Branding: The shift from Expression to Behavior

Digital and Digitisation have given birth to interactivity and made the audience an active participant. Actions speak louder than words. For both brands and humans, relationships are built on trust and loyalty, which are earned through the currency of behaviour. This is why digital platforms have become the most potent forms of branding – business or personal.

Earlier, we interacted with brands through visual identity and unified as well as consistent brand messaging. While this still holds true, it is not enough anymore. In today’s wired world, brands are built and understood through their interactions and exchange of ideas. Monologues are things of the past, both brands and humans are now required to have dialogues. It is no longer a version of controlled messaging but having conversations with a band of followers - its community.

While brands continue to be manifested offline with an online presence, their major interaction with their community is primarily online. Organisations today, are discussing and shifting to a “digital-first” mandate. It’s a development that acknowledges a movement towards branding through interaction. However, most of them are falling short of the transformation, usually by just mimicking their offline behaviour online. Companies which have been able to successfully think digital and then integrate the brand experience across marketing, product and sales have seen heightened adoption and engagement.

Behavioural branding, although relatively new, is the way forward on how brands behave across channels. It’s the brand persona, similar to the human persona where the audience is expecting the brand to behave in the same manner as the brand expects from its consumer. At its most basic level, behavioural branding demands that we move from logos, colour palettes, and other assets to whole living systems. It is no longer about designing and defining communication based on channels of engagement, but rather building a personality and staying true to it irrespective of where you interact with your audience - either online or offline.

The onus of the brand behaviour lies across the organisation – with each employee and department and not just marketing. It is no longer about a 2D funnel, or a customer journey mapping or UI / UX but a more complex system of emotion, engagement, authenticity, and personality - very similar to that of humans and to deliver a human-like interactive experience. Just like humans don’t come with a user or framework manual, Brands must be more alive than just through the pages of brand manuals. Once the brand cracks this code and unifies all its actions, behaviour and emotions, it will be able to build trust and loyalty that will go far and beyond just its assets.