The #futureofmarketing | Why Meaningful Branding Matters?

A few month earlier I ran a workshop for the Outbox Incubator, a very interesting initiative of Stemettes to attract more young girls to stick to STEM subjects and get interested in entrepreneurship as well. The particular challenge in putting my slides together laid in their age: how do you explain branding in the simplest of terms, to primary or high school students? But when it finally came together, I realised, this may just be the perfect way to explain these ideas to any branding virgin adult too. (And maybe provide a bit of a material for all brand marketers out there when they need to support their strategy.)

Let’s start with the basics: what is a brand?

My view and favourite explanation is that every brand serves as shortcut in reality. There is a mind-boggling variety of products, services and potential choices in almost all category. No wonder that people opt for wearing the same uniform every day or become somewhat repetitive in their breakfast choices: making decisions is hard and takes a lot of energy away. Even if the famous jam experiment has since been disproven, human brains are still geared towards efficiency and we are generally very happy to just beeline for the usual products and not worry too much about the content of our basket. (I mean look atMorrison’s 2010 study, the average British supermarket basket is not even very much different from those of 50 years earlier.)
If we have trust towards the brand of that product, that is.

Read the rest of it on Linkedin, where it has been featured, woopwoop.


  1. says

    That metaphor is powerful. It works in every category. Ask those kinds of questions to a leadership team about their customers and you get a whole different way of approaching the customer. When you start getting to the things that drive engagement, your relationships change. The specific ways you measure engagement change based on the product category, but it’s a good way to start.

  2. says

    Finally, you need to make sure you have the skills to use the technology. Will you need training? Do you need a training budget? You’re going to see more and more marketing budgets shift towards enablers like technology and analytics and, importantly, towards training. Certainly from a media perspective, you’ll continue to see a shift towards digital.

  3. says

    Marketers also have a responsibility to ensure that the inside of the corporation reflects the changes that are happening outside the company. Especially when it comes to technology, the pace of change among consumers is often faster than the changes inside the organisation. Think of how Facebook and Twitter and Google have changed our personal lives.

    • orsi says

      Yes, otherwise a brand would become irrelevant pretty quickly. But that requires companies understanding that amrketing is not only about communication it also needs to actively influence the product.

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