Brand.New
In the age of experience brands need to flow
around human expectations.
Power to the people
Branding strategy, as we know it, has slowly died. And that’s a good thing.
Technology is accelerating social and economic transformations that profoundly affect culture and businesses in return.
People no longer look to brands to influence their life choices, but selectively pick brand affiliations that are aligned with their value system.
People choose brands that make them feel relevant as customers and human beings.
In this new normal brands can no longer be ivory tower megaphones shouting self-referential messages at regular intervals. They need to transform into enablers of relevant, meaningful, life-enriching experiences that constantly evolve around people’s liquid expectations.
Welcome to the era of human, relevant, and flowing brands.
Done in close collaboration with:
Stephanie Del Rey
Fabio Sergio
- dear colleagues at Fjord, part of Accenture Interactive
01.
Context.
The fabric of reality is unraveling.
The very meaning of reality is being increasingly questioned. This is not about what is “real” and what is “fake” but about the value we attribute to what we are offered.
Seeing is not believing anymore.
Brands must understand their ecosystems, and be aware of how their influence can be used and abused.
Anything that we can imagine, can be built. Anything that we can be, we can become.
In a world where technology often outpaces imagination people feel they can be or become who or whatever they want to be, but often suffer from the paradox of choice.
Brands, as social actors, also suffer from uncertainty and anxiety
Just like people brands have been embracing digital technologies to reinvent themselves and to avoid being disrupted, but suffer from the same paradox of choice.
If anyone can be anything that they want to be, what should they become?
What is their true purpose?
The day the bunny died.
The son of a colleague asked Alexa to add batteries to the shopping list. The next day batteries were delivered. Alexa never asked which brand of batteries to order, so it defaulted to Amazon’s own. Later our colleague discovered that 90%+ of battery orders are Amazon's own brand.
Just like that the (Energizer) Bunny died: years of great marketing campaigns and brand value were wiped away in one voice command.
We live in the early days of Artificial Intelligence-powered voice assistants, and they are all omniscient and dumb at the same time. And still, they have already reshaped the branding and marketing landscape forever.
02.
The age of experience.
The new normal of liquid expectations and living services.
Technology changes fast, people don’t.
While technology keeps evolving at an accelerated pace our ability as humans to absorb and process change is not getting radically better.
61% of customers stopped doing business with at least one company last year because of poor #CX
Source: What today’s consumers want isn’t what you think, Accenture Strategy 2017
People crave relevant, meaningful, and personal experiences.
Digital services offer brands an unprecedented frequency of interaction with their audiences, which has, in turn, raised people’s perceived level of intimacy with a brand. At the same time, the daily deluge of opportunities to connect and be contacted has also created a gap in attention, and the resulting need for meaningful and relevant interactions worth of people’s decreasing attention spans and time.
The rise of living services has also increased expectations that every interaction will feel personal, and tailored to people’s liquid expectations and evolving needs.
The industrialization of experience.
Brands have adopted a “customer-centric” culture and adopted “omnichannel strategies” to ensure the baseline quality level of the experiences they provide to their customers. While this has resulted in a progressive improvement of mainstream digital experiences even brands who “set the bar” often fall victim to the “industrialization of experience”, and the resulting lack of differentiation and true personalization.
Providing meaningful, contextually relevant, and truly personal experiences at scale - millions and millions of personal experiences - remains as difficult and challenging as it ever was.
There is tension at the
heart of brands.
In the new normal brands are struggling to find a meaningful role.
All of these forces are putting extra pressure on brands, which are struggling to find ways to adapt to the “new normal” of people’s ever-changing expectations and affiliations.
Brands walk a long slackline over the chasm of irrelevance in a dynamic balancing act. When to speak? When to listen? What to hold constant, what to change?
Brands struggle to evaluate the unintended consequences of how their messages and experiences propagate across these layers.
A misguided local marketing campaign can have devastating effects as it negatively resonates across global other regional or global markets.
Economic policies and trade decisions can have a huge impact on brand equity and affiliations (e.g. USA’s policies on Huawei’s products and services).
Connected systems, exponential complexity.
Digital technologies have created real-time feedback loops across ecosystems of incremental complexity and influence.
The skin of brands has become thinner.
In the new digital normal brands are easily exposed all the way to the core. They are and often feel naked.
Megaphones and echo chambers.
Shaken by customer-first and experience-centric narratives brands have been stretched thin. Some have stayed true to old-school ivory tower megaphone paradigms, others have swung all the way to echo the social media wails of their most vocal audiences. The pendulum is still swinging.
How to create millions of unique experiences while staying true to the brand’s core values, personality, promise, and purpose?
Built to last…
… meant to flow
A new dynamic balance.
Experience lives at the intersection of the interaction points through which a brand’s personality is expressed - its human, physical and digital touch-points - and the area where human needs, desires, and dreams manifest the mindsets that influence decision making and human value-setting.
03.
Brand.New
To add value to people’s lives brands need to be authentic and constantly adapt to create experiences that people love. They need to flow around ever-changing human expectations. Brands need to become Human. Relevant. Flowing.
Human
Human brands have
human-like traits.
In the new normal brands cannot be static constructs made up of keywords and expressed through immutable graphic assets. They live and breathe, adapt and evolve. They are influenced by their surrounding context and influence it in return.
