Next Level: How to build your brand and market your business
[Music] hi everyone my name is anjali lai i'm a senior analyst with forrester research i work on our chief marketing officer practice and i lead our firms consumer research i write all about how consumer behavior is changing how consumer decision making is changing how technology is playing a role in the entire consumer purchase journey and how consumers are using new tools technologies information and resources to become empowered i'm really excited to be here uh speaking with all of you in this session where i'm going to share some of our latest research and thinking on how to build your brand and market your business now when we talk about building a brand and marketing a business you might think about a whole range of things like ad copy or communications promotional materials product service attributes quality of digital experiences customer communities brand reputation these are all important modern brand management encompasses this broad swath of brand experiences and this broad range of closely related activities together makes up the brand experience and when it's done right these things in combination become the most valuable asset a booklet from johnson johnson says that our company's brands are by far the most valuable asset and the former chairman of quaker roads has famously said that if this business were to be split up i would be glad to take the brands trademarks and goodwill and you could have all the bricks and mortar and i would fare better than you now of course these are large corporations that are pouring money and manpower into building up their brands but this sentiment applies across the market like the core idea is that brand is no longer seen as a squishy sort of emotional nice to have rather that it now measurably creates value for the business and for customers how does this work why are brands so valuable it's because brands measurably fuel value and investment along with quality of the product and price and distribution brand is one of the key factors that influences buyer decisions right the brand essence powers marketing and advocacy which establishes value and attracts investment which which uh in turn reinforces the brand as a driver of consumer choice so this is sort of the belief that many business leaders and scholars are bought into now but this is perhaps easier to talk through than it is to do building a brand requires a deep knowledge of consumer behavior and really human behavior and psychology walter landor is widely regarded as one of the early uh sort of giants of branding he set up his design firm lander associates in 1941 in san francisco and he quickly scaled up to design brands globally he eventually famously made the unorthodox move to set up a shop in a retired ferry boat moored in the san francisco harbor and it's taken the marketing discipline some time to come around to something that walter knew instinctively that branding is about perception and that products are made in the factory but brands are created in the mind so my team at forrester wanted to understand what are the most important qualities to successfully build a brand in the consumer's mind we wanted to create a rigorous data-driven and scientific framework that could match components of brand building to outcomes that drive financial value so we went out and surveyed tens of thousands of consumers around the world about around 300 unique brands and applied our deep advanced analytics to quantify which branding elements are most crucial to brand advocacy preference a consumer's willingness to pay a premium and consumer purchase intent and we found that effective brand building comes down to three essential and important things which are salience emotion and fit salience is how top of mind the brand is emotion is how the brand makes consumers feel and fit is about how well customers believe that the brand meets their needs we've now developed this into a full model and marketing leaders can use this framework to develop actionable strategies that maximize the value of their brands we think of this concept as creating a brand energy brand energy is that power behind your brand the force that you are building up every time you discover the right message convey the right information or reward your customers emotional expectations with a great experience the more this brand energy builds up the more it translates into consumer action as customers buy your products advocate for you or share your brands socially so you can think of this brand energy as how well positioned you are as a brand to stimulate consumer behaviors that matter to the company in the short run and that lead to long-term brand success so in this session i'd love to dive into these three important levers of salience emotion and fit and discuss what each one means how it looks in practice and how you consider this in the context of your own business as you build up your brand in this particular historical moment and we'll start with uh emotion because overwhelmingly emotion forms the most important pillar so when we look at the relative importance of salience emotion and fit on all of those behavioral and financial outcomes that i was just showing we find that emotion is the number one driver and when we talk about emotion we really consider two dimensions the variety of emotions that consumers associate with the brand as well as the intensity of that emotion so every interaction that someone has with the brand has the potential to leave behind memories but those memories are only likely to form and really stick if they are coded with emotion if you pull certain emotional levers and to do this effectively right to get emotion right it's important to understand how consumers are feeling today right what the current emotional context looks like how are consumers feeling right now what is the overarching sentiment and how do you say something that resonates currently our overall sort of sentiment data shows that consumers are still processing the covid19 pandemic between march and april of 2020 the percentage of u.s online adults who felt that they would be shielded from the pandemic dropped dramatically and by early may of last year 60 percent of consumers recognize that the colbit 19 pandemic would have a long-term negative impact on their quality of life and even as recently as a couple months ago in may of 2021 over half of consumers in the u.s maintained this attitude and it's largely because of ongoing fear and anxiety as of just late may 2021 64 of u.s consumers
