Unlocking new valUes to boost brand repUtation
TrusT and transparency are the top brand values in the digital economy. They help to reaffirm the connection between what the brand stands for and what you as an individual would like to be associated with.”— Ashley George, former Global Head of Innovation and Consumerization Centre of Excellence, Glaxo smith Kline
Today, brand reputation matters more. And reputation care is a major aspect in corporate PR management. But how you build a brand and its image today has changed.
In a partnership project, Longitude Research and Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN) talked to leading marketing and communications experts to determine how they are embracing disruption in the search for enduring brand value and character. You may agree that marketing and communication of the recent past is unassuming and foreseeable, versus now when everything has morphed, as digital disruption turns the practice on its head. There are three key reasons brands matter more today:
n Any loss in brand value—while difficult to quantify—would have major implications for the valuation of businesses, individually and collectively. Brand value accounts for a significant part of the balance sheets of the world’s top companies. Thus, any loss in brand benefit could have a negative impact on the ability of businesses to raise capital, as well as realize opportunities for growth and synergy.
n Convenience, prices offered, user experience and empathy are what consumers crave for today. Digital disruptors give all these. Consumers want to align themselves with brands that fit their sense of self and reflect their identity. And in a world of near-perfect competition where platforms have the data, scale and financial muscle to compete and win almost anywhere, competing on emotions like empathy and trust is perhaps the only sustainable source of competitive advantage and differentiation.
n Disruptors are catching up by adopting more tried and tested methods. This happens while it could be argued that established companies have a valuable head start over digital disruptors when it comes to building (and rebuilding) trust in brands. Airbnb, for example, is tapping into the power of traditional brand-building tools with its TV campaign, helping to strengthen its reputation for trust following some negative stories about user discrimination on the platform.
The study also revealed these key takeaways:
n The instantaneous nature of new landscape has created new complexities and uncertainties. It has speeded up expectations and reactions, good and bad. As people increasingly consume media online and through mobile, advertising and PR technology platforms are key parts of the chief marketing and communication officers’ marketing strategy, providing a new source of real-time optimization.
n Marketers and communicators must have the best customer intelligence, the best data analysis and the ability to react quickly. This will make them operate successfully at the bottom of the funnel. Some established brands are most vulnerable there because they will struggle to be better at this than the likes of Amazon or Facebook. They need to compete with digital disruptors at the top of the funnel, where the focus is on building emotional engagement with consumers to influence their choice at the point of purchase—especially if those brands start selling their products with tools to connect brands with consumers in ways that are engaging and create personal relevance.
According to Ipsos Mori’s Global Trends Survey, 82 percent of consumers believe online advertising gets in the way of what they are trying to do on the Web. More than half of Internet users (57 percent) say they block out ads by using ad-blocking software or manually closing ad panes.
The Dentsu Aegis CMO Survey 2018 confirms these trends. Its findings reveal that engagement has become the most challenging part of the consumer lifecycle for brands. Respondents cited increasing levels of competition (56 percent), consumers’ intolerance for advertising (46 percent) and information overload (44 percent) as the main reasons for this.
n The pillars of traditional brandbuilding—beliefs, purpose, behavior, reputation, trust and emotion—are still very much in place. This is true even while the digital economy has delivered a toolkit that offers greater insight into consumer behavior. Marketing and communication continue to work. They just work differently from before. Jayne Heaford, teaching fellow, King’s College Business School, London stated, “Real-time information has really speeded up expectations and reactions, good and bad.”
n Gone are the days when brands could secure share of voice on all the prime communication channels. Now, technology has lowered the barriers to entry and those channels have been atomized. Faced with so much content across so many channels, consumers are becoming increasingly discerning about what they choose to watch or read. Alarmingly for brands that spend millions on advertising, the use of ad-blocking software is on the rise. When marketers earn consumers’ attention, it’s no longer by approaching them as a passive, unconditionally receptive audience. Rather than purely pushing messages, marketers are now in a two-way conversation with consumers that is often initiated—and largely controlled—by the consumer.
