Brands today face major challenges. Most brand gurus will tell you the importance of building brand awareness and loyalty. But how do you do that and where do you start? What are the key factors that matter right now for a brand?
Each decade superseding former decades has brought about challenges and opportunities for brands. What worked 20 years ago or even 10 years ago may not necessarily work now. When identifying a brand opportunity, one must keep abreast of social changes and innovations.
As a brand marketing firm, it has been vital for our company to be aware of what people care about, where they are and what they are doing. These are things that can often change. In looking at what brands must do to be noticed, loved and matter, here are basic pointers:
Know Your Audience
When it comes to discovering brands, each generation has unique preferences. For instance, Gen Z prefers to learn about products through online videos and influencer marketing. Yet, Millennials respond more to promotional ideas that include traditional online ads, social media marketing and branded podcasts. Research also suggests that brands targeting Boomers should be looking at helping them get more out of life. Ads on TV and email most capture their attention. While marketers may promote the emotional benefits of a brand to Boomers, research suggests they should first feature its practical uses. The point we are making is that each generational audience requires varying media tactics and responds differently to communication.
Audience Interaction is Key
Create experiences that invite your audience in and allow them to interact with one another, and the brand. If the organization representing the brand has a related cause, you can give them the chance to donate or learn more it. Experiential live events, either online or offline, drive interest and involvement. Be creative, you can use live streaming on multiple social media platforms, post videos on YouTube, offer an interactive webinar, plan an online event or get involved in an industry-related trade show. If your brand is more of a product than a service, think about ways in which you can people to try and share samples, then talk about it. You may even consider partnering with an influencer who is associated in a relatable category to your brand.
Link Cultural Trends to Market Opportunities
As example, capitalize on developments in augmented reality, artificial intelligence, voice activated browsing and voice assistants like Alexa, and digital out of home combined with mobile location data to have consumers notice and experiment with your brand. Millennials and Gen Z – two of the largest buyer demographics – love all things customized. However, Gen Z has a different set of considerations for making buying decisions. As Gen Z grows up and newer generations come in, personalization is going to become increasingly inevitable, given the need for smarter audience management strategies and increased segmenting, targeting and personalization.
Be Open to Diversity, Variety and Inclusion
Inclusivity in creativity and design is good business and expands your addressable market. If you’re in the business of content creation, you’ll need to bring varied, underrepresented, and underserved cultural experiences and ways of thinking to your brainstorming. Brands have always utilized aspirational imagery to sell. But a growing number of consumers prefer advertising that represents the world around them and that is aligned with their values.
About:
Los Angeles based Sagon-Phior, a full service marketing and branding agency, utilizes emotional branding to build better relationships between a brand and an audience. Emotional branding enables more effective ways to increase brand awareness, loyalty and sales while revealing insights to better understand important, often unseen, patterns of consumer behavior.
Sagon-Phior has successfully applied this unique practice to many national and global brands in the technology, healthcare, banking and lifestyle industries. For more information, go to Sagon-Phior.com
