Intuitive Brand Building in Modern Times
Nov 28, 2018
Establishing Brand Experience
Remember the gut feeling you had to carry an umbrella on a warm, sunny day and an hour later, there’s a sudden downpour? How about the time a little voice inside your head told you to take a different route to work in the morning and you find out there was a massive traffic jam on your usual route? That “gut feeling” or know-it-all “little voice” was our INTUITION guiding us on the best way forward.
Steve Jobs once said, “Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect”. Given that he was one of the greatest brand builders in our time, the optimistic marketer in me wants to believe intuition played a big part.
A report by Forbes stated that 64% of people start a relationship with a business because of shared values. Brand excellence is the cumulative result of behaviours which bolster the fundamentals for which a brand stands and brand perception remains a vital differentiator between companies that thrive over those that merely survive.
How then do marketers successfully build a brand to effectively communicate the right values?
Creating brand experiences move beyond communicating features and benefits, to providing consumers with deep emotional connection to the brand1.
Feel your brand
What are the first three words that pop into your head when you think of your current organisation’s brand? At PCCW Solutions, our brand stands for innovation, agility and quality. We continuously seek to make these qualities resonate in the minds of our customers. As savvy marketers, we are uniquely positioned to influence the emotions behind the brand.
At the heart of every organisation, is a larger purpose, to alleviate some form of challenge faced by the changing competitive landscape. Marketers need to use their emotional compass to formulate messaging to highlight that purpose in a way that appeals to the target audience.
Starbucks holds nearly 40% of the USA coffee industry market share2, a surprisingly large number, considering the nation’s love for coffee and the availability of many cost effective alternative brands. Why then does that cup of freshly brewed Starbucks feel like such a treat? Some would argue it fulfils a psychological need that its competitors haven’t been able to by creating a sense of “upliftment” in our daily ritual3. By echoing a sense of reward and self-fulfilment in each marketing campaign, the Starbucks brand sets itself apart from competitors.
Prepare your mind
Today’s competitive business landscape requires strategies beyond price wars. To be successful, we need to know what we have, what our competitors have and what our consumers want. Fortunately, we don’t have to do all of this alone.
In the wise words of Albert Einstein, “Intuition comes to a prepared mind”.
Organisations can stay “prepared” with the vast amounts of available data to equip themselves with all they need to know about their consumer base.
Don’t you just love how Netflix recommends movies4 for you to watch which are “just your type”. How do they get it right so many times? Simple – data analytics. Netflix uses the data collected from our previous viewing habits to suggest new content which would appeal to us. Similarly, any organisation can utilise technology and analytics tools to better understand their consumer base and tailor marketing messages accordingly – in other words, prepare to win.
Grow Your Content, Grow Your Brand
As PCCW Solutions strives to keep growing globally, there is a need to grow our brand presence in international markets as well, places where we aren’t quite as established yet. It is imperative that we at PCCW Solutions devise strategies to reach out and engage our target audience. Personally, I think that developing and delivering the right content is the genesis of B2B marketing.
Content marketing has helped PCCW Solutions to build its brand for international expansion, delivering highly quantifiable results with real business opportunities and amassing social media followers. The organisation’s content marketing strategy is deceptively simple: think of what audiences can learn with good story telling and eye-catching creative design, and then keep them engaged for sustainable and impactful ROI.
Through our continuous efforts in building our brand digitally, PCCW Solutions was named as the B2B Winner of Digital Marketing Awards Asia 2017, jointly hosted by Forrester and CMO Innovation. We shone on the regional stage in 2018 by winning Brand Excellence in IT Sector and Best Use of Social Media Marketing in CMO Asia Awards in Singapore, and were named the winner of Silver Stevie® Award in the Award for Innovation in Content Marketing and Bronze Stevie® Award in the Award for Innovation in Social Media Marketing in the fifth annual Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards.
Listen to the Voice that Doesn’t Use Words
Intuition is essential in crafting unique experiences in your brand. Through intuitive collaboration, unique ideas come to life for the most important influence in your brand – People. Incorporating the human aspect into your brand, creates a way to listen, dive in, and reflect on the choices your customers make. Borrowing from the Persian poet, Rumi, “There’s a voice that doesn’t use words, listen” – Let your inner voice intuitively guide your branding strategy to deliver on your brand promise.
1 https://www.emotivebrand.com/making-your-brand-an-intuitive-choice/
2 https://www.statista.com/topics/1246/starbucks/
3 https://digitalsparkmarketing.com/strong-brand/
4 https://www.inc.com/james-paine/5-ways-big-data-is-changing-marketing.html
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