Brands.
As marketers, it’s easy to get wrapped up in them. They’re our creation, so we set the rules. We just have to tell consumers about them.
But brands don’t exist in isolation. They don’t stand alone. Rather, they only thrive through connection.
Read MoreBrand reputation.
I’ve never seen the point. As Jeff Bezos famously said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room”.
Where does that leave brand reputation?
Read MoreHabit.
It’s how we live our lives. Making most of our decisions on autopilot, based on past experience.
So it seems entirely logical to focus on making a brand a habit, an automatic purchase.
As a long time practitioner of customer loyalty, this can seem like I’ve turned to the dark side.
Read MoreEngage or die.
It was a much-used refrain accompanying the rise of social media.
Nearly two decades later, the precipitous decline in organic reach for brands, and challenges around false measurement and fake followers, make this appear just another example of marketing hype.
Yet ironically, engage or die is even more relevant advice today.
Read MoreBack in my days as a young, thrusting marketer, brand equity was all the rage.
It seemed only a matter of time that the value of the brand would be put on a company’s balance sheet. Once and for all, everyone in the business would recognize just how important branding is.
Thirty years later this still hasn’t happened.
Read MoreTrust. It’s the bedrock on which brands are built.
We assume a brand earns our trust over time by demonstrating it can deliver its promises.
However, a brand has first to pass our snap judgement of whether it’s friend or foe. And this has little to do with the core benefits on offer.
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