Doug Kessler, co-founder, Velocity Partners
“A great content brand is a lot like a great product brand: you win if you serve the customer (audience) better than the other bastards.
It’s hard for traditional B2B marketers to do this — we’re practically trained to push our ‘value props’ in people’s faces every chance we get — but, if we really, really start with the audience’s needs and work back from there, we’ve got a shot at it.
It means being brutally honest with yourself and your team. You may have spotted a genuine information need, but have you really put in the effort to deliver real value against it, or did you just ‘paint by numbers’? Be honest. You did, didn’t you? Go back and do it right.
Then it means being consistent. Don’t cheat your audience. Honour them. Earn their attention and reward it with value. It may not pay dividends this month, but it will. Guaranteed.”
Jodie Williams, director at The Marketing Pod
“When it comes to creating a consistent and compelling brand, it’s vital to ensure that your brand is built on truth. If you claim to be something you’re not, your customers and prospects will lose trust in your business, so you must ensure that you can back up your brand positioning.
We always ask our clients, ‘What do you think your customers would say about your brand today? And what would you like them to say about your brand in the future?’ It can be tempting to position your brand based on where you’d like to be, rather than where you are now, which could create unrealistic expectations among your customers. This doesn’t mean you can’t talk about your aspirations, but by focusing on what you can deliver today – and then doing so – you can build a really strong, trustworthy brand in the eyes of your customers.
It’s also important to remember that your brand will evolve over time, so you should regularly review your market positioning and your value proposition. Just make sure that any changes in your brand are always reflected in your visual identity and tone of voice. This way, you can bring your audience along with you on your brand’s journey and ensure that they always receive consistent messaging from your business.”
Stefan Doering, brand strategy lead at PwC
Three key elements that make a great brand are consistency, relevance and distinctiveness. The first is about being consistent – delivering a consistent experience for your customers every time that they can then expect and be accustomed to from your brand. Deliver every time, delight your customers and care about their experience with your brand. The second is about relevance – always ask, is this experience, this service or this product relevant to the need-state of my customer right now. Actively listen to their wants and needs and provide them with meaningful, relevant solutions for them – not a one size fits all approach. And finally distinctiveness – think about what makes your brand truly stand out, every time. Whether it’s going above and beyond in your customer experience, or showing creativity and imagination in your communications, or competitive differentiation in your product or category – distinctiveness matters, because it gives your customers something to remember you by, and create that mental availability front-of-mind when they are in market for your product or service.
Stephanie Pye, lead product marketing manager, Market Research Solutions at Momentive
People have many different views of what a brand is, but fundamentally a brand isn’t a tangible thing. Put simply, it’s what prospects subconsciously perceive and associate when they hear a brand’s name. It’s what people automatically think and say about a business behind closed doors.
Marketers know that customers should be at the heart of every brand strategy as it is their values and viewpoints that will help to shape and maintain a brand. Ultimately, brand longevity is decided by the customer and to pivot an offering or change core values without a concern for their current customers can be catastrophic for a brand name, reputation and therefore overall consistency. At Momentive, we use feedback to fuel our decision-making. For example, we recently underwent a rebrand as a company from the well-known name of SurveyMonkey to Momentive – and it took a village. Brand insights were our number one priority with feedback from over 22,000 customers and employees played a major role in our decision-making process. A rebrand is a big change, but we weren’t fundamentally changing the brand, only the name to encompass the variety of offerings we hold as a business. Through never assuming a viewpoint and using valuable feedback, we have been able to shift to offer our customers what they need most while maintaining our core values.
Sue Mizera, CEO, TorchFish
Powerful brands must always evolve, keep fresh and current, and continue to surprise and delight. But at the core of this evolution lies the power of brand consistency — because loyalists must always know what to expect from their relationship with their fave brands, much as they do from relationships with long-term best friends. And just as with people, the key to creating and maintaining consistent brand relationships comes down to two primary elements — your brand’s personality and its core values.
What defines your brand’s personality — is it familiar, friendly and nurturing? Is it edgy, bold and challenging? Is it surprising, transformational and experimental? All are compelling profiles, yet all are hugely different, and all are equally applicable to different brands within and across categories.
Highly related to your brand’s personality are your brand’s core values— those standards and principles that guide the brand’s development and keep its offerings, experiences and communities on track over time. Does your brand value heritage and tradition? or challenge and engagement? or innovation and new beginnings? Again, all are legitimate sets of core values, but they must be fundamental, always essential to your brand and ever consistent with your brand’s personality, to guarantee overall consistency over time.
For us, brand personality is a powerful, often under-developed and under-valued brand element that is totally strategic at its core. You can practically run your business to your brand personality. Through this blog, explore our approach to brand personality with brand archetypes, and be sure to view the video embedded with my partner James Risch explaining how archetypes work. In our experience, those people who always spark most to their company’s brand personality and archetype are CEOs! If you haven’t identified and fully articulated your brand’s core values, take the time to do so. Through this blog, you urgently learn what process is involved to determine your core values, in line with your brand’s personality and archetype.
Can brand personality and core values morph overtime? Absolutely. We have found that brands need to re-evaluate both their personality and core values about every six years. But these must be done in tandem, and they must not veer wildly from roots or one another. Rather, they must evolve as might be expected, towards maturity, authority and sophistication — just like people!
