If you couldn’t join the live session and would like to access the recording, click below.

Your company is brilliant. Your products are solid. So why is it so hard to articulate your value in a way that truly connects?

Join Ed, our Head of Brand Strategy, for a one-hour webinar designed for CEOs, founders, and business leaders.

We cover:

• The four common “crises” (comms, recruitment, culture, sales) that are really symptoms of a single identity crisis.
• The difference between having a logo and having a brand that builds real equity.
• A step-by-step brand framework to define your Ambition, Purpose, Values, and Personality.
• How to turn this internal clarity into impeccable differentiation in the market.

This session is for leaders who are tired of being misunderstood and are ready to build a brand that is authentic, powerful, and profitable.

The post The Power of Clarity [Webinar] appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

If you don’t have the time to read this article now, you can download the PDF version of Brand Storytelling Trends in 2024: Back to Basics for free by clicking below. Otherwise, just keep reading.

Narrative is the most human trait. 

It defines us as a species – we are able to tell stories to each other with the intent of changing someone else’s mind. Without the ability to convey a narrative, we are just free-range monkeys.

Since it is that old, one may argue that narrative doesn’t change much – in essence it either tells us a story to motivate us (you will look great in this outfit) or to scare us (protect your business from cyberattack).

But the stories that surround us, the ones that get us to pay attention and eventually change our behaviours or beliefs, are the ones that are in tune with what’s going on around us.

The word on the street, the zeitgeist, the meme du jour, the trending tweets (fuck X), this hour’s TikTok dance… while these might all fit within the structure of a core narrative, they speak to us about what’s going on right now. 

And we live right now.

As 2023 comes to a close, here’s a look at the narrative trends that could shape 2024. 

After all, a year is just a collection of the stories that it leaves behind.

As always, strong narratives will win the game. 

When the ‘noise’ gets louder, as audiences are bombarded by even more messages from even more sources, it is the strong stories that will stand out.

Think of it as signal-to-noise ratio. Our stories need to be a strong signal if they are to stand out from the noise.

And it isn’t just about the narrative. It’s about how that narrative gets to where it needs to be. It’s about how that story lives in whatever medium it is told in.

Audience-driven insights

There are three underpinning insights that will most likely dominate narrative trends in 2024.

The general frustration in a post-truth era. 

Not knowing what narrative is true, having stories that reach us devoid of crucial context, and faced by an overwhelming stream of contradictory information, audiences will respond positively to anything that appears unequivocal. This is further complicated by the era of generative AI. As audiences are exposed to more content that’s generated by minds made of silicon, their ability to discern what’s real, what’s human, and what’s been made up by machines continues to sow doubt.

Lack of time, lack of interest

Consumers oscillate between being very busy or being bored – both states welcoming brevity over depth. While this has plenty to do with the behavioural shift towards doomscrolling, it still favours concise storytelling that grabs attention.

Data privacy determinism

Finally, there is the reluctance of audiences to go on trading large amounts of information about themselves in exchange for products such as social networks. This trend is, for now, on the fringe compared to the other two but it will have consequences on the way we tell our stories.

Market-driven insights

Particularly in B2B marketing, more marketers are citing a lack of resources as their major stumbling block. With an ever-expanding set of tools at our disposal, the spectre of a recession, and narrower margins almost across the board, this comes as no surprise. 

There has also been a steady rise in the use of paid media. While smart content marketing and first-party data strategies reduce the dependency on paid media, a surprising number of marketers admit to operating without at least a 12-month plan, let alone a strategy for sustainable communication.

On the other side is the ubiquity of artificial intelligence, giving small marketing teams the tools they need to punch well above their weight, saving money on content writing, planning, and even the need for additional human resources. This is a big thing – AI has become part of the marketing tech stack within a shorter timeframe than any technology has.

This time last year we weren’t speaking about AI unless it was in very specific and very tech-oriented spaces. This year, 3 out of 4 of those working in B2B marketing say that they use at least one AI tool at work.

