Tag Archives: branding

Crisis in Consumer Trust: How Can Brands Rebuild Trust?

I recently wrote about the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, which revealed that trust is in crisis around the world. “The majority of respondents now lack full belief that the overall system is working for them,” the study found in regards to public trust in four key institutions – business, government, NGOs, and media. Edelman president and CEO Richard Edelman traces the roots of the current trust deficit to the 2008 recession, asserting that the combination of technological innovation and globalization has left many consumers feeling left behind.

In this age of social media dialogue and empowered consumer voices, unique challenges and opportunities are emerging for brands that wish to build trust in their products, leadership, and impact. How can we rebuild consumer trust at a time when the world feels increasingly polarized and consumers, who are eager and able to share their opinions, nonetheless feel that major institutions no longer have their best interests at heart?
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Leading Out Loud: The TED Guide’s Public Speaking Skill Set

Talking Points: Empowering Employees to Represent Your Brand

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Who is your spokesperson? Why does it matter? What makes a spokesperson great?

When it comes to putting a face on our brands, employees aren’t usually the first people we think of. However, while professional PR figures or social media influencers are masters of polish and presentation, the very lack of pretense is what makes an employee such a compelling representative. As “outsiders” of the traditional public relations field, employee’s “boots on the ground” experience and insight can make a powerful impact.

So, if you haven’t yet empowered employees to represent your brand to customers, investors, or the world at large, it’s time to give it some serious thought. If your first question is, “But how do I prepare them to spread our message?”, you aren’t alone. Luckily, the answer is simple and aligned with your existing employee engagement and development efforts.
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How Successful Brands Evolve Over Time

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A brand is a promise you make to your customers. It’s a hallmark of the consistency, quality, and efficacy of a company’s products or services. A brand is also an aspirational statement – we’ve encouraged brand-makers to ask themselves “Who do our customers want to be?”. A brand at its best both answers and fulfills this question.

But what happens as a brand ages and evolves? As a brand weathers multiple decades of innovation and market variation, change isn’t just an inevitability, it’s a mandate: evolve or risk being left behind. Here’s a look at three brands that have transitioned successfully over multiple decades of existence, with an eye towards what today’s brand-makers can learn from their example.
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How to Create & Sustain Brand Loyalty

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There are many schools of thought about what creates and sustains brand loyalty (that is, a consumer’s preference for one particular brand over another in the same market space). These range from practical matters of convenience to complex and interwoven psychological factors. In the age of social media, we often hear that “engagement” in an ongoing dialogue with a brand is what creates loyalty. Other marketers swear by the psychology of color in creating consumer preferences.

The reality is much more nuanced than either of these approaches indicate, of course. The deeper drivers of connection with a brand are more subtle than memorable packaging, a brilliant logo, or a witty Twitter mascot. New and growing brands that leverage these underlying factors to connect with customers can elevate their position in consumer consciousness and reap the rewards of brand loyalty and evangelism.
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Visual Branding in the Age of Social Media

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As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and today’s consumers are more visual than ever. Due in large part to the dominance of social media, we live in a world that is saturated with images. With so many selfies and “foodie” photos flashing in front of our eyes everyday, we’re over-exposed and yet primed for visual communication.

For marketers and branding experts, the challenge is to cut through the clutter and make your brand and your product stand out (both online and on the shelves). How can you tell your brand story visually? Here are a few tentpoles of visual branding to consider.
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Marketing to Millennials: 3 Key Lessons from Lilly Pulitzers Branding

1. Personalization

Whether it's videos on YouTube, sponsored Facebook content, or the “deals-of-the-day” promoted on Twitter, it's clear many marketing strategies catered to Millennials are heavily focused on social media.

When Lilly Pulitzer, the world famous women's boutique, set out to design a highly personalized marketing strategy for the Millennial generation, they started by analyzing the influence of the wide range of marketing projects that already existed. In an article in Harvard Business Review, Omar Artun explains,

“Data analytics helped us identify critical points in the customer life cycle and develop relevant marketing programs that best engage the Lilly girl in each situation. The team married insights from this platform with observations of stores and larger marketplace research.”

