What will remain constant, irrespective of the role or impact that technology will play, is our indelible need to connect and bond with people, products and places. We will be forever drawn to the products and services that we identify with or that enhance, fulfill or indulge us. We will be won over by nostalgia and form strong habits through ritual. Like we do with the people in our lives that we bond with, we’ll evolve our relationships with brands from sharing to bonding and in select cases, fusing, where we’ll be inexorably linked and fully co-identified. The Brand Intimacy Platform is the technology solution for the new paradigm. It can be a compass for how marketers today and in the future will evolve the brands we make, use, buy and treasure.
The Brand Intimacy Platform is the technology solution for today’s new paradigm in marketing. The platform helps marketers harness their entire stakeholder ecosystem to evolve their brand to create stronger bonds. Companies that have leveraged the platform have changed how their customers feel, buy and ultimately treasure the brand.
IMPLICATIONS
Top intimate brands outperform the S&P and Fortune 500 for revenue, profit and longevity.
Intimate brands command greater price premiums.
Common pitfalls for brands today most often relate to not being agile, not having a customer-centric perspective, overstepping and overreach.
Building stronger and more intimate brands happens through powerful essence, story and experience.
Software will play an increasingly vital role in fueling intimate brands. Our Brand Intimacy Platform enables and optimizes the entire marketing ecosystem.
CONCLUSION
THE POWER OF INTIMATE BRANDS
The marketplace is constantly evolving, and as new technologies and a dynamic consumer base continue to change how brands are designed and perceived, we knew that a revision of marketing’s fundamental principles was long overdue. Rational-based strategies; artificial testing approaches based on behavioral hierarchies that don’t reflect the real buying process; the assumption that awareness and consideration lead to purchases—these concepts, while not necessarily obsolete, are almost certainly outdated with how consumers interact with, buy and use brands.
We now understand that the biggest indicator of purchase is how we feel about a brand. Feelings in general are a tremendous area of opportunity, and by creating brands that people connect and relate to—brands that tell a compelling story in a simple straightforward way—marketers can both take advantage of and create new opportunities. Decision making is instinctive and emotional. The question is, how can marketers leverage these new insights to their advantage? It will clearly require keeping things short, sweet, and impactful.
Is brand intimacy easy? No. Does it necessitate changing a lot of conventional approaches? Probably. Does it make sense? Clearly. Does it make business sense? Definitely.
It is our hope that this book gets people thinking about the actual relationships people have with brands . . . and, in being a relationship, how it can be reciprocal and engaging. What must brands do to deepen bonds with consumers? How can they invite dialogue and engagement? Most people think only of how brands can attract and sell, not how they can participate in a relationship and deepen bonds with people.
Our biggest thrill is helping companies better understand and realize their intimate brand potential. From assessing opportunities and developing corresponding marketing strategies through to design and execution, there are literally hundreds of ways, both big and small, that companies can improve their effectiveness in creating brand intimacy.
Ultimately, companies need their brands to drive tangible results. Therefore, it makes the best sense to concentrate efforts on those areas that have proven to show results. When we see new partners and customers being drawn to a brand as it lays claim to new emotional territory, we know that what we’re doing works.
Whether a company is a small start-up or a massive multi-billion-dollar global conglomerate, brand intimacy can create incremental or transformational improvements in your marketing efforts. We encourage all brands to build bonds, link to emotions, and amplify their relevance through increased intimacy.
Just as with any relationship, the more you put in, the more you get out.
Appendix
EXPLORE THE BRAND INTIMACY STUDY FOR
DEEPER INSIGHTS AND FINDINGS.
VISIT: mblm.com/brandintimacy
COMPREHENSIVE COUNTRY REPORTS FOR THE U.S., MEXICO AND the UAE
INTERACTIVE RANKING TOOL WITH DETAILED BRAND
PROFILES DASHBOARD FEATURING:
BRAND INTIMACY QUOTIENT SCORES
INDUSTRY RANKINGS AND COMPARISONS
DEMOGRAPHIC CUTS BY AGE, INCOME AND GENDER
NET PROMOTER SCORE
FREQUENCY OF USE
CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT PERCENTAGES
10 WAYS TO ASSESS THE INTIMACY OF YOUR BRAND
The purpose of these 10 considerations is to provide marketers with a clearer set of questions to narrow down and diagnose clear gaps in their brand performance. These questions, in whole or in part, can play a pivotal role in enhancing your brand and moving you toward creating more emotionally charged, emotive bonds.
Brands are ever-evolving and culturally driven. When done right, they can predict and lead the business. Yet too often, brands are seen as expenses to the business instead of the glue between the company and its stakeholders. Like any relationship you want to foster or improve, underinvesting in these bonds creates a greater drag on the business and stunts the growth of bonds that could otherwise propel the business forward.
