Strategy+Design

Mitch Baranowski wrote a fantastic piece on Fast Company’s CoExist site about the importance of ensuring brand relevance. Listen up! Branding is not a tactical free-for-all anymore!

Companies are paying much more attention to their brand culture and their brand perception these days because there are many more instantaneous customer touch-points than there have ever been. The social channels, for instance, have created a culture of radical transparency forcing companies to become much more authentic and trustworthy. Trust, as you know, is driven by brand value and brand promise.  And brand is all about people advocating those values.

Mitch provides 7 Universal Truths to help companies get to a point of ensuring their brand remains relevant with their market.

1. Be Human – your customers want your company to be honest rather than perfect.
2. Have a Point of View – Who are you? What drives you? What do you stand for? Why should I care?
3. Be the Cause – the old maxim is true: actions speaker louder than words.
4. Be a Catalyst for Change – go beyond cheerleading for social change and start your own movement and create ways for like-minded consumers to join in.
5. Sell an Experience, Not a Product – your customers may need stuff, but what they really want is to connect.
6. Create It Together – co-creativity is a powerful approach that holds space for innovating with consumers around a shared sense of purpose.
7. Build It from the Inside-Out – don’t give lip-service, engage your audience in helping your organization truly own these universal principles.

There are a lot of great companies that are living these 7 Universal Truths every day. Apple, The Body Shop, New Belgium Brewing Company, Cisco, Intel are all excellent examples that we can learn from. When you build your brand on a foundation of transparency, collaboration and larger social good, you will inherently foster a culture of enduring brand relevance.

Please read Mitch’s excellent article in it’s entirety. It’s well worth the read…  7 Universal Truths for Ensuring Brand Relevance.

If you have any experiences, thoughts or opinions about ensuring brand relevance, please share them below.