The Future of Branding

Brands are more like “best friends” – they form an important part of our lives, carry specific meaning for every individual and are accepted or rejected based on how well they keep promises. Brands are so ingrained in our daily lives that we cannot do without them.

The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a "name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.”

 

Walking down the memory lane of ‘branding,’ we can find the English artisan, Josian Wedgwood, building the first modern business brand. Wedgwood was able to stimulate demand for his more profitable tableware and command premium price over comparable tableware and other products. Those were the days of the 18th century when the term branding was not known. By the 1920s branding as a discipline had emerged as one of the key tools of marketing. Pioneers in the development of this discipline were Procter & Gamble and the Lever Brothers.

 

Goodyear, in 1996, described the evolution of brands in six stages. The first four stages represent a traditional classic marketing approach where the value of a brand was instrumental as it offered customers certain ends to achieve; the last two stages represent a post-modern approach to branding. The future of branding will most likely be based on the post-modern approach with the following being the cardinal focus:

 

Design is not only about a logotype or the product; it is about the entire brand universe. Designing your brand means caring for every little part of the brand; anything visual that represents the business. This means that you as a brand manager or owner of a company should put systems in place that ensure you have control over every part of the brand. When it comes to the logo, marketing material and stationary, it is usually easy. But most brands struggle when it comes to the products, the packaging, their offices, websites and more.

 

Social Media has allowed the sharing of views and content to grow exponentially, resulting in a power shift from the brand owners who produce and disseminate content. Communications from brands are now predominantly two-way rather than just ‘broadcast’ in nature. Your audiences will want to interact with you as well as each other, via Facebook, Twitter or any other current social media platform. You cannot stop the debate once it has started and you will aggravate people if you try. Social networks devour content, so to maintain interest, people need to create and share more relevant content.

 

Thinking ‘experientially’ - in the future people will bounce from one brand encounter to the next through each and every available touch-point. Desirable brands are so much more than just a product or service. They create an ‘experience’ that influences the head, the heart and the hand of customers. A typical example in Ghana politics is how President John Mahama used “Edey bee k3k3” slogan to influence people. You might remember that the same phrase was originally used by MTN to attract more customers. 

 

Good Framing of Attributes describe the product or service being produced. For example, the attributes of the brand, “Mercedes,” suggests that the automobile is expensive, well-built, well-engineered, durable, is prestigious, fast and so on. Other examples are Vodafone, “Power to you,” MTN, “Wherever you go” and Tigo, “Express yourself.”  Companies may use one or more of the attributes to advertise their products or services. The attributes must be personalized and sometimes it might take on the personality of an actual well known person or spokesperson (brand icon).

 

Customer centered - Attributes need to be translated into emotional and functional benefits, “I am safe in case of an accident”- Mercedes, “I can make SOS calls with no credit”- MTN or “I can borrow credit to make my calls”- Tigo.  There is also a move towards ‘co-creation,’ where staff, volunteers and customers have an active role in the brand identity development. A 2012 IBM survey of CEOs concluded that ‘the most successful organizations are those that co-create with customers,’ and Business Week proclaimed that co-creation is currently the ‘second largest innovation trend happening behind sustainability.’