As resources appear to shrink and new tools emerge to help the industry do more with less, we should be seeing briefer, more punchy pieces of content that, happily, suit the ever-shrinking amount of time audiences are willing to give up.

On top of this is the sheer volume of data that is available to anyone who wants to communicate. Narratives that are driven by data will be the ones that reach their target with the highest degree of precision, winning on cost-effectiveness and efficacy.

Narrative Trends in 2024

Trend 1: Inter-ACT

• Interactive content saw 52.6% more engagement than static content
• 52% of marketers find interactive emails as the most effective form of marketing.
• 88% of marketers see interactive content as a way to differentiate themselves

The data is clear on this and it isn’t surprising. In an era where most of our distribution platforms are interactive, there is little reason to produce static content, particularly when interactive content sees over 50% more engagement than static content. 

The same applies to interactive emails, with over half of marketers experiencing more engagement from interactive emails than static ones.

What is surprising about this trend is that it sounds obvious and yet marketers seem reluctant to go the extra mile and think in terms of interactivity. Broadcast media like TV and radio had a good run that lasted decades but their time as dominant players is over. Thinking like broadcast is the only method of reaching an audience is to remain stuck in a time when today’s tools aren’t available.

You’ve seen influencers try their hand at interactivity: “What’s your favourite ice-cream flavour?” As simple as this sounds, it is an invitation to interaction with the lowest barrier to engagement possible.

Let’s learn from this practice (but implement it better) by thinking of friction. If we produce interactive content, we must give audiences the pathway to reach out that has the least friction possible. Let us make it easy and interesting for our audiences to interact and be sure to offer a good reason (read ‘reward’) for them to reach out.

In a sea of one-way comms, interactive content is a chief differentiating factor. It tells your audiences that you’re up for conversation and, done well, it tells them what kind of chat you’d be happy to have. It turns your brand into that person we’d meet for a coffee, knowing a good conversation is to be had. 

And that’s the start of a friendship right there.

Trend 2: Authentically Human

• 51% of marketers consider differentiating their content the biggest challenge with the rise of AI tools.
• 54% find the amount of content available overwhelming, but find the quality lacking
• 31% of marketers find AI-generated content quality to be lacking

During the time when fast-food restaurants were on the rise, traditional restaurants tried to differentiate themselves by writing ‘home-made lasagna’ on their menu boards. 

We knew it wasn’t true but we willingly bought into the distinction.

As AI-generated content improves in its coherence and quality, it is becoming harder to tell what’s been made by a person and what’s been generated by an AI. Meta has launched a series of AI influencers, each able to interact with millions of humans at the same time without missing a beat.

The chances are that a third of the content you’ve read today has been, at least in part, created by an inanimate device. And this is set to increase as more and more of the workforce climbs over the perception hurdles and adopts this tech in some form or another.

The result is that there will be more efforts to distinguish AI-made content from human-made content. 

And content that can be verifiably created by a human will score points for authenticity.

This is not to say there is anything wrong with machine-made content. It is simply an echo of the way humanity reacts to new technologies. When every leather handbag was stitched by a human hand, there was little to distinguish one from the other. Now that machines stitch most bags, the handmade becomes more valuable.

This blog was written entirely by a pair of human hands and a kitten’s paws      sfl,,,,,.                                 Bv jik eeeerrrrttt

Trend 3: Brevity is the soul

• 94% of marketers agree that short articles is the most popular form of content
• 95% of all content distribution happens on social media
• 47% of marketers put all their content in images

We are all competing for attention all the time. We are also afflicted by an epidemic of ever-decreasing attention spans.

This ushers the era of short headline-style content that conveys as much information as possible in as short a consumption moment as possible. By ‘headline-style’ we mean any form of content that one can consume in a very short time. Memes, gifs, zero-click content, images, and short videos all qualify. 

