Brand news, views & insights: October 2024

What’s the next step for building your brand?

When you strengthen the connection between your brand purpose and the everyday experience, your brand gives your business a measurable competitive advantage.

That’s something you may well have heard me say. (Most likely more than once.)

It’s easy to say, much harder to do.

Different business units. Diverse stakeholders. Divergent points of view.

But there is a clue in what I say that can help to join the dots.

Measurable.

While measuring the impact of any brand transformation is an all-important outcome, it can also be a starting-point to frame how your brand delivers value to your business.

For my money, it's not simply a question of how your brand drives choice in and around the point of purchase, the true value ultimately comes with threading your brand through the whole of your business so that everyone can make the connection at every point of the value chain.

How you make the connection is a series of steps up and down what we call the Transformation Ladder, here it is.

One things leads to another, step by step.

Taking the example of a finance company, starting from the top:

Its business objective is to grow revenue by selling more, new products to existing customers.        

…by meeting its marketing objective to encourage those existing customers to trial new products that can enhance the way they mange their money.        

…by building on its brand objective to promote the idea of a ‘money-buddy’ at the core of the brand.        

…by executing on its experience objective to share data-driven insights with customers at key moments so that customers can see the value for themselves.        

…by committing to its creative objective to demonstrate the brand's feel for numbers.        

Or, you could start from the bottom and each rung on the Transformation Ladder takes you one step closer to business outcomes.

Either way, it not only connects how your brand and marketing efforts ladder up to those business outcomes, it also makes those connections relevant and tangible for the stakeholders with whom you’ll need to engage along the way. Importantly, it does so in their terms, whether those be sales revenue in dollars, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), Customer Effort Scores (CES) or some other discrete measurement ant each and every step.

In isolation, it could be hit-or-miss to focus here or there. But taken step by step, the Transformation Ladder can help your brand not only climb up and up but also further and wider across the business.

Hot off the press (in more than one way)

Just yesterday, FutureBrand featured in The Australian leading the commentary on the ACCC’s decision to launch legal actions against Coles and Woolworths.

They say there are two sides to every story, but two don’t seem to be enough in the case of this particular tale of pricing, politics and cost-of-living pressures.

Our research with Juno, an AI-led research platform, revealed a range of insights, not to mention the risks of positioning your brand only on price. Like sitting on a stool with only one leg, it’s a precarious position. You can read the news here, plus I’ll be sharing the behind-the-scenes story of how we facilitated 200 in-depth interviews in 24 hours in next month’s newsletter.

Transform brands, Transform Awards

Now and then, we enter brands that we've created or transformed into awards programs.

One of those is the appropriately-titled Transform Awards, and our decision to enter is driven by the fact that these awards combine strategy with design, process integrity with the measured impact of outcomes.

This year, the brand transformations we’ve entered are Bush Heritage Australia, eBay, IFM Investors and TeeMates for Golf Australia, and I’m happy to share that all have been shortlisted.

?? Bush Heritage Australia for Best Visual Identity by a Charity, NGO or NFP

?? eBay for Best Creative Strategy

?? IFM Investors for Best Visual Identity from the Financial Services Sector

? TeeMates for Golf Australia for Best Naming Strategy (New Name)

It was only a couple of years ago that won the Grand Prix for our work with Asian Football Confederation; last year we scored a hat-trick of Gold medals for our work with Funlab; and, this year we have our fingers crossed ;)

Of course it’s reassuring for us, but it's even more rewarding for our clients as a signal of the commercial return on their investment in brand transformation: from strategy to reality.

The Big Swing

Just the other week, our Head of Strategy Victoria took to the stage together with Josh Marton, General Manager of Public Affairs & Marketing at Golf Australia to share the story of how a change in brand is changing perceptions and attracting more people to play more golf.

With more than 1.1 million more people playing some form of golf last year, including more women and younger audiences, the game is growing bigger and better.

Given the transformational nature of the Golf Australia’s ambitions for the game, there are lessons to be learned for brands of all shapes and sizes:

1. Alignment drives action.

2. Changing perceptions means challenging them.

3. Removing barriers is key to unlocking growth.

If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to contact Victoria Berry and she’ll be happy to explore how you can help your brand make its own big swing.

Innovation, always

When your brand has future in the name, innovation comes as standard.

So it was that we introduced Brand Experience (BX) as a new capability with the help of Stephen Barber – one of the first new hires after I acquired FutureBrand in Australia. Stephen has since returned to London and now been elevated to Chief Experience Officer globally is successor Sam Hughes finished what Stephen started, embedding BX into our brand-building practices and helping our clients turn brand strategy and identity into customer reality.

Just as Sam has helped evolve our business, so now his role is evolving too.

Brand Experience & Innovation Director

It's an exciting evolution of his role now that he's helped us establish and embed BX as part and parcel of our offer. Not that he'll be focusing any less on BX, this is a natural extension of his role and his contribution to the impact we create for our clients, their brands and businesses.

When I say 'innovation', it's also worth clarifying that I mean how we might 'innovate the brand-building process for our clients', that's the end goal. With that in mind, this is about innovation that touches our clients so that they can benefit from more impactful brands.

Sam has made a fast start.

We’re working with an AI-enabled strategy agent to work alongside our human strategists.

We’ve piloted a new AI-led research platform to speak with hundreds of Australians for a qualitative, in-depth research study to understand what they’re thinking right now and why.

There’s more to come, innovation is not something we will ever silo in our business and our curiosity means we will each always have a tendency to explore new possibilities and share the lessons.

That's it for another month, thanks for reading. I hope you found something useful to share with your own teams – as ever, please ask if you have any questions, I do appreciate the feedback.