Human brands have human-like traits.
Human brands have an authentic personality, and they are not afraid to have an opinion, even if they might be wrong at times.
Human brands see us as whole, not just as recipients of their messages or buyers of their products. They know us and care about us. When we love them, they love us back.
Human brands are authentic.
These characteristics need to be consciously selected and designed; they come from the brand’s authentic self: a sum of the past, present, and future stories.
These characteristics cannot be made-up or copied. They need to be real and authentic.
Human brands are relational,
not transactional.
Relational brands create trust through credibility, reliability, and intimacy.
They aim to connect their authentic personality with what people need, think and expect.
Human brands are aware
and self-aware.
Human brands know that Silence is Gold*, and know when they are expected to speak and when they better shut up.
Human brands speak the
language of love.
From the moment we came kicking and screaming into this world, we have expressed preferences one way or another. Status assertion and affirmation, groupthink, font, and color psychology.
Human brands want to create strong emotional connections. There is no love, only proof of love.
Human brands use data to increase their empathy, not
just their profits.
Human brands see today’s abundance of data about their audiences and customers not just as a way to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their transactions, but as a way to get to know people better, and grow with and around them.
Data Humanism is the new name of the game.
Illustration by Joan Cornellà
Relevant
Built to last:
Remaining relevant.
Just as people are searching for their own relevance and place in the world, brands must constantly prove themselves to be relevant to their customers, quite possibly the biggest challenges of today’s digital age.
The most future.proofed companies are not defined by their age, their sector, their tech or data savvy-ness, but by their ability to consistently align the totality of the experiences they create with their wider corporate purpose. This represents the defining challenge for today’s boardrooms and brand marketers.
Some companies are moving ahead because they are making their purpose more compelling by blending data and insight to deliver better human brand experiences. For others, it has become crucial that the experiences they create, powered by exceptional technology, are matched by an authentic corporate culture and purpose.
Relevant brands are rooted in
human purpose.
What is required is a true shift in perspectives.
A brand’s purpose will only be relevant if it sits within people’s own purpose and not the other way around.
Relevant brands stand for something.
Every brand must strengthen its core, which is what the brand itself stands for, as well as curate an ecosystem where people find a place where they can flourish and, in that process, feel more relevant.
Patagonia has done just that, declaring its beliefs while simultaneously inviting its customers to join its mission and become part of something bigger.
Relevant brands give people
space to contribute.
Brands must serve as beacons for people, inviting them to align with their value systems. They must create a place for their customers and audiences to feel relevant.
Relevant brands reward love
with love.
Relevant brands put their customer’s interests on par with their own and focus on creating shared mutual value, for individuals, and at scale for society.
“There's no such thing as love; only proof of love.”
― Jean Cocteau
Relevant brands create a space for people to belong.
Humans have an innate desire to improve themselves and their lives.
It’s the role of brands to align with their audience’s innate desires and provide products and services to help progress towards them.
Contribution.Recognition. Belonging.
To become and stay relevant brands have to focus on creating a space where their customers and audiences can contribute to creating something purposeful and meaningful together, can be recognized for their role, and can hence feel a sense of belonging that keeps them contributing.
This is the virtuous cycle of relevance building.
Flowing
Meant to flow:
a new dynamic balance.
The way we experience a brand’s presence in our lives is a dynamic balance across the brand’s lasting pillars and assets, and liquid human expectations and ambitions.
It’s an area in constant flow, shaped by thousands of individual and collective interactions over time.
Modern brand building is just as much about understanding how to achieve and maintain flow and dynamic balance as it is about understanding and preserving long-lasting core foundational assets.
Michael Eisner. Former CEO of Disney
A brand is a living entity, it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.
Flowing brands
flow into one another.
Today’s brands live across brand ecosystems, touch-points, and time.
Flowing brands are permeable to one another, and treat the experience as a shared strategic asset that is enabled and strengthened by open ecosystems, rather than controlled through closed delivery platforms.
Flowing brands adapt to mindsets and context.
Brands need to constantly adapt and evolve around the mindsets that people adopt when interacting with their products and services, which are informed by the personal and social context that surrounds them.
Flowing brands provide freedom through totall
experience.
Experience brands are the sum of all the impressions and interactions people have with them and all the feelings those interactions generate.
Flowing brands free their customers to decide on their preferred path to fulfillment, flexibly adapting their preferred combination and sequencing of human, physical and digital touch-points.
Flowing brands scale gracefully.
Today’s markets offer overabundant stimuli and live off fluctuating demand and ever-shrinking attention spans.
Flowing brands need to be able to adapt to different levels of expression, from full scale to atomized minimum experience.
Flowing brands are natural extensions of a Living Business.
Today’s businesses have to deliver customer-centric innovation at ever-faster speeds, forcing them to adopt new organizational and operational models.
Flowing brands require, enhance, and naturally complement a Living Business, where a purposeful employee experience naturally aligns with a relevant and differentiating customer experience.
Brand.New.Hope
Brands must learn to…
Be Human
Grow authentic relationships based on mutual understanding and care.
Be Relevant
Create a sense of belonging that stands the test of time.
Be Flowing
Flow across experiences, evolving & adapting.