While it's clear Millennials are interacting and engaging with one another on social media, simply placing content on those platforms without the usage of analytics won't get you far. As Lilly Pulitzer learned, it was far more effective to tailor unique messages to individuals based upon their purchase history than it was to create an archetypal model of the Millennial shopper. As always, figuring out which analytics provide meaningful returns is key to effectively personalizing your campaign.

2. Online Interaction

Millennials live on their phones and laptops. Everything marketing – inquiring, searching, interacting and, most important, purchasing — is all done on their devices. However, this digitization of life shouldn't make us think Millennials want a dehumanized experience. Instead, this online and digital life should be seen as a form of self-expression and personality. In essence, Millennials online to interact with and express themselves to a wider audience.

Effective marketing campaigns understand this need for personalization and self-expression. A survey completed in 2014 by The McCarthy Group, revealed that 84 percent of Millennials no longer exhibit trust in traditional forms of marketing. Radio spots, television ads and in-your-face pop-out messages achieve very little, as these types of marketing seem generic and company-focused—the opposite of the genuine, content-driven ads this generation longs to interact with. Meaghan Moraes, a marketing specialist and writer, explains in an article for HubSpot:

“Millennials know what they want and know how to find it online. If they decide they want to go for their master’s degree, odds are that an in-your-face pop-up ad wasn’t the deciding factor.”

Understanding that purchases are seen as a form of self-expression can help determine your messaging. Take Lilly Pulitzer for example. According to Artun in the above Harvard Business Review article,

“We also found that our Millennial consumers showed a willingness to spend more on brands that focus on quality and authenticity—they valued the fact that the company hand paints all prints in-house and hides special surprises in the patterns, just as Lilly herself did in in the late 1950s.”

3. Shareable Self-Expression

If being a brand participant is a part of many Millennials' identities, then it's important for brands to allow them easy ways to share that information. Going beyond simple social media sharing buttons, this means creating sharable content, unique hashtags, and easily accessible brand stories. Marketing to Millennials should be seen as starting a growing conversation, not a one-way dictation.

For the Lilly Pulitzer brand, this meant creating a unique Snapchat filter. This method got them unique results:

“Engaging with this audience on their platform of choice gave us the opportunity to build an emotional connection and to tell our brand story in a visual way (ideal given that color and print are the hallmarks of the Lilly brand). Lilly was the first fashion brand to work with Snapchat to offer branded Snapchat filters for users that visited Lilly stores. During our first two-week summer campaign, the Snapchat filters delivered 97 percent more engagements than on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter combined.”

Bridging the Gap

So what do Millennials want? Personalized, shareable, digital experiences. This sounds relatively simple, but in the real world, it's rarely executed effectively. I look forward to see how other brands successfully (and unsuccessfully) reach out to this generation that wields so much social influence. And once their day in the sun is over, I'll also look forward to watching Millennials crack the puzzle of marketing to their successors.

Al Eidson is the owner of Eidson & Partners, a business and marketing strategy consultancy, and a founder of SparkLabKC, an early-stage startup accelerator program in Kansas City. He's an expert in taking products to market and has launched more than 220 new products and ventures through his career. He's also proud of killing off a great many problematic products before they hit the market. His vision involves meaningful and lasting products through innovation.

(image source: https://georgetownmetropolitan.com)

What Social Media Does for Your Business: Dove Changes the Conversation

Quality Over Quantity

Much in line with JetBlue's “Fly It Forward” approach, Dove understood a single gesture that's both effective and genuine could harness more power than dozens of posts, tweets or ads with no direction or purpose. So, in 2013 Dove released its “Real Beauty Sketches” video. In the ad, an actual FBI sketch artist completes two different drawings of the same woman—one based on her descriptions, another based on a stranger's. Every time, the woman's picture was much more beautiful based on the stranger's description than from her own.

