People make decisions based on what things say and how things look. It’s important these are working in concert, toward the same goal. Limitations or lack of synergy in essence set off a chain reaction of marketing deficiencies throughout all levels of an intimate brand.
STORY
The next level of building an intimate brand is called story. This level plays an increasingly important role as brands engage in more reciprocity and social marketing channels. Brand content in today’s omni-channel universe demands a strong narrative that connects audiences to a brand in emotionally driven ways. Leveraging the right mix of compelling archetypes can be a key way to provide emotional direction and content orientation. Brands charged by powerful narratives will foster greater engagement and relevance. Story can encompass social media, integrated campaigns, creative content and thought leadership.
In a fluid marketplace, brands armed with a strong story level can pivot, react and stay ahead of the competition. They can also initiate programs that encourage reciprocity and make users feel involved and encouraged. This is becoming increasingly vital. While almost all brands have some version of essence, not all brands have well-developed story components. A strong narrative enables segmented communications to sharing, bonding, and fusing customers, and both engages and delights those connected to the brand, helping them deepen their relationships and move to the next stage of intimacy.
In the case of building the story component, look at the importance of creating powerful content and determining the optimal ways to share and distribute it to maximize its cost, effectiveness and engagement. This involves architecting the content: what to lead with, what to support, how the content gets segmented (by audience, geography, industry, etc.). Then it’s important to determine taxonomy: creating a technical plan for supporting content objectives with metadata and consistent nomenclature to enhance search results and build user familiarity with the campaign or language used. Last, consider merchandising: how the content gets segmented and shared. From enticing bite-size bits of information to infographics to video and long form material, how can the merchandising potential of this material be maximized? Where can dialogue be invited? Intimacy can be an important filter, both to help you build strong content and to make content decisions in terms of prioritization.
STORY: COMMON PITFALLS
A lack of story-related offerings often suggest a brand may have a limited tone, manner, and personality, basically not much distinctiveness in the market. Whether it’s ideas consumers connect with or valuable information for a business audience, without story, brands will have a hard time engaging with their users and deepening reciprocal relationships.
EXPERIENCE
The final part of the framework in shaping a more intimate brand is the most expansive and encompassing; it is where the rubber meets the road between brand and its stakeholders. It is one thing to have a strong brand in theory; the experience phase is where the brand lives in practice. This includes all the physical, environmental, and digital worlds where a brand exists. The goal is orchestrating an elevated experience that centers on delivering more personalized, memorable and enhanced moments, in more places, across more devices. Whether physical or digital touchpoints, stakeholders of the brand are increasingly attuned to the consistency and overall caliber of brands. With this greater scrutiny comes less tolerance for weak retail experiences, poor customer service, or product or services failures. Further compounding the challenge, marketing channels today are becoming more fractured, and they are evolving, which forces brands to adapt and embed themselves with greater frequency and efficiency.
Look at the customer’s journey across multiple touchpoints to map a carefully considered range of experiences through integrated programs and initiatives.
Here, understanding your Brand Intimacy Quotient score can be invaluable. You can see what archetypes you’ve been associated with, which stages you’re effectively building bonds and which users (male, female, old, young, income levels) you’re most successful at connecting with. From there, a more detailed journey mapping can focus on the brand’s ability to engage and delight customers more effectively and align the growing and complex universe of touchpoints. From how the infrastructure can better support the desired outcomes, to the tools and processes that bring the experience to life, orchestrate synergized experiences that are designed to deepen bonds and encourage reciprocity. Here it’s key to dimension and bring to life appropriate triggers like select archetypes, key messages, visual cues, design components, personalized communications, and opportunities for dialogue.
EXPERIENCE: COMMON PITFALLS
It may be surprising to highlight that often well executed brand experiences are limited by antiquated infrastructure and processes. Uninspired materials distributed across channels that are not frequently updated or optimized worsen the impact. There is a lack of creativity with touchpoints that influence behavior. Often we find diminished attention to detail, or else few campaigns that attempt to engage customers in new ways. These are all missed opportunities to build dialogue and foster relationships to improve your brand intimacy performance.
3-4
THE BRAND INTIMACY PLATFORM
Marketers today are facing increasing pressures to demonstrate a return on investment and the ability to be seen within their organizations as in control of the brand. Truly intimate brands start by excelling inside of organizations first. A strong, unified culture aligned to a compelling vision and a clear articulation of the brand promise is the priority before even trying to convert prospects into customers.
In these dynamic and evolving times there is top down pressure within the leadership of companies to create tangible results in quarters versus years. Financial measures increasingly supersede more intangibles ones that are associated with maintaining strong brands like goodwill, equity or even brand value. Without a meaningful measurement for your brand like the Brand Intimacy Quotient, the actual bonds formed with customers are left to be measured in only transactional ways.
