There is tension at the heart of brands
The future for brands is about managing their identities as well as their relationships with customers and the world as a whole
“We are in a period of interregnum,” Zygmunt Bauman says. “We are between a time when we had certainties and another when the old ways of doing things no longer work. We don’t know what is going to replace this. We are experimenting with new ways of doing things.”
From organisations to individuals, there is a sense that it is impossible to predict the future. And even after you have made a decision after long deliberation and very careful, meticulous calculation, looking retrospectively, you still are not sure whether the decision was right or wrong.
Brands, as social actors, also suffer from uncertainty and anxiety. And the ones that don’t adapt in today’s landscape will suffer great pain — or will simply become irrelevant. That means we need to find new ways to build brand strategies that give brands the ability to design millions of unique experiences — almost in real time. In other words, brands need to become Liquid.
Becoming a Liquid Brand requires a new approach focused on the experience: simple concepts and actionable strategy based on an authentic organisation personality — putting people at the heart of the process.
Our model is simple: Strategy, Experience, Execution.
Built to last, meant to flex.
There is a very interesting challenge around mirroring customers. If a brand is adapting to appease person one and adapting differently to appeal person two (etc.), to what degree does the brand remain unchanged, and to what degree does the brand flex to become like every customer and every channel that it flows through?
Today, brands serve experiences that create emotional attachments and have become platforms where like-minded people come together. In this new role, they need to constantly adapt to their fast-changing environment in order to survive.
This means that being strictly “consistent” becomes a limitation — and will harm the brand, making it too static and inflexible. Modern brands must change, learn and adapt constantly. Brands need to nurture a continual conversation of truth, not just focus on key moments. Finding a “formula” reflecting the balance between fixed and flexible elements is part of modern brand design.
According to a Walker study, by 2020 (yes, next year), customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.
Gartner predicted that by 2019, more than 50% of organisations will redirect their investments to customer-experience innovations.
How to start:
The future for every brand is about managing, just like a human does, the core of its personality and identity, as well as the interrelationship it has with the rest of the world.
To what degree should a brand remain true to itself and to what degree should it spend time listening and reacting? It’s about managing the tension between the core of the brand and the adaptability of the brand.
A few things to keep in mind:
1. ’Human’ is core — purpose, behaviour, personality and value are the lenses we use to build a brand system and a set of behavioural patterns to work in the right way.
2. ‘Liquid’ does not happen on day one. It can’t — so we must create containers that can be filled and connected.
3. ‘’Interactions’ over time will define the brand. Know how to create these, and combine creativity and data to make the interactions human.
