Brand Growth Through Technology

As we’ve been discussing in the past couple weeks, the old playbook to spur brand growth has become antiquated and is quickly becoming obsolete. No longer can we turn a brand around with advertising and “branding” alone. We’ve established we need a new playbook. 

While we embark on this new journey, we need to know where technology plays into this new normal for brand growth. As we’ve said before:

“We have to face the facts that we live in a digital world now. There is no such thing as a digital strategy, it’s just strategy. However, we do believe that the right strategy mixed with the right technology is a crucial driver to The New Brand Growth Playbook.”

This statement gives us the mindset to succeed, we now need to put together the organizational pieces:

Brand Ownership

The idea of brand ownership is quickly changing as well. In today’s fast-paced, disruption-laden world, we can’t simply have a portfolio of brands using the same mindset and playbook varied by spend. We need complete brand ownership. An entity or group of people that run the business as a Brand-driven Business. This allows for decisions and strategies that not only communicate the brand’s promise, but fulfills it with every interaction, external or internal.  

Strategy

As we discussed in the New Brand Growth Playbook, we have to look at and structure our business in a new way. From operations to communications to actual product or service design, each element needs to live together and separately, depending on the consumer interaction and lifetime relationship. Here we’ll move beyond a campaign or short-term mindset and into an always-on or long-term world. One where we value our customer relationships more than our non-customers.

Once we have the mindset and workstreams established, we can build a custom tech stack to help us achieve our business goals and fulfill our brand promise. The strategy is just a document without the power of technology behind it to activate.

Tech Stack

Current estimates have well over 6,800 different marketing tech solutions for CMOs and their brand teams to pull from. A bit overwhelming if you ask me and if you’re really looking to make a change. By having hyper-focused brand ownership and a holistic, detailed strategy to build your New Brand Growth Playbook, it makes it simpler to sift through the choices that are out there. 

“Technology is never the end. It is the means to get us to the end.”

The thing that we also have to remember as we’re building our New Brand Growth Playbook is that technology is never the end. It is the means to get us to the end. Our strategy is not traditional or digital; it’s just strategy.

Steps to Build Your New Brand Growth Playbook Tech Stack: 

• User Journey & Service Mapping: Once the strategy has been established, a simple user journey and service design mapping exercise will give you a sense of what categories of tools you’ll need to start with
• Relationship Data Landscape: Understanding the long-term value of your customer relationship, you can activate the user journey through data. Here you can identify what types of data to build on and how to gather that data
• Digital Product Roadmapping: This change won’t happen overnight and should be implemented in short sprints to be able to build, test, grow and iterate along with your brand growth and your consumer response. Building a long-term digital product roadmap will allow you to identify which elements are highest priority to solve your strategy and build those first. 
• Implementation, Test, Iterate: Now that we have the tools, the data and the roadmap, we begin implementation. As we’re implementing we not only measure ourselves against our tech and tool KPIs, but we measure ourselves against our business and brand KPIs. Remember, this tech stack is merely the engine that powers the strategy. Not the end. As we implement, we test and we iterate. The best disruptors in the industry, the ones with staying power, do this by sticking to their Brand-driven Business goals and make adjustments based on this tracking and how their consumers are responding.