It is against this void that we built the Brand Intimacy Platform, software designed to create cohesion and power for your brand and further build bonds across your organization. The platform has evolved through an amalgamation of disparate tools used by Fortune 1,000 companies that spanned numerous industries such as finance, healthcare, automotive, real estate, technology and consumer goods. We’ve created a battle-ready suite of functionality that solves disparate items like digital asset management (DAM), brand management and intranet content management. Over the years, the tools have integrated into a variety of enterprise environments and have been customized for the diverse needs of brands of every scale and type. We observed that as cloud-based platforms proliferate and the landscape continues to get crowded, software that unites a marketing organization and its community of internal and external stakeholders remains limited. Armed with our new paradigm of brand intimacy, we sought to align our various distinct tools and features and unite them into a powerful platform focused on building stronger bonds for the entire marketing ecosystem of stakeholders. Implementing and using software that delivers the glue for managing and deploying brands depends on several key criteria. Next, we detail each tenet with some support examples. These are important to consider as you tackle ways to maintain, build and advance your intimate brand with a platform like the one we describe or with other solutions.
INTEGRATION
The biggest initial barrier marketers typically face is one of technical infrastructure within organizations. The degree of flexibility and openness to adding platforms within a company creates, at a minimum, tension between marketing and technology teams, and at worst, a major struggle.
The Brand Intimacy Platform is built to integrate primarily with broad enterprise-wide systems like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft (and others) that establish the critical technical foundation for many companies. Secondarily, the platform is designed to also integrate with the myriad of other cloud solutions th
at may be in use in areas of the sales and marketing technology landscape including Salesforce, HubSpot or DAM systems like DropBox, Box or other web technologies like Google services and Adobe Cloud. Success for marketers today lies in the ability to build an ecosystem that is nimble and flexible with both the large technology super systems that run companies and the many niche and department-level tools that specific teams favor. As the landscape of solutions, platforms, and technologies continues to evolve and accelerate over time, the Brand Intimacy Platform remains flexible, open and adaptable.
MEASUREMENT AND INSIGHTS
While integration is key to the set-up and running of the platform, measurement and insights are the dynamic data that delivers brand performance feedback, predicative opportunities, and validation. The Brand Intimacy Platform unites a range of research and marketing data, tools and repositories. Against what can be a massive vault of material, marketers need effective sorting, filtering and search tools to find information in fast, visual and intuitive ways. An editorial layer is an option for some clients, that bring the insights more to life in a series of infographics, short blurbs, imagery and keywords.
Executives are continually searching for a sure thing—the silver bullet solution that will generate the next big increase in awareness, trial, or sales. In our practice working with Fortune 1,000 brands, and in discussions with marketers that represent the top ranking intimate brands, the conversation frequently involves understanding how they can reliably predict brand intimacy. We built a tool as part of the platform that helps predict the impact of potential marketing efforts on a brand’s intimacy quotient. This predictive model, or simulator, lets marketers and researchers alter their archetype or stage ratings to see how those changes could impact their overall intimacy score. This tool gives us a model for scenario planning which is extremely valuable when trying to develop new communication platforms, discover new ways to attract customers, or determine which brand to leverage when optimizing a brand or product architecture portfolio.
The simulator uses the model as a flexible desktop tool that can render scenarios by changing a brand’s archetype scores. Each increase or decrease in a particular archetype score will visualize the real-time impact on brand intimacy stages and overall quotient scores.
Naturally, this type of simulation is only possible with brands that have existing intimacy data or are using a proxy brand for comparative purposes. We are regularly surprised to see the impact that archetypes can have on more intimate brands. The combination of strong archetype pairs can also dramatically alter the score in surprising ways. The simulator was designed to visualize, test and explore a variety of scenarios before making marketing commitments.
Predicting brand intimacy can be as important as building a real-time tracking tool to measure it. Our clients are eager to understand and track in real-time the emotional performance of their brands. So, to complement our other research sources, we began to mine social media data to reveal additional current, candid, and comprehensive insights. According to Pew Research, more than 74 percent of all adult Internet users engage with social media, giving us a potentially deep and varied pool of data on brands and their users.123
Social listening and sentiment tracking tools paired with appropriate algorithms provide an effective means for marketers to survey the social web. Our aim is to provide up-to-the-minute feedback on a product, an athlete, or politician’s positive, neutral, or negative sentiment, and much more, by essentially aggregating social platforms, search portals, blogs, or news sites, and factoring what people write, comment, or share about a brand. We are building on sentiment by gathering verbatim comments, shared/posted images and even emoticons, which we believe all provide important emphasis or tone to the commentary.
By leveraging the influence and scale of social media, we are now adding the real-time tracking of emotional currency for a brand as a way to gauge market reactions and/or predict future performance.
