Living your brand is the new brand strategy.
Creating and communicating your brand promise is only scratching the surface on the value that your brand has in the marketplace. By expanding your brand to build interactions that actually fulfill your brand promise and developing how your brand acts in a relationship are the next levels of brand-value creation.
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As large organizations, we’ve spent years, if not decades, and millions, if not billions, of dollars crafting and communicating our brands. This has created a promise that we’ve put into the marketplace - a promise that consumers are now expecting to be fulfilled. Moving beyond the traditional ‘brand story’ video, consumers are looking for brands that have a well-rounded brand - a brand that fulfills the messages and promise they communicate.
This means that the position a brand holds in the marketplace, the promise it creates and the value of their products and services must be fulfilled at each touchpoint across the consumer experience. It’s no longer viable for a company to advertise their brand and expect a consumer to mindlessly go and buy it. It must be an orchestrated, consistent and progressive experience to engage your consumers to become advocates.
Truly living your brand starts with fully defining and deliberately building your consumer experience. This experience will prove to not only create an environment where only your brand can create, but also fulfill the promises with the consumer at each touch point. This manifests itself in three, high-level buckets.
Aesthetic
This, we should all know. The brand design and all of its elements need to be consistent and channel specific. This is what we’ve been building for years. The basic idea of a brand.
Interaction
The interaction is where incremental value is being created by fulfilling the promise the brand has created. Each interaction needs to be something that only your brand can create and something that is unique to your offerings to your consumers. As we see in the video above, over the last few years, the companies that focused heavily on brand interactions to fulfill their brand promise (Apple, Amazon, Google) have become the most valuable. Leading with the interaction as a component to your brand strategy expands the power and the acceptance of your brand.
Relationship
The next era of brand value and truly living your brand, will be the evolution of the relationship between the consumer and your brand. With personalization becoming an expectation from the consumer, we need to define and create how our brands build relationships over time. How do we listen, learn, react and empower? How do we lead or add value in our consumer’s lives? The idea of brand relationships to live your brand will quickly become a major driver in value for your brand.
Are you truly living your brand?