1
EXAMINE THE BONDS YOUR BRAND BUILDS
Are you using yesterday’s strategies to solve tomorrow’s marketing problems? Or are you relying on traditional (and likely dated) methods of brand building to try and remain compelling and relevant today?
Do you know what influences the bonds people have with your brand?
Do you have the methods and tools to determine this bond?
We start with bonds, the foundation of intimate relationships. What this group of questions is asking is, why do people connect with your brand? What drives your brand relationships? Do you know how to measure those relationships?
2
ARTICULATE AND MOTIVATE THROUGH YOUR BRAND
Does the essence of your brand promote or inspire intimacy with your stakeholders?
Is your brand’s essence rooted in factors that enable it to forge powerful emotional connections that drive decision making?
Does your brand align with enduring human fundamentals best used to create connection?
Can your brand be more relevant to audiences that matter most?
Here, we’re trying to determine if your brand is based on emotion and fosters quick decision making. If your brand is not based on emotion, it is important to start here. A rational hook might have been good enough until now, but it won’t optimize the brand’s potential. Are you leveraging the archetypes? Which ones? How?
3
ALIGN YOUR BRAND AND YOUR CULTURAL VALUES
Since your brand has to first establish bonds with internal stakeholders and partners, are they aligned, inspired, and ready to deliver compelling on-brand experiences?
Do employees understand their role in building the brand?
Do they realize they have an opportunity to evangelize through each customer interaction?
Have you created a living, breathing brand that employees can be proud of and a part of? Does your brand reflect your employees? Do they understand their role as ambassadors? Before focusing on customers, focus first on the people who influence customers. They are your defense, your offense and a clear way to give the brand a human dimension.
4
DESIGN AND COMMUNICATE FOR TODAY’S AESTHETIC SENSIBILITIES
Does your brand’s identity, messaging, and content resonate?
Are you attracting the right audiences?
Does your brand promote sharing, bonding, or fus
ing behavior to help build ultimate relationships?
Do your materials create distinction compared with your competitors, and are they optimized for today’s digital landscape?
Is your brand effectively communicating in ways that matter? Does it have a distinctive, easy-to-identify look that stands out from competitors? Is it inviting, engaging and intriguing? Is it talking to consumers in a way that suggests dialogue and relationship, or is it one-way and top down? Do you make it easy to get involved and start a relationship with your brand?
5
MANAGE YOUR BRAND AND FOSTER YOUR MARKETING COMMUNITY LIKE AN OPERATING SYSTEM
Is your brand managed in a disciplined way, yet adaptable to changing needs or conditions?
Are you supporting your marketing and communications community effectively?
Are you striking the right balance between engaging your marketing community and mandating to them?
Can you identify where, when, and why your brand succeeds or fails to meet expectations?
An intimate brand needs the right tools in place to act quickly, speak compellingly, and create crafted moments. Are you using state of the art tools so that your marketing team can deliver what is required on time and on budget? Are you sharing best practices and innovations? Have you assessed what platforms are most successful and why?
6
DRIVE YOUR BRAND TO INFORM AND PLEASE CUSTOMERS IN EVERY INTERACTION
Are you demonstrating your brand’s value or offer through effective content and truly integrated campaigns?
Do you have an optimized media mix?
Are your methods delivering consistent experiences that resonate?
Can you identify the areas of weakness in your activation?
Are you aligned to where your customers go? Do you promote your brand in the right channels with the right content to maximize their interest and engagement? Are you investing in content that adds value or are you relying on customers to create content? Are you communicating with customers frequently enough (or too frequently)?
7
USE THE PROLIFERATION OF DEVICES AND PLATFORMS AS AN ALLY
Is your brand in enough channels or in the right ones?
Have you developed ways to leverage the ubiquity of device usage to become a more valuable part of customers’ personal and work lives?
Are you balancing traditional and emerging platforms to broaden your audiences?
Are you experimenting across channels? Do you have multiple trials and campaigns going on at the same time to test new ideas to build stronger bonds? Have you optimized across devices to make it easier for your customer to be delighted to be interacting with you?
8
SEE YOUR BRAND AS A COMMUNITY AND YOURSELF AS THE ACTIVITIES COORDINATOR
Are you discovering and embracing the communities that your customers frequent?
Can you create compelling content for these communities?
Are you finding ways to engage, dialogue with, and influence consumers, in addition to selling?
Is your customer engagement elusive?
What value are you creating for customers? People are busy. Good content gets noticed. Promotions, coupons, and giveaways are table stakes. Are you identifying important new ways to create compelling material? How are you building communities? Do you follow your own brand? Do your employees? What kind of meaningful dialogues are you fostering?
9
DON’T LET THE DELUGE OF DATA DROWN OUT THE SIGNAL FROM THE NOISE
Have your analytics been aligned with the right marketing goals?
