What attracts customers to brands in 2017?
Whether you’re looking at finance firms or electronics manufacturers, Apple iPhones or Tesla cars, a few things matter more in marketing than brands. A company can survive a bad product launch, a competitor with better prices, and a wealth of other mistakes as long as the brand remains strong and it’s customers loyal.
But what makes a brand catch on? What turns a relationship between a company and a consumer into something more intimate, more enduring?
What makes a brand catch on?
Before we discuss specific measures companies might take to build their brands, let’s first look at the process by which a brand becomes beloved. There are a few key components:
? Awareness
People cannot become attached to a brand they don’t know about. That initial seed of awareness spreads primarily through direct advertising and early adopters. It’s the reason why companies often struggle out of the gate, as they launch before they have the right tools in place to spread awareness rapidly, aggressively, and effectively.
? Perceived value
This encompasses any number of traits that boil down to a single factor. An excellent price for the product, superior customer service experiences, extra features, any and all of these influence the perceived value of a product. When those factors add up the right way, consumers see making the purchase as getting a great deal—one they’ll be glad to tell others about.
? Social influence
The magic factor which multiplies all other aspects of marketing and determines the fate of a company. The difference between abject failure and immense success can be a single Snapchat picture or tweet by the right person. More often, the role of social influence is more subtle; customers are given a good reason to mention the brand in a positive light, sharing their experiences and driving more consumers to take the plunge. Word of mouth is highly targeted, highly trusted, and highly efficient—the gold standard of marketing.
Brand growth for luxury goods
Luxury brands may appear superficially different from other brands in how they catch on and spread, but if we take a step back we can see how the same factors add up to sell Bentleys that add up to sell Tupperware.
The perceived value of a brand depends on who looks at the item in question. A low-income family may judge products purely on concrete factors—and each dollar will represent more value, being a higher percentage of available income. A man or woman purchasing luxury items looks at value differently.
For someone with the disposable income necessary to purchase luxury goods, a brand’s value as a status symbol matters far more—at that level of income and product, concrete factors such as feature set, reliability, and customer support quality are taken for granted.
This means the final factor, social influence, and matters far more to luxury brands. What matters to a luxury goods customer is purely how they’ll feel about the product and what it will signal to acquaintances, coworkers, friends, and family.
But how, then, do marketing teams control social influence? It seems nearly impossible to reliably generate the social buzz that catapults a brand into the international spotlight.
How consumers build your brand!
Very few marketers would dispute the value or importance of word of mouth in brand growth. What a few recognize is the role of social media and word of mouth in shaping the brand itself. A brand picks up new traits over time courtesy of consumers, whether it wants them or not--a process some branding experts have termed 'brand hijacking'.
These traits are as frequently negative as they are positive, but that only matters insofar as those specific negative traits dissuade potential buyers. Brands, which learn to lean into the right traits, playing into their strengths and owning weaknesses as necessary, thrive in a way, which rigidly structured brands cannot.