What about long-form content? Longer reads, in-depth podcasts, long-form video, and other forms of narrative that are involving or longer to consume still have their place in telling a complete story. 

We just need to lead to them with a much shorter hook.

This should not be an issue for content creators. It is good practice to find the shortest possible way to convey a message while retaining clarity and all necessary information. As the trend towards brevity gains more traction, cunning storytellers will find new ways of telling short-form narratives.

Ultra-short form, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it form of content, is something of a novelty in mainstream comms but it has been quite standard in niche and closed-group circles, especially those composed exclusively of Gen Z and younger individuals. The move from niche to mainstream is inevitable and we will see more content that’s ultra-brief, usually depending on a link to an established narrative that we, the audience, are already aware of. Think of this kind of content as a mass-appeal in-joke.

Another useful angle to this trend is the creation of micro-moments within longer narratives. These serve as little breaks, giving our audiences a short reprieve from longer form content in the shape of a snack-sized piece of content that’s there to distract for a moment. Micro-moments can be informative, entertaining, or even a simple change in content delivery method (like a 5 second video within a blog post) and that help keep our audiences engaged for a little longer as they skip down the path of your defined user journey.

In essence, however, brevity is an ever-appreciating commodity:

1. Scrap useless words (or scrap words completely)
2. Lead with a benefit
3. Consider the appropriate platform
4. Link to a wider story
5. Grab attention in 5 seconds or less

Trend 4: Data destiny

• Data storytelling has increased by 233%.
• 93% agree that data storytelling boosts revenue.
• Consumers are 63% more likely to remember data if it’s presented as a story.

We’ve had accurate and real-time consumer data available to us for decades now. We’re used to data feeding into accurate targeting, consumer insights, and campaign optimisation, to mention just a few ways in which data carves the messaging we create. But having much more data available to us is not enough to form an emerging trend.

The trend is being shaped by data storytelling itself. Presenting data alone isn’t enough. There is no story to a statement that says “62% of consumers prefer this drink to its competitor”. A story alone is interesting but it is much more captivating when backed up by real numbers. And this is the basis of data storytelling – the way we can use data as a component of an engaging narrative.

Over the past 5 years, data storytelling has grown by 233%. Which forms the shape of a gentle trend but this is set to grow significantly next year as the technology that’s available to us boosts this trend from multiple angles.

The intelligence that was needed to properly harness data for storytelling purposes was reserved for companies with deep enough pockets to afford powerful Business Intelligence and market research capabilities. As AI services become affordable to all, the ability to spot behavioural patterns in huge datasets reaches the masses.

Tugging this trend from a completely different angle, but pulling it in the same direction, is the ever-increasing epistemological crisis – we simply don’t know what the truth is any more. Data-driven storytelling is one way to let the market know that what you’re saying is rooted in an unquestionable truth.

Another way of looking at this trend is a shift of narrative from the ‘what’ to the ‘why’, particularly in the case of B2B narratives. It takes us from “this is what people do with this product” to “this is why people change their minds and here is the data to prove it”.

Finally, there is much to do with the way our brains are wired. While we tend to understand the numbers, we don’t remember them. We are 22 times more likely to recall a story than numbers alone. The linking of story and data is a combination that bends credibility with memorability and it is this confluence that will create powerful narratives going into 2024.

There’s more

The trends that have been shaping up over the past few years are digging in deeper and turning from trends into mainstays of commercial narrative.

The desire for authenticity and transparency isn’t going anywhere. If anything, it is being reinforced by the difficulty our audiences experience with being certain about what is real. Deep fakes, AI personalities, the distorted narratives around politicised events, and all other forces that distort the stories that describe our world raise more questions than they answer. Demonstrable authenticity, aided by data-driven storytelling, will form the mainstays of the stories that matter.

This demand for authenticity will favour human-led narratives and put even more value on the local and the hyperlocal. The closer to home a story appears to be, the more likely we believe it to be authentic and relatable.