said that they were still worried that they or someone they knew would get sick and only half said they felt prepared to handle the economic fallout of the pandemic so in this emotional context consumers are feeling high levels of fear hesitation and their behaviors are fairly risk averse consumers from our consumer voices market research online community which is the qualitative research platform that we use at forester have been telling us things like i'm trying to learn how to save and invest more so that we don't have to take a hit during volatile times this attitude towards saving and sort of hedging against impending risk is still really strong when it comes to the dominant consumer emotions yet at the same time these intense fears are also entwined with intense desires which leads to kind of an odd tension and sometimes absurd behavior you may have heard about consumers buying tickets on uh you know to the flight on the flights to nowhere or they're buying uh tickets to spend a week on board cruise ships that never leave their port just to feel that exciting sensation of traveling again even when the travel industry had largely shut down so this tug-of-war tug of war between fear and desire is very very real for consumers and is continuing to persist even as restrictions lift and consumers are also assimilating back into what somewhat feels like a normal life after the pandemic so what does all of this mean for you the call here is to honor how consumers feel in the moment and emphasize how you create uncommon or unique value that is indispensable and when i say create uncommon value i mean build experiences that feel irreplaceable right you specifically are at an advantage here because ebay is largely about creating connections between people seeking something special and then the unique business right ebay allows you to connect with consumers at that enthusiast level as the company enables people to make a living off of what they're passionate about and connect sellers with a global audience of passionate shoppers and when i say indispensable i mean that sometimes new products and brands can bring about such a profound change that they reshape an entire category netflix uber airbnb are of course the leading examples of this the marketing leader's role is to layer brand experiences and messaging to tighten those emotional bonds between brand and customer an example of a brand that has done this by doubling down on emotion is white claw so when a relatively unknown irish company launches a brand that awakens these kind of sleeping giants like anheuser-busch to the potential of alcoholic seltzer you know that this brand has arrived and when that brand fends off legacy giants to claim the largest share of the market you know that that brand is here to stay whiteclaw has proven to create uncommon value by breaking boundaries a significant reason that white claw blew open the doors to this category was that it shaped its go-to market message to reflect a new gender reality right storied alcohol brands oftentimes have a difficult time getting out of the legacy sort of sexist tropes but whiteclaw had no such issue it created a drink that both men and women could enjoy right society's perception of gender is evolving and white cloth is both a testament to that change and a beneficiary of that broad kind of cultural shift and it has become indispensable because it has tapped into its community white claws secret weapon uh secret weapon in um in upending a category of incumbents with you know large budgets was to capture the zeitgeist with very little traditional marketing and instead rely on user generated content uh sanjeev gajiwala is the senior vice president of marketing at whiteclaw and he told us that we want to let consumers have the conversation they want to have i'm not interested in forcing myself into a conversation they're already having about me after emotion the next most important component here is salience salience indicates whether a brand is at top of mind in its category and salience requires you to really kind of understand the zeitgeist right what are consumers looking for today which are the brands that they are at drifting to and why where is the cultural and social momentum going and how do you play a role currently we're finding that consumer changes in behavior and in attitude are a leading they're sort of driving this preference for businesses that feel human 41 of us consumers say that they want to buy from entrepreneurial startups there is an inherent appeal right now in the small business that feels local and feels authentic and there are a number of reasons for this sort of new preference or taste namely right we're not only coming out of a public health crisis but consumers have also become much more sensitive to a whole slew of other threats in our environment things like fractured or unstable trust in public and societal institutions they become more aware of the ampli amplification of misinformation in what the world health organization has called an infodemic there is intense uncertainty about our future and specifically our economic future growing discomfort with rapidly emerging technologies and other threats to our physical health and safety with these rising fears and hesitations and apprehensions in the backdrop consumers are beginning to lose trust in public or societal entities things like social media or the government or professional news sources and instead they're investing that trust in companies and entities that feel local or personal entities like one's own employer or certain businesses right good brands one's own friends and families so to enhance salience in this particular moment it's important to demonstrate how the brand resonates with and generates cultural momentum in a simple clear relatable way uh tiktok has um uh sort of you know tapped into this and and and as a result has seen astronomical growth um even though the pandemic induced homebound environment has not been that kind to short form mobile content right we all saw perhaps what happened with quibby which no longer really exists tick tock downloads continued unabated the rate of adoption outpaces other social media platforms so in terms of user numbers facebook took over four years and instagram took at six years to get to where tick tock did in three tick tock has achieved this kind of salience because it became a culture maker the lip syncing videos for example have captured popular imagination but also because it has been relatable all throughout right tik tok is less about the social network and its brand is more about creating sticky experiences right tick tock has stood out because its uh incarnations are designed to be authentic representations of ourselves versus our kind of