Fab brands are like the finest cocktails

A Founder & CEO (hereinafter called X) once asked me, “How can one create a loved brand that lasts the tests of time?”

“Well, for starters, building a brand isn’t quite as simple as re-designing a logo”, I said.

To which X replied quite nonchalantly “well, isn’t the logo and the communication all that it takes to truly build a great brand.”

I am not one to reduce a Brand to mere communication and hence decided to finally bell the cat and told him that I’d be happy to help put together a long term plan for the brand to become truly iconic in its category and for all the lives it touches. Here's a small primer on laying out the long term vision and the tactical initiatives to help build a brand that is iconic and lasts the test of time.

Fab brands are like the finest cocktails.

Yes - a truly delicious, fabulous looking, punchy, presented in the perfect glass with the right paraphernalia and presentation, layered in its flavours, heady, addictive and intoxicating in a manner that makes us want more of it. Again and again and again.?Like having happiness delivered every single time.

Well, to be honest, all I am saying is that a brand needs to appeal to all our senses, every single time and make us keep falling in love with it again and again through experiences that delight us.

Essentially, therefore, a brand is a sum-total of all the experiences that the audience has with the brand across every single touchpoint.

So what builds long-lasting iconic brands?

The single most important variable that builds great brands is PEOPLE & CULTURE.

You can have the best design agency carve your positioning and identity and comms but one single human interaction can destroy all the perceived notion in double quick time. So if you’re a founder or CEO and reading this - focus on building a fabulous culture for your brand’s values. If every single person working for a company and brand doesn’t exhibit the same values and behaviour every single time, rest assured there’s a shit-storm waiting to happen some day that no amount of PR or glitzy advertising can plug. So hire well based on your brand’s values and reiterate, train well, enable them, empower them and reward people who live and breathe those values. Don’t just reward the highest sales, but also the manner in which they were done and soon you’ll build something that will stand the test of time. Longer than you can imagine. Remember that your people are who will determine whether your brand becomes an iconic one or a mediocre one and act suitably.

Advertising & Comms is the face, experiences across touchpoints is where long-lasting delight lies. If you’re building a business and not planning for every experiential touchpoint, are you even building a brand??

I asked X “how many touchpoints you think there are where your brand creates an experience for your audience?”

X replied with the same nonchalance, “we’ve identified 7 touch-points for our brand”. I was truly flummoxed. For a brand with millions in traffic on website and over 100 Crore in Revenue, how could he be so precise about the number of touchpoints. On digging deeper, I realised the obvious. He thought the only touchpoints that mattered were the simpler ones - Advertising, website, app, product brochure, Email, WhatsApp and Social Media. When I started helping him with identifying the touchpoints, we finally closed at 387 touchpoints where major or minor brand experiences were being created. Out of these over 50 were highly important for the audience.

So, if you’re building a brand, buckle down and identify every single engagement for your audience with your brand. Yes - every single one. Then prioritise them basis not the duration of the engagement but whether it can Make or Destroy the overall brand experience and begin building.

It could be the first 10 seconds of the first call from the call centre or the user experience that helps someone choose better or the payment experience on the site or the unique pre-loader on your app or the feeling that a prospective employee has with the hiring experience or even the packaging & resultant unboxing experience if it is a D2C brand. Consumers are touched uniquely by various stimuli and in today’s world of non-stop content, let’s build for all the senses all the time.

Create helpful content that’s answering human intent questions of your audience across mediums. I am someone who truly believes in the power of innovation around content. From using Augmented Reality based tools way back in 2014 to using Artificial Intelligence in early 2021, I have been leveraging every possible tool that helps me create fabulous content addressing varied questions that consumers ask. Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is changing every year and great content that answers human intent questions will win. So plan for long tail questions & podcasts and audio content coz VOICE is now 50% of all search and also plan for videos plenty as rich snippets matter more than ever. This is not to say that keyword based articles are exiting but just saying that there’s more to creating great content that truly helps consumers. So be a brand that helps the audience in various stages of their shopping and post shopping experience

Investing in UX is worth a lot more than “looks” alone. Never underestimate the power of UX in building a modern, digital first brand specially for the mobile-first world. From your website to App or any other tool that the audience shall be exposed to, invest in UX from both a time as well as resource perspective and thank me later.

Well researched positioning and Identity system that is all pervasive. No brand is built without its core positioning being well defined and a brand identity system that is ever evolving. The reason for existence has to be crafted based on research and then the brand identity with equal amount of research. Only then the communication can do true justice. No off the cuff advertising can ever truly define a brand. Nike doesn’t advertise a shoe and nor does Apple sell a MacBook. They make you believe and if you want your brand to do so, copy the greats.

Data, Analytics & well defined CJMs mean more than ever. Brands today have to deal with customers who are being touched by other brands across various touchpoints and mediums too. To truly stay ahead, continue to fine-tune your approach using analytics and then build them onto your CJMs and craft the experiences thereto. There are niches that brands need to address today and hence the criticality of analytics and CJM led touchpoint enhancements become vital.?

Great Advertising kills brands with poor experiences faster. This is something I can’t stress enough about. If you are looking to advertise, remember that the traffic and customer research shall go up and if you haven’t ensured that the experience with the brand and its product/service offerings is up to scratch across all touchpoints, the death bugle would be well and truly sounded.?

Word of mouth and PR is a magic pill. Yes it is hard to get WOM if you’re doing a slack show but if you aren’t and are delighting across senses, time to get those Martech tools in action and create various avenues of powering up the user generated content across mediums. Add to that the power of PR and you got an engine that’s meant to take you places as a brand.?

Community builds brands. You might have heard it before but if you’re not building for it already across your own platforms or across platforms like discord or slack or any that you deem fit which allows active engagement across community members, you’re missing the biggest obvious trick. You’ve gotta work towards ensuring you work together with the community and help while seeking help transparently. No hidden agendas there. Get cracking already.

To make all of the above come alive, always dive deeper to understand and thereafter document & practice WHY DOES THE BRAND EXIST? That very soul of the brand that is left behind when you strip away every fancy advertising and brand ambassadorship or packaging.

That soul is what needs to be lived and breathed across every touchpoints by every single person across your company and you got that iconic, ever lasting brand going folks.