In the same vein, the humanity of our narratives, the ability of our content to be consistent with who the organisation is, what it stands for, and how it is different from all others, will be the currency by which the greatest stories are measured.

Finally, we remain ever hopeful that this will be the year of A/V/XR, the year when the market finally sees excellent VR hardware at mass-market pricing, paving the way for truly immersive content. Apple’s launch of their high end device is little more than a proof of concept and was aimed at studios and content developers but a launch of this nature usually portends a shift towards a more widely accessible product. When it happens, a third dimension will really be added to the content we produce and consume.

2024 the year of human lore

The art of storytelling won’t suddenly become more important in 2024. It has always been the way we stood out from the rest of the animals on earth and will continue to do so.

But there are trends that will define the year and they will be greatly influenced by the tools we have at our disposal and the general behavioural patterns of the market.

More than ever before, stories backed by facts and figures in a post-truth world will win on authenticity. We do have more data available to us. Let’s use it wisely to reach the right people with the right message.

The right message is never noise – it feels personal and stands out from the rest of what’s being said by appealing to us in a way that’s respectful of our time (brevity), of our intellect (clearly useful to us), and of our identity (a match in fundamental values).

The right message is also one that honestly promotes diversity, equity, and inclusiveness (DE&I). While this was a brand trend a few years ago, it has gone from the fringe to the boardroom and that will strongly influence the narrative of 2024.

And while this is nothing new, we must endeavour to differentiate by telling a unique story. It seems like one out of every two pieces of content is a repost from another channel. And half of that again is a poor rehash of a trending topic. In a sea of sameness, the original will stand out.

Keep it short. Keep it relevant. Keep it human. Keep it unique.

The post Brand Storytelling Trends in 2024: Back to Basics appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

If you don’t have the time to read this article now, you can download the PDF version of Brand Trends 2024 for free by clicking below. Otherwise, just keep reading.

Brand behaviour plays a game of cat and mouse with whatever is happening in the world around us. 

Most brands follow the zeitgeist. 

Some act in a way that shapes it.

Brand trends in 2024 are a mixed bag. Some trends will simply build on the momentum of trends that are already being shaped while others could surprise us.

One of the trends that will shape brand narratives as we roll into 2024 is brevity. In anticipation of that trend, this will be as concise as possible. If you want to dig deeper into any one of these trends, reach out and we’re happy to provide more context.

Trend 1: Authen-tick

What makes audiences tick? There is a sea of faceless brands and sterile products out there so the ones with a real story stand a better chance of engaging the curiosity of our audiences.

Brands that show authenticity and transparency will come across as human. As we recoil from the overwhelming wave of tech that is cresting, authenticity delivers a clear differentiating factor over brands that are so large that they inevitably collapse into a diffuse narrative of corporate speak and hollow promises.

As always, it is great to lead with benefits. We are, after all, selfish creatures. But we don’t form long-term relationships with benefits alone. For us to form an emotional relationship there needs to be authenticity and a narrative that we can identify with. This will be more important as we enter a period of uncertainty about what is human and what isn’t.

The great thing about this trend is that the majority of brands started with a great story. Sometimes, all it takes is to step back and turn to the original reason for the brand to exist, building an authentic narrative around this in a way that suits the audiences and channels of today.

Trend 2: Immersion 

We are finally entering the golden age of omnichannel brands. VR and AR are one consumer product away from changing the way we interact with the world around us again.

As the porosity of the wall between IRL and virtual experiences continues to increase, the possibilities for brands to be where the audiences are in a rich and immersive way are also in plentiful supply.

Omnichannel immersion is not the death knell for retail. We’ve seen the way consumers behave when a new channel is made available. Online retail did not kill IRL retail. On the contrary, the two channels are entirely complementary. For some, while the final purchase is online, in-store interaction is a decisive factor. Others prefer to browse online and then make a purchase IRL. 

