Your customers don’t give a s**t about you. It’s time to change that.
Of all the businesses that exist out in the world, how many do you love? Not prefer. Not just like. But how many do you love? The reality is, that is a short list. Consumers don’t connect with businesses. People connect with brands.
This was one of many lessons I learned from the brilliant people and A-list brands I had the opportunity to work along side during my time at the Havas Chicago office. Most importantly, it was a massive lesson I learned and applied to building my own branding agency, EightySeven. Put simply, if you want to matter to a consumer, you need to matter to them.
The team at Havas conducted a public survey with 350,000 people and found that people wouldn’t care if 77% of the brands of the world ceased to exist. You read that right, 77%. Let’s look at it another way; if there were some Avengers level Thanos snap for brands, 23% would survive. You can take a look for yourself here.
Okay, so odds are you won’t survive. Myself included. What do we do now? Don’t worry; this isn’t all doom and gloom. Like any big problem, there’s always an opportunity in disguise. In this case, let’s look at your business differently…
- Don’t just run your business. Manage your brand.
- Don’t market to customers. Connect with people.
- Don’t make products. Improve your customer’s lives.
- Don’t play it safe. Stand for something.
The list doesn’t stop here, but you get the idea. These little sayings aren’t just some woo-woo positive thinking, its’ a mental exercise for building a brand for your business. Your customers want more from you than products. They want to interact with brands that can help enhance their lives. When baby boomers had the top buying power, this didn’t matter since only 63% wanted an experience beyond the product. But today? 76% of Gen X, 84% of Millennials, and 87% of Gen Z want brands to deliver more than products.
So let’s say you decide to deliver more of a brand promise (values, personality, connection) versus just product, you’ve immediately become a consideration to the majority of people with top buying power. But wait, there’s more.
Let’s take a look at the top 30 meaningful brands out in the world that connected brands with people. They’re the “big dogs” of brands like BMW, Microsoft, YouTube, Johnson & Johnson, etc. But the most eye-opening number is that this index of brands that deliver more than product and connect with consumers outperform stock market growth by 134%.
But let’s boil that down since we’re probably not working with publicly traded brands and just blanket statement say brands that deliver more than product and connect with customers outperform their industry.
So what if you implemented these shifts into your business? Started thinking about what your brand promise is, how you can deliver more than product and connect with customers? It won’t happen overnight, but you’ll start turning your customers into fanatics. And to any business owner, a fantastic customer is worth their weight in gold.
So what’s the key takeaway of all this? When done thoughtfully and strategically, branding is always good business.
Article was written by Brand Designer and founder of EightySeven, Maxwell Billings. If your business could use a better brand story to connect with your people, let’s talk at madeby87.com.
