2021: What Brands Must Do To Win!!

This is the third and most important of Presciant’s analyses of learnings from 2020 and predictions for 2021—it is about what brands must do to win in the new world we’ve now entered. You can find them all on the website at this link.

Respect your brand

Have a strong purpose and bring the corporate brand out into the marketplace. Now that brands are judged by their behavior, the corporate brand and its reputation is more important than ever before.

Make sure that the purpose is reflected in every aspect of the business, from who you hire and how much you pay them, to what you make, what you do, and what you say.

 Be radically transparent. Open to every new idea. Tolerate and encourage experimentation and failure. Admit your mistakes and missteps, don’t hide them.

 Recognize the importance of brand. Make sure brand is treated with the respect it deserves as the source of business growth. Elevate the CMO’s job to growth leader. Make sure the CMO has the qualifications and experience to fit this role. Strive for brand and marketing to have a seat at the table with executive committees and boardrooms.

 Get the CEO to make the brand their own. Ensure that they believe in it, live up to it, and are visibly involved where it matters.

 Look ahead

 Never stop anticipating. Start from the future and work back. Don’t just focus on reacting to today’s demands and next quarter sales.

 Rethink your portfolio and innovation strategy by projecting where the world and your customers will be in 10 years’ time. Balance your innovation and marketing dollars between the businesses you have today and the ones you need for the future. Identify the products you have that don’t fit the future and develop a strategy to reimagine or transition them. Identify the products you don’t have but need to meet the desires of future customers; the categories you are not in where the growth will be; and the future markets you need to expand to. Develop a strategy to add them, whether through innovation or acquisition.

 Review the business models through which you take your brands to market. Explore opportunities to get much closer to your customers by accessing them directly. Knock down all boundaries between “e” and other commerce.

 Reorganize your portfolio to reflect your different relationships with your customers. Use customer relationship as the organizing principle to determine your architecture and how you apply your corporate and product brands to different situations.

 Target more stakeholders

 Look beyond customers and investors. Add society and community to the key audiences for your brand. Understand how all stakeholders create value for your business and how you can add value to their lives. Tailor your messages accordingly.

 Think of your audiences as people not as roles. Accept that there is no longer a distinction between B2B and B2C. Consider that the same person may interact with your brand in their work and personal lives. Design your brand experience to be 360 and touch audiences in different aspects of their lives.

 Devolve more decisions

 While retaining central control of brand purpose and essence, reverse the traditional top-down line of command where possible. Replace control with education so that it happens naturally. Allow local managers to make on-the-spot brand decisions. Let them take responsibility for anticipating and solving customer problems. Trust them to experiment with brand innovations as long as they tell you first.

 Measure, measure, measure

 Broaden and modernize how you measure your brand. You do need to know how customers perceive your brand, but you don’t need heavy, clunky traditional brand equity research. Take a mobile first approach. Add big data and digital analytics, but don’t let that drag you down into being purely sales and short-term focused. Expand measurement to new audiences and consider societal impact. And link everything to financial results. Put brand on the same level as other assets of the corporation and demonstrate its ROI. Then you have a chance of getting the right level of funding for marketing. And brand and marketing will take their rightful place in the boardroom.