Brand Strategy 101: Why Brands Today Must Awaken Customers to Accelerate Growth

There's no question that companies need to focus on branding today more than ever before. But what does that mean for entrepreneurs and CEOs? It means creating a strategy to awaken customers and inspire them to take action. Easier said than done.

To say that the world of business has changed in the last few years would be an understatement.

The rules of the game are no longer what they once were, and to succeed today, you need to be on your toes. One of the most important changes has been in how customers interact with brands.

Traditionally, businesses have relied on advertising and other marketing schemes to get their message out there and educate customers about their products. But customers are savvier than ever before, and they can see through those tactics easily.

So what's a business to do? It turns out that the answer lies in getting customers involved with your brand.

In this blog post, I discuss why that is and share some tips on how to do it.

Awakening Customers: The Role of Brands

What does it mean to awaken customers? It means rethinking the brand strategy and how you connect with customers on an emotional level.

In a world where people are bombarded with over 5000 marketing messages every day, brands must find a way to stand out and be relevant.

Successful companies and brands do this by using storytelling as a way to introduce new ideas and new framing of the problem each brand helps fix.

Recently, I had to do this with several companies from a private investment firm offering non-traditional opportunities for above-average returns to a cybersecurity company disrupting the entire "detect and respond" method to withstand malware to a soft skills company servicing many of the world's top companies (delivered to over 50,000 employees over the last 4 decades).

The common challenge each company faced? An increase in noise in the market made it hard to stand out and differentiate.

Knowing When to Rebrand: How Companies Stay Relevant and Awaken Customers

While the need to rebrand was evident, the process and approach for each company were very different.

Many of us know a brand by the piece we see and recognize most: its visual identity, or logo. While that's certainly an important component, brands (and rebrands) have these core pieces:

• Naming and slogan
• Differentiator
• Brand Narrative

To provide insight, here are several recent rebrands to understand how we helped them introduce new ideas and present new framing of the problem each brand helped fix.

Motorcyclists share an Obsession. Here's How We Tapped Into That Obsession and Showed It the Respect It Deserved.

Motorcycle owners love their bikes. And storage is part of keeping that bike protected and out of the way in their garages with minimal effort.

And looking at the competition in the "motorcycle lift" space, we saw a wide open road for a brand that could leave the competition in the dust. The result was a 500% increase in sales within 12 months of the rebrand.

And here's a certificate designed to accompany every purchase validating every motorcycle owner:

Money by Itself is Dumb. So Why Does It Perform Better in the Hands of Some Than Others?

Managing one's wealth and assets can be tricky, especially as one approaches retirement. Sometimes the worst of it is not knowing how (and when) to tap into less-familiar terrain and opportunities.

So, how does a proven private investment firm introduce itself to make the unfamiliar more familiar? By taking a narrative that helps educate new clients on what can be done.

How did we do that? By positioning the firm and its funds with the most established and recognized minds in investment history.

Here's how the story unfolded in the introductory video created for them:

Celebrating the Art and Craft of Handmade Wooden Furniture

When a 30-year-old firm looked at properly reflecting its skill and scope, it was time to rename the company and reintroduce it in a bold way.

This is what's happening with Black Wolf Design (the new website will launch soon).

Using custom typography and wood, we designed a new brand identity with a new name and slogan to reflect its expertise to not only awaken customers they already were serving but to introduce the company to a new generation of customers who appreciate a bespoke piece of furniture for home or office.

Here is the proposed lobby design with the new brand and the new box that will be sent to clients and interior designers the firm has as clients:

Disrupting the Billion-dollar Cybersecurity Industry

In 1936, Alan Turing, the father of computing wrote a paper that's largely been ignored by cybersecurity companies (while being embraced by the perpetrators of malware and ransomware, a multi-billion dollar industry).

A point that largely explains this statistic: In 2021 alone, 66% of organizations globally were the victims of ransomware attacks.

This vulnerability results from the "malware solutions" used by companies today despite continual malware expenditures, hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities, and billions in financial losses.?

This drove the rebranding of COMODO to become Xcitium, as you see here, along with photos from last week's record-breaking debut in Las Vegas.

Transforming a 40-year-old Brand into a 21st Century Revolution

When we first discussed the shifts happening for Situation Management Systems, it was apparent that many points were not being leveraged that could be.

So we did some homework and discovered that the Harvard Business Review had recently written: “People with strong human skills can form deeper connections with colleagues and customers. This ultimately serves as a strong foundation for positive workplace performance in terms of innovation, adaptive thinking, collaboration, and more.”?

We further discovered that international consultancy McKinsey had reported that the demand for certain skills will continue to grow into 2030.?

Those skills? Soft skills.

We discovered people were searching for this term online. We needed our client to be on that radar with its 40-year history of serving some of the world's top companies, helping over 50,000 employees worldwide.

Here is that transformation, not only changing the brand visually but changing the company name, slogan, and brand story.

Introducing a Brand New Category: "Growth Management for Organizations Worldwide"

Many rebrands require a new discussion. When it came to rebranding Envisage, this was needed to introduce their new technology to companies worldwide.

Here is the new narrative that laid the foundation for the new brand:

94% of CEOs have this problem: No way to track the individual production of each member of staff, units, departments, etc.

In addition to the 94% of CEOs having no way of keeping track of individual employee production, it gets worse. 48% of CEOs we spoke with stated that finding and retaining good employees was their biggest source of frustration.

After all, how could any company that doesn’t know what’s happening with every individual in it hope to find and keep great employees? An indisputable fact: Every company has a pulse. The strength of that pulse is determined by the vital signs exhibited by each individual member.

MetaPulse.com The World’s First Growth Management System?

Here's how this rolled out visually.

The Ultimate Brand Strategy to Awaken Customers

A rebrand is a complex and nuanced undertaking that can have far-reaching impacts on your company.

As you consider a potential rebrand, be sure to take all of the factors I’ve outlined into account.

And if you need help putting it all together, we have decades of experience in successful brand transformations from brand refreshes to entire brand overhauls resulting in over $7 billion in generated revenue and sales.

Contact me today to learn more about how we can help manage your rebrand – and generate real results for your business.

With branding done well, marketing will do its job easier resulting in more sales to the right type of customer.

Join me on August 27th at a Free Live Training where I will do 8 Brand Audits of those present.