COMMUNITY
A company’s internal culture plays a pivotal role in the success of any brand. The stronger the brand intimacy a brand builds with its customers, you can expect to see a cohesive team working within the organization delivering on their brand promise, meaning marketing community features are at the heart of the Brand Intimacy Platform. First and most importantly, access is provided to audiences within and outside the company that are all working with or on marketing and communication efforts. Agencies, consultants, production vendors and partners are some of the typically invited stakeholders and the platform is the central destination for all those involved in building the brand.
A timeline driven ‘wall’ is the home screen experience to the platform which promotes the news and daily information flow related to the company. As it evolves in small and big ways the “pulse” home screen creates a manifestation of the people, events and achievements of the brand over time and a more engaging intranet feature.
Beyond the screen showcasing the living and breathing brand in action, the content of the platform forms the connective tissue for the community. This encompasses everything from essential guidance and key assets, to detailed explanations and rationale behind the strategies, design and activations that form the brand management core of the brand. It is relevant for everyone from the casual visitor looking for a simple asset or template, to the power user who needs to be fully conversant in the essence of the brand. The platform is designed to be visually beautiful, customized for the brand in all of the interface elements, and easy to navigate.
BEHAVIOR
Whether creating a new brand or transforming an existing one, building more intimate bonds with your customers requires some degree of transformation in the methods and priorities that drove your previous marketing efforts. This transformation demands new or augmented goals and motivations, and ultimately new outcomes from your marketing and communication teams, agencies, partners and vendors. That’s why the Brand Intimacy Platform is engineered to encourage on-brand behavior and strong bonds internally. From the pulse home screen that first greets users, the goal is to promote commenting and sharing. Social collaboration is central to the user experience. Some clients choose to go further having an internal awards section that allows member participation through voting and recognition of awards for excellence and best practices.
On a more pragmatic level, a robust help desk feature creates a valuable way to govern brand requirements. This part of the platform creates a streamlined workflow that allows different departments like marketing, sales and legal to review and comment on materials prior to release. Our clients have saved millions of dollars on this functionality alone, gaining stronger compliance and controls while identifying weak areas to the brand or the marketing organization they need to address. Once the Brand Intimacy Platform becomes established and engrained within a company, we see a greatly elevated attitude and performance around the brand. The platform resolves and clarifies ambiguities and unknowns related to the brand, thus the time saved by no longer educating or policing can be used toward solving more creative marketing and strategic issues.
As the brand projects outward or gets activated on screens and environments, the Brand Intimacy Platform performs a critical function in improving and transforming the way the brands sells itself. The platform is designed to empower sales and communication teams to effectively engage with their audiences using the latest content that is easily updated and centrally managed. Whether in intimate iPad demonstrations, on touch screen kiosks, or across massive video walls in sales/retail environments, the platform delivers a compelling selling experience of the brand’s products and services to customers of all kinds. One of the most powerful aspects of the platform is that every action or follow-up is measured, tracked and can be integrated with sales or CRM tools. A dashboard of internal user activities as well as the status of kiosks or screens in use is summarized in a detailed dashboard, enabling a clear perspective on who’s utilizing tools, what’s connecting with customers and
what can be further optimized.
IMPACT
The relationships or bonds your brand forms are dynamic and ever-evolving. As we have been detailing, to thrive in marketing today, you need a software marketing platform that effectively manages, connects and enables your intimate brand.
For IT groups that are responsible for technology infrastructure, brand platforms have to deliver low overhead, ease of deployment and a modular suite of functionality that can be scaled up or down. In companies large or small, platforms for marketing are typically on the lower end of priorities. Therefore, how easily or effectively marketing tools can be integrated plays a critical factor in their success.
Most importantly, software for creating brand intimacy is only as effective as the human processes and outcomes they enhance or improve. Every second of every day, a brand is either building or diluting its intimacy with stakeholders. The goal of our marketing platform is to help teams interpret and guide the nuances and evolution of the brand over time. A software platform is an essential tool when trying to advance an intimate brand, particularly across geographies and divisions.
LOOKING AHEAD
In Chapter 1.5, Discovery, one of the key findings is that technology can either enable or diminish brand intimacy. As technology continues to advance, the impact on how brands are built, managed and ultimately experienced requires that we ensure technology is working effectively to build stronger bonds and relationships.
This is both an exciting and daunting possibility. We are living in a time of profound innovation of artificial intelligence and automation. Connected appliances bring virtual assistants into our homes while in business some of the biggest challenges we face regarding healthcare or finance are now the responsibility of computers to solve. For us in marketing, we seek automation techniques that scan and react to our online behavior. Media has become programmatic and at the time of this writing, Adobe just announced an experimental program called Sensei that uses machine learning to create graphics and web layouts. There are already online tools that create unique names from word parts, apps that generate logos from sketches and programs that can write long form copy that is indistinguishable from human authors. We can anticipate that every aspect of the brand creation and marketing process will soon evolve from being aided by computers to being mainly created and managed by them.
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