.
4. The Business Model Of Luxury Brands: Luxury is a business model. This has been empirically fine tuned through time by those luxury brands that dominate the pantheon worldwide: Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci, Hermès, Ferrari, Rolex and so on. These companies, many of which are still family owned, have crafted a unique common business model, a pillar of their resilience and profitability. It’s a business model that runs contrary to most present business models in any sector.
5. The Four Most Powerful Brand Codes: How do we recognize a brand? What do consumers see, and how different is that from the ways brands are structured? The most powerful brand codes seem to take these four forms.
6. Eight Marketing Beliefs That Are Hurting Brands: What could possibly be leading marketers astray today? Here are eight beliefs that are hurting brands.
7. The Measures Of Brand Equity: Every established brand should have a clear understanding of its brand equity.
8. Confusing Brand Strategy With Creative Strategy: Brand strategy and creative strategy are both necessary but the terms are not synonyms. Brand strategy is the business case for change at a brand level. It envisages the future position of a brand in the marketplace, based on the company’s wider business aspirations and its ability to deliver and market brands that align with that desired position.
9. How Brand Perceptions Are Formed In The Mind: Compelling research offers good news for brand managers because it reaffirms the importance of branding. It’s not just about the product inside. The brand matters because it tells consumers what to expect and influences how they evaluate a product. A strong brand gets the prefrontal cortex on your side.
10. Lies And The Declining Trust In Brands: Here are four factors that may be driving some brands to disregard consumer trust as a license to operate.
11. What Brands Need To Do To Stay Relevant: Brands come alive for people when they encapsulate ideas that consumers want to have in their lives. That’s partly what makes brands distinctive and desirable. So what do you do when your core idea is no longer as attractive as it used to be?
12. How Nike Shifted From A Sales To Marketing Mindset: When I stepped into the role of planning director inside Nike in the spring of 1986 marketing was a dirty word. At that time a marketing department didn’t exist and Nike had never written an annual marketing plan. There were three main obstacles preventing Nike from adopting a brand planning process.
13. Ten Guiding Principles For Effective Brand Building: At the heart of brand building is the search for more meaningful ways to connect with customers or end consumers. Getting good at connecting with consumers and building strong and relevant brands requires an end consumer orientation regarding how you frame problems and ask questions.
14. Seven Customer Experience Mistakes Brands Make: It’s widely known, and too often forgotten that brands stand or fall based on the customer experiences they create. If your customer experience is in free fall, one or more of these seven mistakes are most likely to blame.
15. Five Ways To Keep Your Brand Current: One of the hardest judgment calls for brand managers is currency. Brands must change to stay consistent yet they must also remain recognizable in order to preserve brand equity. So what should you change, and when?
16. The New Era Of Strategic Brand Partnerships: Partnership is about bringing brands together in arrangements that consumers want to have bundled in their lives. To be successful, brands will need to “plot” their position in consumers’ lives much more exactly.
17. Brands Grow With Empathy: The more empathy, the more validation. The more validation, the deeper the relationship. The deeper the relationship, the more commercial success of the brand through the return of repeated purchase, loyalty, advocacy, and ultimately cult status. Brands often fall short of establishing this chain reaction because, from the outset, brands fail to do a number of things.
18. Seven Insights For Emotional Branding: Leading brands have long studied the minds of their target customers, leveraging advances in psychology and behavioral science to gain competitive advantage and accelerate growth through strong emotional connections. For these brands no leadership ‘buy in’ is necessary. They are well past the ‘why’ and are perpetually interested in the ‘how’.
19. Two Powerful Lessons In Brand Pricing And Value: Two short stories illuminate powerful lessons in pricing and value for marketers and the brands they serve.
20. Five Brand Positioning Models: The P-A-S-P model (Purpose, Ambition, Strategy, Proposition) will be new to some as the expression ‘proposition’ rather than ‘positioning’ is used.
21. Eight Ways To Create Powerful Brand Rituals: Call them rituals, ceremonies, habits … associating a brand with a set behavior can have a powerful effect on loyalty and enjoyment.
22. Twenty Five Questions Every Startup-Brand Must Ask: Some searching questions, by way of a guide, for the leaders of companies expecting to build lucrative brands in the years ahead.
23. Brands Are Missing The Point Of Content Marketing: The intention of content marketing is to create stronger bonds with consumers. Sadly, that is not what is happening.
24. The Business Case For Building Brands: The next time you are asked to make a case for building a strong brand refer to the following eight fact-based insights.
25. How Disruptive Marketing Is Shaping Our Future: 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.
*26. (Honorable Mention) Ten Characteristics Of The Modern Marketer: Today it is no longer enough to say you have digital “experts” or that you are data-driven. What does that mean in a perpetually changing world? So what will help marketers go above and beyond in the 21st Century? A well-rounded person who has these 10 skillsets.
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