Do you
want your branding to go beyond an aesthetically appealing logo?
Then
your branding must become customer-oriented and re-focused with an objective in
mind: building a coherent and aspirational identity that consumers want to talk
about with others. Let me explain.
Building
a strong brand identity has become a must for businesses of all sizes. Branding
however has been traditionally approached, in smaller companies, by a visually
inclined creative, who is often a designer. The visual character of branding
has, no doubt, an enormous role to play; yet brand building in our Digital Era
has become a complex task, requiring the combination of strategy, consumer
intelligence and network thinking, if it is to result in successful market
positioning, customer loyalty and increased brand equity. This article
discusses the advantages you can derive from using network analysis, as the
main strategic approach behind your branding efforts—if you want to first know
more about Network Analysis take a look at What
is Network Analysis?
Let’s
get started.
1. Consumer-oriented Branding or Branding
as relationship building
Successful
branding, by which I mean, successful positioning of a brand that results in
effective differentiation is all about relationship building. Branding
relationships, however, are not only about relationships with your customers,
but also about the relationships you build with prospects, partners, and to a
degree, with all those who at some point can influence your customer’s journey.
Having
a customer oriented branding means that the purpose of your brand is to add
value to people's lives; this is how you want your brand to be perceived and
this is why your offering’s value is a continuation of your brand’s promise.
Defining the metrics or measurements by which you evaluate the quality of the
relationships you build, should be the starting point of your branding
activities.
The
key, however, is not to derive such measurements from generic recipes about
what good customer relationships should be, but rather to determine them based
on the values and the positioning statements that you have set for your brand.
This means, for instance, choosing a multidimensional perspective to measure
the value of your brand: combining brand equity measurements, which usually
rely on your financial performance, with perspectives that take into account
customer acquisition and lifetime value, as well as more localized aspects,
such as the authority of your branding-related content in SERP results and your
brand’s value promises, will provide a more accurate picture of your brand’s
value.
Building
fruitful relationships and evaluating their role is equally important: your
company story, your values and your customer experience, are all aspects that
are relational at their core and, as such, should be evaluated accordingly.
Shareability is, from this perspective, a way to measure your brand’s
relationships with customers and the wider public, yet it is not simply a
matter engagement, measured as a percentage of likes, shares or comments.
Shareability delivers greater value when it enables you to understand the
reasons, the motivations that people have, to engage with your brand—it may be
the emotional, reflective or entertaining qualities of a particular piece of
content, albeit always mediated by the relationship they have with your product
and your projected values. In all cases network analysis allows you to compare
types of content because it enables you to focus on the quality of the
relationships you are building, rather than simply describing the reaction of
individuals to certain types of content, which almost always ends up with the
same recommendation for companies: make your content trigger an emotional
response, even without having a clear understanding about the relation between
emotion and purchase decision, for instance.
2. From adoption to creation of brand
identity
When
establishing goals for their brands it is common for companies to use 3
well-known and established brand dimensions: image, message and mission (or
values). While these dimensions are relevant and can help you structure your
branding efforts, they are reductive and difficult to integrate with your
broader marketing activities. Branding imagery tends, by and large, to be
associated with logo design and in short, with things that are visually
appealing. In the online world where audio-visual content is key and where
infographics need to deliver value beyond aesthetics, such focus on image is
often too reductive—it also adds to the disconnection, between creative talent
and the more strategic managerial talent (production, marketing and sales
managers, etc.).
Your
company should avoid reducing its brand building efforts to a checklist of
sorts. Instead, it should, first and foremost, reconfigure such efforts around
the relationship that it wants to have with customers, prospects and the
general public. If branding, as relationship building is more about the
evaluation of the relationships that your company already has, then brand
building should be about the relationships that it wants to have.
Brand
building begins, therefore, when you think about the ways in which your brand
and, by implication, your offering relates to consumers, whose purchase
decisions have become investments—of time and money—on a shared identity. I
purposefully said, the way in which your
offering relates to consumers, because in order to fully grasp customer
experience one must begin by leaving behind the assumption that only consumers
are active, while your offering is passive. If your offering is passive,
then this means that your consumer experience is fundamentally out of your
control: it does not attempt to create long lasting memories or transform a
chore into a lively activity, among other ways in which your product delivers
value.
Taking
control of your customer experience and transforming your offering into an
active agent begins, no doubt, by having a detail rich understanding of your
consumers. In knowing how their expectations and preferences affect their
behaviour, not only as consumers, but also as teachers, parents, managers,
etc., your company is able to identify opportunities for your offering to
become active. A great example of this is the relationship of consumers with
Apple’s IPod. Instead of focusing exclusively on the convenience of having a
library of songs at all times in your pocket, the IPod’s customer experience is
built on the new experiences that are now possible for consumers owning an
IPod: being able to jog at the rhythm of a playlist that functions as an energy
boost, transforms a tedious workout into a memorable and enjoyable experience.
3. Your brand, your network
I have
discussed the ways in which a brand’s identity can be constructed, by focusing
on the value of relationships. The focus on relationships enables you to see
your brand as a bundle of relationships between humans, technologies, and
objects that come together to deliver unique consumer experiences. In other
words, the focus on relationships allows you to see your brand as essentially a
network. The concept of network is
often used as a synonym for the World Wide Web, yet more than the image of a
spider-web, a network is a mental model that allows you to coherently
understand organizations that are not hierarchical, that entail a variety of different
constitutive knots that can form internal networks and which are dynamic, that
is, change through time. Under this perspective, a brand can be understood as a
network with at least four main knots or internal networks: the network of
consumer experience, the network of communication channels, the organizational
network, and the network of partnerships.
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