This hybrid is a reflection of who we are as a species. Individually we might have defined preferences but as a whole we are beautifully messy and often unpredictable.

So, while I might want to use AR to see what a pair of Danish speakers will look like in my living room, I will most likely visit a brand store for the final purchase.

VR will add a significantly immersive layer to the spread of experiences available to consumers. With Apple making inroads and Meta stepping up their hardware game at consumer-friendly pricing, 2024 could be the year that sees VR finally become a mainstream reality. And the brands that are ready and waiting will be the ones with significant first-mover advantage.

Trend 3: Personal-AI-zation

As marketers, we have access to huge amounts of data. We also have unprecedented access to very, very intelligent machines. Together, they usher the era of hyper-personalised marketing.

This is not new. We have been progressing, in fits and starts, towards the hallowed audience-of-one. What we have at the output end is machines that can converse in language that approaches that of an average person. This brings conversational marketing for personal customer interaction to the masses. 

The AI-powered customer service rep that’s tuned to our specific personality could finally be the rep that we will actually like.

The gold rush of 2024 will be shaped by those who make the most creative use of the technologies that are flooding our landscape to harness the data that’s already available to us.

Trend 4: Diversity, Equity & Inclusiveness (DE&I)

We have been feeling our way around on these values. Most brands can be accused of missteps but we are finally making proper headway.

While many larger companies thought it was fine to pay lip service to DE&I, consumers are now demanding that these values be more than a marketing campaign. The thinking in the boardroom must wholly embrace a more equitable view of the world and this is the way beliefs are changed. This is the way beliefs lead to appropriate behaviour and communication. This is how everyone feels represented and respected.

Of course, there will be those that attempt to buck the trend – the right-wing  anti-woke will dig in and make their voice heard. And the stronger this faction digs in, the better for the trend in favour of DE&I because contrast is a powerful driver of perception.

Trend 5: Sustainability / Ethical practice

The idea of putting all the ‘doing good’ into one bucket and hoping for the best is slowly going out of the window. We are splitting environmental and ethical manufacture from social issues and, in the longer term, there will be even more fragmentation. 

This is a good thing.

We rebranded CSR to ESG when CSR was seen for what it truly is. CSR was a bolt-on set of activities that companies paid for to divert attention from the truth about their activity. And ESG will also see its day but it won’t be this year.

2024 will see even more demand for sustainable practices as consumers put their money where their mouth is. More and more consumers state that they are prepared to pay more for a product that is ethically manufactured. And once consumers put their hands in their pockets, brands will deliver on the demand.

Trend 6: Less is again more

This has more to do with brand expression, with a particular emphasis on visual identity and brand communication. Historically, we have gone in cycles that broadly swing from maximal to minimal. The excesses of Art Deco gave way to a pared back Art Nouveau. The gradients of the nineties were replaced by flat vector illustration when we’d had enough of it. 

It appears as though we’re diving right back into the minimal end of the cycle. This means a search for memorability through symbolism and meaning rather than maximalism, with strong colour palettes to keep the excitement going.

This ties in with the overall fatigue that could very well be afflicting our audiences. With so much going on all the time, a minimal approach to visual expression could present itself as a soothing break from the constant visual stimulation.

Trend 7: Get shorty

One more expression of the trends that are in favour of brevity and minimalism is the rise of the micro-moment – short videos, memes, tiny brand experiences, and other snack-sized pieces of content that serve as a little distraction.

To be more specific, microinteractions give a little dose of instant gratification – they deliver a tiny shot of dopamine that keeps audiences’ attention focused. 

Micro-moments can take the form of a clever or unusual CTA, cute error messages, unusual UI behaviours, or any form of little reward that is at least mildly surprising or unexpected.

Trend 8: Purpose-full

More than ever before, purpose-driven brands will be the ones that emerge victorious in 2024. This is a trend that’s adjacent to authenticity but it is not the same thing. Brands that are led by purpose more than anything else are visibly committed to their reason for existence.

