The notion of a brand extends beyond the mere product or service; it's an experience that develops over time through multiple touchpoints within a company. These touchpoints traverse various functional areas of the company, from the parking attendant to the cashier and beyond.
Traditionally, marketing focused on creating promises and expectations, but the brand isn't just an external outcome like the projected image. It's an intrinsic element to the process itself and permeates the entire organization, fueling innovation and guiding employee behavior, which in turn influences the customer experience. This represents a paradigm shift from how branding was conceived in the past.
In the past, branding was tightly controlled and confined to visual identity; now, the focus shifts towards the internal workings of the organization, involving various business functions with which traditional marketing didn't typically engage, such as operations, human resources, and IT. These functions are responsible for delivering the brand across multiple touchpoints throughout the entire customer experience.
The dynamics of the industry are changing, as are the methods for assessing brand health and measuring success. This necessitates an evolution in the ways of working and the strategies adopted by companies to adapt to an ever-changing landscape.
What has radically changed, particularly in the last decade, is how brands are communicated to consumers, as well as the speed at which brands enter and exit popularity. Whereas previously a brand's lifecycle could be considered to span around 50 years, now brands can become irrelevant swiftly, being overtaken and going out of fashion at an incredible pace, over a span of years rather than decades.
Peter Drucker, hailed as the management thinker of the century, once said, "The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it sells." Many brands actually don't know what they're selling, but reaching the true purpose of the brand means understanding the real driving force behind your customers' behavior. Especially in the business-to-business context, it's essential to understand that customers aren't simply buying products; rather, they're seeking solutions for their needs. This has been a significant shift in the business landscape in recent years.
To effectively address this change, it's helpful to adopt a three-stage approach:
1. Identify a simple and recognizable truth for the target audience: this truth should be something that the target audience understands and believes in wholeheartedly. This forms the basis of communication with the customer.
2. Determine the brand truth: this is the unique and distinctive vision of the company or product that you want to convey to the audience. This concept should reflect the values, mission, and fundamental identity of the brand.
3. Blend the two truths for a purpose: combine the truth of the target audience with the brand truth to create a coherent and relevant message that resonates with the audience while promoting the brand's identity and goals.
In a media landscape, albeit increasingly fragmented, it's crucial to embrace an extremely simple mindset and maintain a consistent brand message. Brand consistency acts as the glue that binds together all the diverse communication activities, be they traditional or digital. While each communication channel requires a different approach, it's important that all messages and experiences offered uniformly reflect the brand's identity and values. This ensures that despite encountering the brand in various contexts and formats, consumers will be able to have a cohesive understanding of what the brand represents.
The most common communication channel utilized by businesses is social media, enabling interaction, collaboration, and content sharing among users. The impact of social media on consumer behavior encompasses a wide range of activities, spanning from information dissemination to the sharing of ideas and attitudes, and even to the monitoring of post-purchase behavior. This drives companies to be more interactive in their marketing communications and to devise innovative applications to make products and brands more accessible through online marketing efforts across social media channels. Through these social media marketing activities, businesses can establish personal profiles, offer online customer services, provide product information, and deliver special offers in a simple, cost-effective, and continuous manner.
Additionally, at a very low cost, informing customers is functional in terms of brand familiarity and awareness. Marketers are aware of the opportunities and appeal that social media have presented as part of their marketing strategy. Research has stated that social media marketing activities are significant parts of branding actions for companies. Social media marketing activities generally focus on customer satisfaction, effects, and behavioral intentions of customers.
Social media platforms are the online environment where people with common interests gather to share thoughts, comments, and ideas. The use of these online communication platforms on mobile devices in marketing actions by companies is critical because social media influence intention, trust, and purchasing by facilitating the sharing of knowledge and experiences among consumers. Many companies leverage online interactions among their users by encouraging customers to share their purchases with simple clicks using their preferred social media channel.
Businesses use social media as a platform for conducting direct marketing actions. In this sense, social media are pushing the boundaries of time and space in companies' interactions with potential consumers and promoting a sense of closeness. Through social media tools, companies have the opportunity to advertise products and brands, conduct low-cost promotions and advertising for their customers, and receive feedback from them.
Entertainment is a crucial component that encourages participant behavior and follow-up continuity, creating positive emotions about the brand in the minds of social media followers. Although the motivations for using social media vary, individuals emphasize that content that is most attention-grabbing is presented in an entertaining and enjoyable manner. In this regard, by providing entertaining shares, businesses should encourage likes and resharing by a large number of individuals and capitalize on it.
By utilizing social media as interactive communication between the company and the customer, it's possible to obtain requests and understand customer needs, opinions, and suggestions about the product and brand in real-time. Timeliness as another component of social media marketing activities means presenting the most recent/current information about products for customers.
Customization is the act of creating customer satisfaction based on the company's interaction with individual users. Businesses on social media can convey the uniqueness of the product and brand to customers through peer communication and can address their individual issues and influence product and brand preferences by actively responding to make them feel important.
Lastly, advertising refers to the advertising and promotional campaigns that businesses have carried out through social media to increase sales and develop their customer portfolio. Research on the effects of advertising on social media on customer perceptions and awareness has shown that advertising is a significant part of social media marketing activities.