3 customer-centric strategies that will boost your branding activities

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.

Do you want to know more about how you can apply Network Analysis to your company’s strategic branding? Want a more personalized approach? No problem. Just drop a few lines to my email or get in touch with me through LinkedIn

The medium is the message OR why we must stop being social media narcissists!

It is often argued that social media owes its success to this very fact: people show a flawless version of their lives, sparking envy and cynicism in others. Detractors of social media, arguing against the growth of impersonal relationships and lack of censorship, seem to have their work cut out for them. Marketer's, on the other hand, walk around in the dark stumbling upon crashing failures or unexpected success stories which they cannot replicate. Does this all mean that we must agree with those who say that social media cannot but cultivate shallow relationships and superficial egos?

My belief is however that they have it all wrong!

The thing people often miss is the fact that the internet is a tool. Too obvious? Perhaps, I say too that the internet is a medium. Confused? Well, let me explain.

When I say that the internet is a medium, I mean that it is actually a medium for creating relationships. The catch is, however, that these are not the same in kind as the face-to-face relationships you have with your closest friends, your family, or even your peers at works. The internet is a lousy medium to generate strong long lasting bonds. Understanding this is a necessary step, prior to grasping its true potential as a medium.

The word medium may perhaps carry some of the blame for the misunderstanding. The problem with the Medium is the results of taking it as representative of two basic images. On the one hand we have the medium as a sort of support for transporting something, where the image of, for instance, a pipeline, through which water flows freely, would be exemplar. The medium is, on the other hand taken as a sort of visual support that would somehow bring something distant to our presence, where for instance the TV would be a medium through which a TV-show is seen, or a screen the medium through which a projected image becomes visible. In both cases, however, what is at stake is the notion of the medium as essentially transparent and passive. The pipeline is a medium inasmuch as is it transports, without hazard or leakage, the water that flows through it. The moment at which the pipeline starts leaking the medium becomes visible, we become aware of the pipeline, but we do so always in a negative fashion—the pipeline has become a bad medium when we are aware that it is there leaking. The same can be said about the TV. The TV without a TV-show to watch is dead, but a broken TV is not much better. 

Curiously enough we become aware of the medium only when there is something wrong with it, and we, again, grant true importance to the TV-show, but not to the TV; to a certain extent if we could watch the show as a live audience then the TV becomes useless, because there would be no need for a medium, for a support. From this perspective, therefore, the internet would be expected to equally transport something; words, videos, photos, and, to my point here, it should also transport persons, to the extent that social media should replace face-to-face relations only there where flesh-n-bone interaction would not be possible.

I propose, in turn, that we shouldn't see the medium as a support that should somehow help us to create experiences that should resemble, albeit badly, the ‘real thing’ (the live TV-show, the friendly conversation, and the sensation of fresh water). From this point of view the medium will always be a plan b or a second best, whose positive qualities are always dismissed. The positive qualities of the medium are, for instance, being able to TiVo a show to see it later, while in my pyjamas with a pizza in my hands, or, for instance, being able to contact someone who we don’t and can’t know in person, but with whom we have a patent shared interest, and so on. 

The role of the medium, furthermore, is not to primarily allow me to become friends with a scientist in the North Pole or with a Movie star in Italy, for this would again be nothing but a reduction of the medium to a second best. What the medium so distinctively and concretely allows for in a wonderfully unique manner is for me to become familiar with the writing, photos, paintings, drawings, ideas,  and, in a word, the work (professional or not it doesn't matter) of virtually anyone around the globe. I may not be able to use the medium as a way to get to know a person’s deepest personal thoughts or funny quirks, but I can take advantage of it to create my own networks of shared interests. 

Given that these networks will expand or contract depending on the actual exchange that goes on through them, and given that the more that is shared between people the more solid a virtual relationship will be, it is then not surprising that the more you give the more you will be able to expand your role within your networks. It is not simply a matter of public advertisement or sophisticated public relationships—although it could be—because we are not simply bumping into strangers in an interruptive manner: networks live of mutual exchange and there is no mutual exchange in uninvited interruption. 

There is mutual exchange in shared interests, and these mutual exchanges are indeed gifts (don't miss Gift Giving and other Crazy ideas that Bosses don't Get), because the same as with teachers, mentors, or colleagues, we can cultivate and cherish the relationships we have with them, notwithstanding that they may not be the same in kind as the ones we have with our closest friends, our siblings, our kids or our parents.