Why now is the time to reposition your brand. By Luis Rodriguez-Baptista

Yes, you read that right. No, I’ve not completely lost my mind. Now is exactly the time to reposition your brand. 

Consumers form emotional engagements with brands. And right now emotions are high. 

Think about your brand experiences over the last few months. 

Maybe your Amazon Prime order for your son’s birthday present was significantly delayed. Then cancelled. Maybe you battled for hours to access your supermarket’s website. Only for it to crash. Maybe you were using Zoom for a new business call. But the connection kept dropping.

How did that feel? 

Getting let down by your trusted brand is tough in normal times. But right now it can shred a brand’s trustworthiness. Because we’re all so exposed. We need that reliability. Brands who fail to recognise the increased importance we place on them are in for a tough time in the new world. 

Is your brand in that position? 

Don’t get left behind

Your brand was forged in a different world to the one that’s being remade almost daily. 

Maybe it was centred around a luxury offering your audience can no longer justify. Maybe it wasn’t appropriate to communicate during the crisis and your prominence has faded. Maybe you took a misstep during the crisis and you need to reassure everyone.

Where your brand was a must-have, is it now in danger of slipping to a nice-to-have? This is the reality we all face. Consumers will be making decisions about what’s important to them in this new world. You need to be sure you stay on that list. 

Because not only are consumers reassessing what’s important, often out of necessity, they’re also becoming more brand savvy. Right now, millions are enduring more down time than ever. So naturally, viewing time has increased significantly. In the UK, the ITV Evening News bulletin reached an average audience of 4.2m a night in March, up by nearly a fifth year-on-year. Its audience on the weekend is up by 147% (Source: UK broadcasters reaching record audiences during coronavirus crisis, Press Gazette, Freddy Mayhew). So brands have a captive audience like never before on ‘at home’ channels.

Increased exposure leads to increased consumer awareness, needing confident steps from brands. Social media has been a case study in the evolution of brand messaging, shifting almost daily in terms of what brands talk about and how they do it. We’ve seen countless stories of brands getting it wrong and being outed as everything from opportunist to culturally tone deaf. 

Could your brand be one of those already looking out of touch? 

According to Accenture Strategy’s last global survey of almost 30,000 consumers, 62% of customers want companies to take a stand on current and broadly relevant issues like sustainability, transparency or fair employment practices (Source: Accenture Strategy Global Consumer Pulse Research, 2018). Today’s customer feels that the closer a company’s purpose aligns to their own beliefs, the better. 

“Public expectations of your company have never been greater...Every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential.” 

Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO

of BlackRock, Inc.8

So the questions right now must be – how can you stay on your customers’ ‘favourites’ list? Is your brand still relevant as the world changes around it? If not, what do you need to do? 

Can your brand continue in its current form?

At a recent event, Rex Briggs, Founder and Executive Board Chair of Marketing Evolution said: “If you are there for people when things were down, they appreciate you and you won't have to do a whole lot more to your overall brand” when conditions return to normal (Source: Event Reports, ARF Coronavirus Virtual Town Hall, March 2020).

This appreciation will be deep rooted and long lasting and will triumph over every other value proposition (yes, even price). 

Nike, Virgin Atlantic, BMW all engage at an emotional level to inspire a sense of customer loyalty that transcends their higher ticket price. But what’s at stake now is more than a love of product or even company ethos. 

How companies look after employees and customers has never been more important or more visible. Domino’s and DoorDash, among others, have created contactless delivery. Salesforce, Bank of America, and Patagonia are guarding employees’ financial safety by committing to a no-layoff policy, despite temporary store closures.

Google offered $340 million in ad credits for small and medium businesses. Zoom and Cisco’s Webex have expanded free access to their videoconferencing technology. Utilities such as Con Ed and telco giants like Verizon and T-Mobile are reducing, or waiving, late fees to help keep customers connected (Source: Leading with Purpose: How marketing and sales leaders can shape the next normal, Brian Gregg, Aimee Kim, and Jesko Perrey, McKinsey & Company). 

While it’s great to see brands living their social credentials, and not to detract from those, there’s also a significant financial factor at play – long and short term. More than half of consumers (53%) who are disappointed with a brand’s behaviour on a social issue will make their feelings known, often visibly on social media. And now 47% are walking away, with 17% staying away (Source: To Affinity and Beyond: From Me to We, The Rise Of the Purpose-led Brand, Accenture Strategy). 

So hitting those emotional engagement points has a clear financial impact. If your brand can connect with consumers, you stand a strong chance of cultivating loyal customers, fostering trust, and preserving your customer base. You also put yourself in a strong position to attract new customers from that 47% who walk away. 

This is crucial. Because, again your brand was forged in a world different to the one that’s being remade around us.

Is your brand relevant in the current context?

Start building your brand relevance

Your aim must be to make sure you stay on your customers’ radar. That they see you and that they connect with what they see. Maybe you have few employees, maybe you don’t have much frontline contact, but no mistake, your brand is under scrutiny. 

How are you looking after your customers and employees and suppliers? What are you putting out into the world? You need to nurture your brand towards becoming a cherished daily necessity. So when all this is over, you’re still an automatic choice for your consumers. You haven’t slipped on to that ‘nice-to-have’ list.

Those customers will stick by you, will do business with you and will recommend you. Many brands are giving customers reasons to stick by them – Starbucks is giving free coffee to front line workers, Estée Lauder is repurposing facilities to make hand sanitiser, Inditex, owner of brands including Zara and Bershka, is turning over supply chains to produce medical supplies. All these actions build emotional engagement in consumers. 

What emotion will you spark in your audience?

Let's build your future now

Predicting consumer habits is slippery. Especially during a never-before-seen global event. We can run predictive analytic models to divine the changes and their impact, but the variables are completely different.

So, what should you be doing right now?

Start with a deep look at your brand. What do you stand for? What do you want to stand for? This may lead to fundamental changes in your strategy, even your governance (perhaps your status as a public company, a private company, or a public benefit corporation). But being clear on what you stand for will give you more chance of making an emotional engagement. 

Reposition your organisation so your target audience knows what your company promises each stakeholder, because this will become an important purchase driver. Defining a broader brand promise is about identifying the key promise your organisation makes to stakeholders and which competencies it possesses to deliver through a comprehensive experience.

Think about everyone in that equation. Your brand belongs to them all. Shareholders own a stake, as always. But there are the employees who bring your brand to life. Customers who keep it going through their purchases and influence it with their demands. Suppliers who affect the type and timeliness of your customer offering. Together, these players continually improve the brand experience and, knowingly or not, refine what it represents.

Adapt while you can

So how is your brand positioned now? What perceptions do your customers have of it? Do you need to shift that perception?

Almost everything about your customers’ world has changed – their income may have been damaged, their travel habits may have been restricted, their indulgences may need to be curtailed. 

Their natural, emotional reaction will be to remove your brand from their list of favourites, either looking for an alternative or learning to live without you altogether. And once your brand is no longer the first name on the list, it can be hard to get back up there. 

So now is the time to make sure your brand is robust and ready to thrive in the world we’re all waking up in. Now is the time to make sure your brand is ready for these new customers with their new demands and new realities. 

The brands that can do that, are the ones that will do well. 

How prepared is your brand?