This drives a clear sense of focus in the minds of its audiences. A brand that digs deep into its reason for existence and acts purely in accordance with this purpose is one that is evidently out for more than profit. 

Of course, without profit a brand cannot exist. 

But that cannot be its only goal.

Too many brands lose their way after a while. These are the ones we vaguely remember but don’t consider as part of our lives any more. 

A few brands keep their purpose alive. Think of Toms, Lego, The Body Shop, GoPro, and other brands that have been unwavering over decades. These are the ones we have a continued relationship with. They are the brands we think of as having a clear space in our minds. They benefit from the almighty one-two combo of focus and differentiation. We know their place in our lives and we know what makes them different from every other brand in their space. These are purpose-driven brands.

Why do brand trends matter so much going into 2024?

While it is always important for brands to be fully in tune with their purpose at all times, it counts more when the going gets tough. 

The spectre of an economic downturn is looming. 

We’d be reckless to ignore the metrics and hope for the best. In times of strife, our audiences are more cautious with their purchases and will limit these to those entities they feel they can have a personal connection with – the entities that have a clear resolve.

The Wildcard

This is not really a trend for 2024. It is more a hopeful speculation based on the way we see the world around us.

Take this with a bucket of salt. 

But if you are responsible for a brand that has clout, think about it as a possibility.

Never has there been so much technological and economic advancement. And yet, all this plenty isn’t having the impact it should on our environment, on economic equanimity, and on social justice.

In the absence of the political will to address these issues, a handful of brands out there are taking matters into their own hands and driving the change they would like to see around them. We are privileged to work with a couple of clients that think this way and it drives us to do some of our best work. Even if this ‘trend’ is no more than a little stir, it is a start.

Brand Trends 2024: Wrapping it all up

2024 will see brands look inwards for a good look at their purpose and the truth behind the stories they tell. It will also see brands look outwards at the preferences of their audiences and put more focus on brevity and short-term gratification. 

Bringing these two viewpoints together will be the mighty and unstoppable force that emerging technologies are bringing with them – AI and A/V/XR giving us unprecedented granularity and immersion.

The post Brand Trends 2024 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Short answer: No. 

Strap in for the longer answer. I’ll lead with a TL;DR for the impatient amongst you:

1. Revisit your brand fundamentals and revive the spirit of the brand with your team.
2. Do these revised underpinnings have an impact on your brand expression? Is it time to refresh identity and tone of voice?
3. Obtain a perception reading from your team and, if possible, from a sample of your audiences.
4. Assess the gap between your claimed brand values and the perceptions you’ve collected. Devise your 2022 brand strategy around narrowing this brand gap.
5. Rally your team around the brand, keep it alive, and cement its strengths.

Our brands have collectively taken a beating. We have a whole generation of young people who are coming of age in a time of global crisis. Think of two years of sixth form, or your first two years at university, during which you have been denied most of the usual social interaction.

On top of that, you’ve had a permanent narrative that’s a mixed bag of fear, dissent, conspiracy, and optimism. The ability of our audiences to form and maintain healthy relationships has been under assault – many of us have had to work harder than usual to maintain our relationship with ourselves and with others.

Faced with all this, do you really think that the relationship between an individual and your brand is a priority to them? And we have not touched the possibility of economic hardship, issues with job security, battles with one’s own health, or dealing with the loss of someone close.

That’s a bigger dose of reality than you were prepared for in a blog about brand. But take heart, it is just the context for a more optimistic look at your own brand.

Start with purpose

Your brand has a purpose. 

It’s what keeps you going through thick and thin. 

It is very likely what allowed your brand to survive or even thrive during these times and this is a moment to stop reading for a second and congratulate yourself and the team for making it this far.