Are you measuring traditional and emerging aspects of brand performance?
Are you measuring and benchmarking the depth and intensity of your customer relationships?
Does your brand performance measure up?
With the proliferation of data, what are you measuring and how often? Are you pleased with your performance? Are you testing or benchmarking increased emotional connection with customers? Do you measure traditional and emerging channels differently? What are your objectives? Are they short-term gains or long-term wins? Would you be more successful moving customers from sharing to bonding or trying to build more fused relationships?
10
CREATE AND SUSTAIN ULTIMATE BRAND RELATIONSHIPS
Are your stakeholders and your brand co-identified?
Is there positive emotion behind customer behavior toward your brand?
Are you fulfilling the expectations of all your audiences?
Do your efforts correlate to real business performance?
Are you building an intimate brand? Are you measuring bonds? How can you create relationships, not transactions? Are you pleased with your performance? How are you continuing to deepen customer bonds? Are these efforts improving your bottom line?
REFERENCES
Endnotes
1Story, L. (January 2007). “Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad,” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/business/media/15everywhere.html?.
2Bolman, Chris. “How to Win Anyone’s Attention.” Percolate, Sept 25, 2014. https://blog.percolate.com/2014/09/how-to-win-anyones-attention/.
3Chen, Y. (March 2015). “84 Percent of Millennials Don’t Trust Traditional Advertising,” http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/.
4Egan, John, “18 statistics that marketers need to know about millennials,” LeadsCon, Jan 22, 2015. http://www.leadscon.
5Asknert, S. (April 2015). “Nielsen study - Global Trust in Advertising 2015,” https://company.trnd.com/en/blog/nielsen-study-global-trust-in-advertising-2015.
6“State of the American Consumer: Insights for Business Leaders,” Gallup 2014.
7Zorfas, Alan and Leemon, Don. “An Emotional Connection Matters More than Customer Satisfaction,” Harvard Business Review, Aug 29, 2016.
8Ibid.
9Murray, Peter N. Ph.D., “How Emotions Influence What We Buy,” Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/inside-the-consumer-mind/201302/how-emotions-influence-what-we-buy.
10“Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update,” 2002–2017, February 6, 2013, http://cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11-520862.html.
11IBM Institute for Business Value, “CMOs and CIOs,” 2011, http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/gbe03513usen/GBE03513USEN.PDF.
12“What Is ‘Haptic Feedback’?,” MobileBurn, 2013. http://www.mobileburn.com/definition.jsp?term=haptic+feedback.
13Dublon, G. and Paradiso, J. A., “Extra Sensory Perception,” Scientific American, July 2014. Web: Aug. 1, 2014. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-a-sensor-filled-world-will-change-human-consciousness/.
14Ibid.
15Ibid.
16Ibid.
17Geirland, J., “Go With the Flow,” Wired, Issue 4.09, Sept. 1996. Web: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.09/czik.html.
18“Introduction to Google Glass,” The Guardian, June 2, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-masterclasses/introduction-to-google-glass-michael-rosenblum-digital-course.
19“Watch,” Apple, 2014. https://www.apple.com/watch/overview/.
20Zuckerberg, M., Posts, Facebook, March 25, 2014. Web: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101319050523971.
21Carnegie, D., “The Rule of Balance—Logical Mind vs. Emotional Heart,” Westside Toastmasters, http://westsidetoastmasters.com/resources/laws_persuasion/chap14.html.
22The Behavioral Economics Guide 2014, edited by Alain Samson. http://www.behavioraleconomics.com/BEGuide2014.pdf.
23Damasio, Antonio, The Feeling of What Happens, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1999.
24Kahneman, Daniel, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
25Ibid.
26Haidt, Jonathan, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics. Penguin Random House 2012.
27Ibid.
28The Behavioral Economics Guide 2014, ed
ited by Alain Samson. http://www.behavioraleconomics.com/BEGuide2014.pdf.
29Ibid.
30“Net Promoter.” Wikipedia. March 16, 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter.
31Reichheld, F. (December 2003). “One Number You Need to Grow”. Harvard Business Review. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter-cite_note-OneNumber-3.
32“What is Net Promoter,” https://www.netpromoter.com, 2017.
33“Walker Loyalty Matrix,” Walker, 2013, http://www.walkerinfo.com/docs/WP-The-Walker-Loyalty-Matrix.pdf.
34Giddens, Nancy, “Brand Loyalty,” Iowa State University extension and Outreach, Aug 2010. http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c5-54.html.
35M. Uncles, A.S.C. Ehrenberg, and K. Hammond, “Patterns of Buyer Behavior: Regularities, Models, and Extensions,” Marketing Science, volume 14, number 3, 1995, pp. G71–G78.
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