best self that we might post on instagram david roth who's the ceo of the store wpp and chairman of brand z and bav group says that this authenticity and relatability enabled tick tock to carve out the differentiated position in an undifferentiated platform world now you don't have to be a big global brand like tik tok to do this right but you can borrow lessons from brands like tik tok and create this own uh sort of cultural momentum within your consumer groups third and finally is fit so put simply fit represents how well a brand meets a person's needs it informs how irrelevant a brand is to a person's lifestyle as well as how it meets the tangible needs so when you look at fit through the lens of classic marketing it's about the brand offering the right product or service at the right price in a place or a manner that is accessible to the customer and for the fit to work we have to understand where people are right how technology is changing customer needs and customer expectations and how this is also changing the ways in which people shop right where they go to get value or to find the brands and products that solve their needs and in this regard there are three timely insights to know one is that the pandemic has radically accelerated five key human attitudes that affect the future of how we buy those include the willingness to experiment our data had shown that consumers have become much more willing to try out new brands and products and experiences the risk associated with doing something new today is much less than it was two years ago five years ago or 10 years ago it includes the expectation to use devices to get things done right how often do we turn to our mobile phone and expect to find the exact product that we need it at the time that we need it the expectation to blend digital and physical experiences information savviness navigating information consuming information and finding valuable resources to help us solve our needs and then finally self-efficacy which is that drive to find the brand that helps the consumer optimize for well-being the second uh sort of major piece here is that consumer sensitivities are changing especially coming out of the last 16 months or so of the pandemic around a third of consumers are now saying that they spend more time thinking about how they can contribute to their local community spend more time thinking about the condition of the environment or about how they can contribute to the well-being of people around the world over half of consumers in the us are projecting these sensitivities onto their brand choices are not and are now evaluating brands according to how the company might help them play a role in their local community for the environment or in the broader global community and three the way to express a tighter fit between brand and consumer is through trust which is also changing fit is very much related to trust right you're essentially saying that i believe this brand will solve my problem right i trust that this brand will follow through on its promise and solve my problem and you again are strategically well positioned here because ebay's enabling connections between individuals and small businesses drives trusted transactions and ebay's commitment to economically empowering small businesses and even their charitable efforts help to drive engagement and trust and loyalty to a small business my team has also spent some time digging into the dynamics of trust and we found that things like consistency are important to building a trusted brand consumers have said that i could not live without my netflix or my internet service they were reliable service was never interrupted consistency is about consistency of product and of the experience but trust also requires brands to exude a sense of competence right consumers have been saying that they're most optimistic about technology companies and companies in the digital documents business because they make it possible for contactless transactions like online check deposits and online document signing this is a way of sort of showing the consumer that the company is equipped to handle uh the new sort of experience moving forward trust is also a function of dependability right is the brand on the customer's side and by the customer side even through times of crisis like we we've witnessed during the pandemic and trust is a function of empathy right does the brand express a sense of empathy for the customer acknowledge how the customer feels in a particular moment and sort of acknowledge that the brand is listening to consumers and consumer needs so the message here is to show up for customers by offering the right product in a manner that is accessible to the consumer right fit is sustained and nurtured when consumers believe that a brand is right for them and for everyone else that's like them right digital connects massive communities of empower of empowered consumers who flock together in the internet and brands grow stronger as they meld with these communities and harness the momentum of these communities and sort of create a bond around common themes health and beauty brands like the good day young milk ritual are all examples of small businesses that built a really strong message they built a strong community and a loyal following anchored around shared beliefs like transparency veganism or free products so by pulling on these levers of salience emotion and fit you can dial up brand energy that power that fuels customer engagement along the purchase journey or along the funnel and that impacts high value outcomes around the brand so i'll leave you uh with the sort of recap of actionable takeaways here and recommendations which include the need to honor how customers feel in the moment and emphasize how you create uncommon value that is indispensable demonstrate how the brand generates cultural momentum through simple clear relatable language and experience and then show up for customers by offering the right product in a manner that is accessible to the customer and with this sort of message to experiment as well right i'd like to leave you on this note of now is really the time to experiment with and invest in your customers um the past year and a half has brought about so much commercial economic cultural and social change that consumers are now giving companies more permission to get creative and try new things so this is a particularly fruitful moment in time to experiment innovate get creative and put your ideas and thoughts into action when building and evolving and furthering your brands so thank you very much for joining the session and enjoy the rest of the conference
2021-08-13 10:10
