Your Brand Deserves Change!

https://t.co/eYT3rZV9yJ i3 magazine

There are only a few “cult” brands whose lifetime value-tail and social consumer-tale allows for small mistakes along the way. Twists, turns and trials launching new products in lock step with market investments fuels, or perhaps dampens, brand level pent-up demand.

On special product earned occasions the consumer becomes one with the brand and the brand is won with the consumer. In that affable life-cycle moment, investing a dollar to create change in the language of consumer opportunity to make or take a market accelerates the muscle of any “brand machine.” After all, the goal of a brands’ competitive prowess is to earn a few more pennies on the shelf than its competitors.

Our demand for personal prominence through any brand experience declares our angst or passion to promulgate the social and local crowds we hang with and declares our personal loyalties or lack of for product, experience and brand. Understanding the cause and effect of such pro and con consumer-sanctioned power educates and can fuel brand opportunity early, especially in highly pulsed, commoditized global markets like consumer electronics.

Within the CE industry we have a multitude of “like products” from unlike brands that competitively battle daily for the right to market, revenue and profit pull. Some are considered legacy mature brands based upon decades of consumer engagements earning once hefty market share. Some brands play for volume in the language of “increases in productivity delivers increases in profitability” with little respect for brand-forward building or garnering lifetime value.

Whether in the brand building business or not, brands in 2014 have never been so fragile, so vulnerable and yet so anxious to succeed. Building a profitable competitive boundary blur between brands should be much easier today through hyper-fast digital dissemination of pushed and pulled content, information, entertainment and knowledge. Yet brands still struggle, sometimes for the wrong reasons.

Your brand deserves consumer positive change and recognition every day: I’ve studied savvy CMOs and CEOs who re-orchestrate their brand machines. They strategically navigate, protect and protract their brand by ensuring they:

Never place their brand in harm’s way: Brands can never coast or live on past product performance while new brands are emerging at hyper-speeds through Internet pylons. Sluggish brands are brands already in harm’s way. A brand must be shined and reinvigorated every day with competitive product vigor. Smart CEOs ask: “What has our product team done for our brand today?”

Act and perform like a consumer: When you do, your brand will outperform your competitors. In our new socially charged networked planet, consumers have more brand power than your marketing department. When you reward and care for consumers through your brand promise, they will in kind, reward and care about the future of your brand.

Fuel their brand through product association: Link your brand and product personalities within your category tightly to create profitable congress through transformative product lines.

Invest in emotional capital: Weakness in product cosmetics, design, usability and features creates a brand disaster in mere days based upon “the social voice of the consumer.” In years past consumers would purchase a new Ford based upon trust and satisfaction. Today companies like Ford must win on the competitive merits of their new products, not on the legacy of their old products and invested brand promise.

Peter Weedfald is president of Gen One Ventures author Green Reign Leadership.