3 ways your brand can create change that matters

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3 WAYS YOUR BRAND CAN CREATE CHANGE

THAT MATTERS

H U G H K E N N E D Y

PA R TN ER

P J A A D V E R T I S I N G + M A R K E T I N G

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Why Today’s Brands Must

Create Change

The ultimate value of marketing today is to create change – in customer behaviors, in the buying process, even in our culture.

The bad news: brands continue to be stuck in awareness-building expressions that are more than a decade old.

The good news: opportunities are everywhere for brands to build loyalty by inspiring customers to change their behaviors.

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3 WAYS TO USE YOUR BRAND TO CREATE CHANGE

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1Position your brand to take

advantage of market gaps and opportunities

Identify the market gaps your brand can address better than anyone else. Example: a marketing taboo or a place where buying hasn’t kept up with innovation.

Define the opportunities to close the gap you’re best equipped to address.

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If DNA technology can cure disease, can it also help consumers choose better sheets? In a word, yes.

For a client that created DNA tagging technology for Pima Cotton, we uncovered a gap: sheet brands were making purity claims they couldn’t back up, and sheet buyers had no idea what to buy.

The opportunity: Position our client to educate buyers about the proven quality and greater environmental benefits of verified Pima Cotton.

Example1

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Companies have missions. So should brands.

Today’s most successful companies use their brands to drive the high-impact change. How?

Identify a brand mission by asking: how could our brand play a deeper role in people’s lives?

Use this mission to guides the experiences your brand creates for its customers.

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A drug company felt its messaging about innovation left it lost in the pack. The insight we uncovered that predictability could lead to faster, better drugs became a mission their brand could embrace. This mission was much more useful than another “me too” message about which brand’s innovation was more advanced. And guess what? The customer wasn’t looking for innovation, but a pragmatic vision for improvement.

Example2

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Enlist your crazies

To really drive change, find the people – “the crazies” – with an outsized passion for your brand or category. Go beyond influencer marketing, which is

essentially paying someone to create marketing messages for you.

Crazies need not be customers. Crazies are people who advocate for a vision of the market that is consistent with what you do.

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For an enterprise software company, we identified 50 rock star CIOs who volunteered to write articles and participate in a community to further the goals of our client’s mission.

A year into the program, the CEO bumped into a lead executive at a Fortune 10 company, who told him, “That program is the best marketing you guys have ever done.”

Why? Because it was changing opinions among change-makers.3Example

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NOW ASK YOURSELF 3 QUESTIONS

What change can my brand drive that also helps achieve our marketing and

business objectives?

How can my brand play a deeper role in

people’s lives?

What kinds of experiences can we

define to inspire audiences to lean in, take an action, and change their

behaviors?

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“If marketing is not driving the change agenda then either the agenda is wrong or marketing is not being effective.

—Ian Ewart, head of products, services, and marketing at Coutts, quoted in “The Rebirth of the CMO,” Peter Dahlstrom, Chris Davis, Fabian Hieronimus,

Marc Singer, Harvard Business Review, 8.5.14

“A Closing Thought

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