CONTEXT
Marketing risks remaining stuck in the past, even as it tries rewriting its future. Most agencies now concede the increasingly homogenized and interchangeable nature of advertising long-ago lost its credibility with consumers who are “trained” to avoid its messages. They are less willing to concede, however, that the same may ultimately be true of social media.
CHALLENGE
We believe conventional assumptions about how organizations should build and communicate their brands will not help prepare them for tomorrow, unless meaningful content is created and leveraged to create deep and quality perceptions of the organization, and nurture community interests. Organizations have to remember Jim Collins’ advice that “many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness.” But who is listening?
If you want to get to effective branding, hitting the reset button on your marketing begins by accepting a new perspective on what marketing needs to accomplish. Divining brand meaning is one thing; being able to deliver on brand promise is another. There is no reason not to embrace whatever tactic it takes to build brands and sell products, so agencies that claim to provide media neutral brand strategies must offer more than lip service.
In a nutshell, you can’t differentiate and you can’t adequately communicate leadership, with superficial claims or thrown-together content, as seems to be the norm with most Social Media strategies.
“For purposes of brand building, proprietary content on topics
of public interest is more powerful than advertising.”
(Roger Martin, Rotman School of Business)
Companies that make the deep strategic, organizational and operational shifts required to build effective brands can become more agile, more productive, and accelerate revenue growth. Effective brand building is no longer solely about advertising claims and image-driven campaigns. It now requires marketing executives to step up to a broader, cross-functional coordination role, armed with deep insights about the decision journey consumers are undertaking and the tools needed to guide it. In this oversubscribed world, one thing, above all else, will influence branding success and this thing is “Trust”. If you aren’t a trusted brand, you will be a perpetual second-tier player, whether you aspire to market dominance or to be the best in your own small niche. Customers trust leaders.
SOLUTION
If leadership is essential to establishing trust, then organizations must hold their agencies accountable to new standards in order to create marketing strategies that center around establishing leadership. Before you dismiss the idea that this only attainable by a few large corporations with the financial and marketing clout to dominate a sector, you must stop to consider that leadership comes in many forms. We speak here specifically of thought leadership, a value that most organization can rightfully aspire to in their own way, if they are only willing to look inside and take stock of their unique knowledge and properly leverage it by building their brand communications strategy around it. This is what knowledge marketing can do.