The three-minute spot contained a powerful message: Women are far too hard on themselves about complying to a certain “image” or societal body type—and Dove proved it. In less than a month, the video elicited more than 114 MILLION views in more than 25 languages. However, the reactions didn't stop with views, as men and women across the world took to Twitter and Facebook to not only share their reactions but also to offer encouragement and kind words to others. Fernando Machado, VP of Dove Skin, explained,

“The campaign evoked an emotional reaction in millions of people that inspired them to share the positive message with others. Beyond just the millions of views and publicity impressions, it is the outpouring of testimonials from around the world that is exciting us.”

Dove transformed a three-minute spot into a global phenomenon. How?

They truly understood their customers, and they gave them a cause to rally behind and a platform to do it on. In an instant, their brand became synonymous with honesty, transparency and beauty. They gave their customers the cause and allowed them to help spread the word!

Partnerships and Perceptions

For Dove, the “Real Beauty Sketches” video was only the beginning. Now that they had reached their audience on social media, it was time to empower them. They knew powerful partnerships would be a must.

If an ultra-connectivity had given rise to these negative, unattainable standards of beauty, who better to partner with than Twitter? In early 2015, Dove partnered with Twitter to launch a collaborative campaign aimed at transforming the notions surrounding beauty and also the ways in which it was discussed using social media. The two began imploring women everywhere to abandon typical social media criticisms and adopt #SpeakBeautiful.

However, in order to build both campaign and brand awareness, Dove needed a splash, and it used the 2015 Oscars to provide just that. On a night where social media tends to be overly cynical and judgmental, Dove urged women across the world to tweet positively about body image and beauty throughout the show, while including #SpeakBeautiful! Within hours, the hashtag was trending across the United States.

And the campaign worked! According to research by Vayner Media and Dove:

In 2015 alone, #SpeakBeautiful was tweeted more than 168,000 times and created more than 8 million social media impressions.
The hashtag led to a massive reduction in negative Tweets about beauty and body image, dropping from more than 5.3 million in 2014 to 3.4 million in 2015–a 36.8 percent decrease
The #SpeakBeautiful campaign changed how people thought of the Dove brand, increasing brand affinity and brand sentiment among consumers more than 17 percent.

A Community Conversation

These calculated campaigns have created a community around Dove and its products. Because consumers identify so deeply with the company's mission to change the culture of our society, they simultaneously stand behind the brand while participating in the conversation. Dove's campaign did a great deal of work to show consumers that their brand had a mission for societal good behind their products, which is exactly what the consumers of today desire.

No Tall Tales: How Your Brand Can Tell Effective Stories

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I recently saw a piece of excellent spec work from some advertising students out of Germany titled “Dear Brother.” I won't spoil it for you if you haven't seen it, but the spot is moving, effective and tells an incredible story. In working to produce the spot, film students Dorian Lebherz and Daniel Titz, enlisted the support of Ashton Hinkison, a London-based agency, to get the casting right. As Lebherz says in his interview with brandchannel,

Since this spot focuses much more on character than on plot, the casting process was very important to us…[The actors] portrayed that sensible authenticity we were looking for and when they met for the first time, it really seemed as if they'd known each other their whole life.

The power and authenticity of the spot got me thinking about how storytelling is so often used in varying degrees across marketing and branding.

For most of us, some recurring character or story line has shaped at least a small potion of our experiences with advertising: the Geico Gecko, Progressive's anthropomorphized “Mayhem,” even Verizon's “Can you hear me now?” character. With the growth of social media and the increase in different media the Internet provides, this marketing technique has exploded to great effect. As Lebherz goes on to say in his interview,

“We wanted to tell a story that captures the audience emotionally in a very short period of time… We believe a cinematic story that creates emotions is always stronger than a rich assembly of different settings without storytelling.”

Let's take a look at why and how these stories can create meaningful connections with consumers.