n Brands today are increasingly shaped by what they do and how they act (customer experience). In a recent Accenture study, 41 percent of consumers said they switched from one brand to another because the old brand did not take the time to learn about them and reflect that in its interactions with them. The digital economy has made this switching process easier, thanks to an increased choice of product and service providers, access to better information about these providers and lower costs of switching. “Marketers need to figure out how to stop marketing at consumers and how to start mattering to people,” said Dirk Herbert, chief strategy officer, US, DAN.
n Consumers, and investors, will buy into a company that stands for something beyond the product alone. Nike’s experience will underscore this claim. When Nike, for example, chose American football player Colin Kaepernick as the face of its latest “Just Do It” campaign, online sales jumped 31 percent in response and its share price hit a record high of $83.90. Admittedly, the positive numbers were a spike—the share price was down to around $75 at the time of writing (well below the pre-campaign level)—and commentators have been quick to remind the public of Nike’s ultimate profit motive.
This attitude is increasingly evident among younger consumers. According to research from global public relations firm MSL Group, 83 percent of millennials believe businesses should be involved in societal issues while 69 percent want businesses to make it easier for consumers to get involved in societal issues. In the Dentsu Aegis CMO Survey 2018, nearly 70 percent of CMOs say connecting their brand proposition to positive societal impact is an important way to engage with consumers over the next two years to three years.
There are several strategic questions that brands can use to gauge their readiness to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the changing marketing and communications landscape:
n Who are your target publics and brand champions? While CMOs need to own responsibility for brand building, CEOs should champion the brand, internally and externally. The role the CEO plays will depend on the company. Within single-brand companies, where the brand is the company and the company is the brand, the CEO’s involvement will be essential. In multiple-brand companies, the CEO will need to be involved in championing the corporate brand, but may take a smaller role in building product brands. Either way, the CEO’s support will help to win long-term investment for brand reputation building. In the digital economy, employees and consumers also have a role to play in championing a brand. Ashley George goes so far as to say responsibility for long-term brand building doesn’t lie solely with the CMO or CEO. “It lies in the social amplification of the employees and consumers themselves— how they rave, represent and talk about the brand.”
n Are your corporate chiefs on board with investment in brand and image building? As the communication functions have become more complex, it has broken down into separate teams that may include investor relations, corporate social responsibility, public affairs and corporate communications. PR communicators, for instance, have increasingly found themselves focusing on performance communication while responsibility for building the brand may straddle many different parts of the business.
Is your communication model-customer centric? The digital economy is largely demand-led. Most of contacts between people and brands are now initiated by consumers themselves, whose expectations of brands are also high. Within this context, building an innovative and reputable brand requires businesses to reorganize around the consumer, not just push messages to them. That requires transformation across all elements of culture, organization and technology.
Are you evaluating what are important to customers? When you understand what matters to customers and you have the metrics dashboard in place that tells you how well you are serving your customers, you can start to identify what will drive the greatest impact for them, like removing an existing pain point or delivering above and beyond the customer’s expectation.
Brand-management strategies have moved from five-year strategies to three years to one year, and now we’re in an agile space where everything is instant, Francois Botha, founder of Simple averred. Indeed, building a brand, as the study espouses, is a fluid and iterative process.
The report is part of an ongoing program of research into brand value in the digital economy. The proponents of the research hope it will encourage business leaders to pause for thought and rediscover the value of strong brands. All businesses can unlock new value in their brands, but it will take different keys depending on their specific context. Embarking on this journey will help businesses embrace the potential of disruption and find a new brand balance.
Pr Matters is a roundtable column by members of the local chapter of the united Kingdom-based International Public relations Association (Ipra), the world's premier organization for Pr professionals around the world. Bong r. Osorio is a communications consultant of ABs-CBN Corp., skyCable, Dentsu Aegis Network, government projects among others, after retiring as vice president and head of the Corporate Communications Division of ABs-CBN.
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