Brand news, views & insights: July 2024

E before C, except after B

E for Employee experience.

Before C for Customer experience.

Except, of course, if you’ve already been thinking holistically about B for Brand experience.

All too often, however, ‘customer-centricity’ is heralded with such great fanfare that it monopolises the attention of executives to the point that they overlook the missing link in the company’s evolution, their own employees.

Nowhere does this feel more palpable nowadays than the recruitment experience.

Companies that promise their customers simplicity at every step while their recruitment process creates complexity for employees with every hurdle.

Companies that strive for customer empathy with every ad created while they ooze a sense of antipathy with every employee application ghosted.

It was just last week that a client asked me this question:

We’re thinking of leveraging our brand in order to elevate our customer experience, do you foresee any risks?

The risk is the mismatch between the Employee experience and the Customer experience.

You can avoid this risk by building the Employee experience before the Customer experience, or at least in tandem with it. But, if your company focuses on elevating one without the other, what goes up could come at the cost of employees feeling let down.

It creates a customer bubble.

One day, sooner or later, the bubble will burst.

Get your Employee experience right, and you won’t risk your Customer experience going wrong.

Business, brand and home improvement

When we first received hipages’ brief to transform their brand, I knew immediately what I needed to do.

Get my gate fixed.

What better way to understand the hipages brand than to experience it.

It’s part of our immersive, first-hand, try-buy-use ethos.

Plus, it’s core to our proven philosophy that strong brands are built with purpose but ultimately defined by experience.

hipages helped me fix my gate by connecting me to a tradie named Jordan; and, we've been helping hipages by bolstering its business transformation and turning strategy into reality.

We’ve not only reinforced hipages’ purpose, but also renovated its brand strategy, identity and experience.

What made this possible was working together with hipages' Marketing team together with their Product team and their Technology team too – and equipping them with brand tools and training so that the brand can work harder in those moments that matter to build an altogether better experience.

To learn more, here are the news story and the case study to paint the full picture of the brand’s renovation. After all, it’s more than just a new lick of paint ;)

From us to AU

One of the benefits of forming part of a global company is that we’re naturally inclined to look far and wide for insights and ideas.

It’s a combination of curious minds and informal chats, thanks to our peers around the world, whether they’re in Paris or Sao Paolo.

It also means we can share the best of both worlds: we come independently minded and locally owned, together with global relationships and resources of FutureBrand worldwide.

This time, we’ve got our friends in New York to thank for sharing the latest brand thinking from the US to Australia.

The first-ever FutureBrand Consumer Index reveals a range of insights to help consumer goods businesses to evolve and grow, as and when times change. This in-depth study uses the FutureBrand Index methodology to assess 100 undeniably everyday brands in the US, and its findings are no less relevant to consumer brands in Australia.

You can download the report here.

If I were to highlight one key insight, it would be this.

All brands uniformly excelled and faltered in the same areas.

Which leads me to pose this question.

Is there a risk that similarly formulaic approaches will make the Australian consumer brand landscape ripe for disruption too?

From the bush to centre stage

Just a few weeks ago, together with Bush Heritage Australia, we made our submission to present at the Fundraising Institute Australia’s annual conference in the new year.

It’s a prestigious event, organised by the peak body for fundraising, and the perfect stage on which to share the story of Bush Heritage Australia’s rebranding.

The organisation's reserve network stretches across 46 reserves, and its ambitions extend far beyond this: in 2022, Bush Heritage announced its 2030 strategy including a target to deepen and double its impact before the end of this decade.

An ambitious cause needs an ambitious brand.

But how do you strengthen the brand for an organisation that’s already a force of nature?

In this exclusive session created for Fundraising Institute Australia, we will tell the behind-the-scenes story of transforming a successful Not-For-Profit brand into an even more ambitious one – and we’ll share the five key lessons to help any NFP leverage more effectively one of its most valuable assets, its brand, for improved social and environmental outcomes.

For now, I thought it useful to share one of those lessons learned.

Look beyond the logo and make your brand a practical tool for people to use – marketers and non-marketers alike. For Bush Heritage, that included everything from the delivery of brand templates and training to the alignment of brand values to KPIs in order to embed the brand in the everyday experience.

We’re looking forward to the prospect of putting Bush Heritage centre stage, and of course to helping more NFPs build their brand for better outcomes.

Powered by productivity

I have been a big fan of productivity ever since we held our first productivity training session at FutureBrand back in 2016.

Since then, it’s been a focus for me and it’s something we’ve been revisiting as a team this year, running a new series of productivity pilots to see what works for us now.

One of the most useful pilots for the team has been the initiative to ‘switch off to switch on’ – by avoiding alerts that can distract us in unproductive ways.

For me, my favourite productivity tip has always been to get things out of my brain and write them down.

Because our brains are terrible storage units – they tend to forget things and, if they do remember them, they remember them at the wrong time (just like all the times I’ve remembered to send an email only after I’ve gone to bed).

But our brains are amazing processors, so writing things down frees our brains to process and analyse, ad infinitum…

That’s it for another month – and for another financial year. I hope that’s given you a few more insights and ideas for how your brand can give your business a measurable competitive advantage. See you in the future, all the best for now.