This week as we continue our post-SIP brand pivot series, we’re looking at the fourth of six steps to successfully navigating a hard turn brand pivot. If you missed our initial post of the Brand Pivot series and Steps 1-3, check out Part One: Refocus, Restore, Realign.
Step 4. Reinvent The Brand Experience
Your brand is a promise you make. It’s a promise of purpose, of relevancy, of “truthiness,” of trustworthiness – and your organization must be able to deliver the promise in a meaningful, engaging manner. The brand must be signaled, spoken, written, and acted into being by everyone in your organization. So while we’re preparing to welcome back our customers, it’s a good time to check in with our brand, to find out if we really are putting them at the center of our experience, if they still are the hero of our brand story, if we’ll still be a good “fit,” if we really do “get them.”
Einfühlung
Your brand should lean into and lead with empathy; you must have the deep understanding that can only be achieved by walking a mile in the customers shoes. To put brand into action requires your organization understand its stakeholders, and particularly now, as the entire landscape has shifted in the past few months. This means leaning into and leading with empathy. When was the last time your organization created a matrix profile of buyer and stakeholder persona/s? Illustrated how your brand lets those stakeholders solve goals or solve specific problems? Do you encourage stakeholder engagement through appropriate experiences? Are you managing expectations?
As an organization, you should be refining your perspective. Are you embracing organizational and brand transparency, and weaving who you are, what you stand for and why you exist into the fabric of your brand?
Do you have a value mindset when it comes to competing? As we come out of SIP, we’re standing at a future of at least short/midterm economic uncertainty and voalitility. Recent history (2009-2014) shows even when times are tough, customers still, more often than not, make buying decisions on a range of factors (value) and not just price. Price cuts often hasten bad outcomes; establishing a strong value proposition and value chain are key. The brand needs to be of fair value, with fairness being more than mere price; fairness contains justice. Justice means the benefits-per-costs equation is equitable, dependable, fair. A recent example of a misstep in this area just this week – Covid-battered restaurants reopening, and adding a Covid-surcharge to customer bills. Customers were just not feeling it.
Are you taking a cross-functional approach to branding, with everyone from operations, facilities, customer service, sales, development, integral to helping conceptualize, shape, build and implement your brand experiences?
Are you prepared to do a deep dive on a data-driven approach to support your branding? Brands don’t “happen” overnight and organizations are feeling the pinch of urgency in making miracles happen about now. Quantitative and qualitative insight should drive brand experience decisions. In our experience, a holistic approach to creating and measuring brand experience across financial, brand, and employee metrics offers the most balanced set of data points from which to gauge and build your brand over time.
Building relevant brand experiences requires thinking about the mechanics of brand experience delivery, emotion, co-creation and omni-channel experiences. Is your organization creating emotional connections that mitigate risk, reassure, give peace of mind, provide security, enhance personal or organizational reputations? Understand how you want to make your stakeholders feel – then deliver those experiences to help you make that a reality.
Successful brands evolve from a customer-centric approach to the brand story and experience … they are the lead, the hero. Make sure you know who they are, why they are, where they are – and that they are at center stage for your brand.
Black Ink has provided brand story crafting and experience design to startups, micro and small-to-medium businesses and Fortune 500 companies across a wide range of industries in both regulated and non-regulated environments. Need a brand tune-up to set things in motion? We can jumpstart your organization’s brand realignment with empathy and brand mapping; customer/stakeholder persona matrix profile research/development; and value proposition and value chain creation.