If you’re responsible for your brand, you will know that you rarely stop to celebrate its achievements. You think in terms of what could dent its reputation, you do all you can to build its equity, and you strive every day for a consistency between what you say your brand is about and the way your audiences perceive it. 

Celebrate where you are today because you’ve earned it.

Now that you’re done celebrating, let’s go through a few of the steps we can all take to shore up our brand, to consolidate those little (or big) wins, and to take our next steps towards building the brand of the future.

Let’s return to purpose first. 

Why, besides commercial benefit, does your brand exist? 

Why do we do what we do and not engage in a completely different activity? If you have at some point in the history of your brand taken the time to distil this into a concise and meaningful statement, return to it. 

Dig it up and read it. 

And find a way of making sure everyone on the team has it as top-of-mind. Having your brand purpose as top-of-mind is not a passive pursuit. 

Think of an activity or some form of communication that can remind everyone around you why they get up in the morning and dedicate more waking hours to your brand than they do to friends and family. 

It is that important, and matters of this importance take active reminding.

Next up, your brand values

Let’s revisit our values. And let’s revisit these in terms of the uncomfortable context we are living. The likelihood is that our values don’t need to change, at least not fundamentally, but they can be reinterpreted to suit the realities of our time. 

We are, tortuously and sometimes imperceptibly, moving towards a society that is a little more compassionate. 

We are seeing more drive towards being considerate – with ourselves, with our social circles, with the disenfranchised, and with our planet. 

Our brand’s audiences are more likely to resonate with human, compassionate, brands. 

We are, as audiences ourselves, more in tune with the brands that have shown us empathy. 

It stands to reason that we ought to look at our values and to examine them for this genuine display of humanity.

How about Brand Expression?

The third round is our brand expression. 

You remember the downer in my first couple of paragraphs. Don’t you think that more optimistic brands should be setting the tone? Is there a way in which our brands can be beacons of cheer or hope or optimism? Would you not prefer to relate to a brand that brings a smile to your face?

If I were the betting type I’d put a couple of Satoshis on a brighter, more visually optimistic visual style and tone of voice over the months and years that mark our recovery from this crisis. There is always going to be a darker side to the narrative but we have control over our own brands and we can only do what’s in our control.

Let’s get planning

How does this fit in with our plan for 2022? 

It sounds like one of two things – either a task so monumental that we don’t have the resources to accomplish, or one that we can do so little about it might not be worth pursuing.

Think again.

Brand starts on the inside. It resides with you and your team. It is expressed as a result of the collective behaviours of everyone on board. Only then will it be experienced as a collective set of behaviours by your audiences. 

So start with the team.

Run a finger-on-the-pulse exercise with your team. It doesn’t have to be all-encompassing and minutely detailed – what we want here is a reading of the general sentiment. Is there alignment with the brand’s purpose? Is there a homogeneous knowledge of the brand’s values? 

Does the team value the importance of brand-aligned behaviour?  

If you have the time and the resources to do so, gathering a perception reading from your audiences (and desired audiences) will give you a more accurate and useful picture. This creates a snapshot. 

Do it now. 

2022 will creep up on you like a David Cronenberg monster and we have a lot to cover before the new year. Have a look at that snapshot and be brutally honest with it. 

It helps to take adjectives or phrases used by the team (and your audiences) to describe the brand and to cluster them by association so you end up with a handful of meaningful words that describe the state of your brand. Compare these to the purpose and values that you have committed to paper. 

Wherever there is an overlap, you’re golden. Where they differ lies your brand gap. 

And this should form the basis for your 2022 brand strategy.

Addressing the brand gap

Your brand strategy for 2022 ought to address the brand gap between your brand’s perceptions and your ideal place for the brand.

The gaps are usually behavioural. 

While we might be saying that “we’re the most responsive brand in the industry”, if there is no sense of urgency across the customer-facing team we have work to do. If our claim that “we’re a one stop shop for [product category]” is plagued by out-of-stock issues, it could be time to present a more specialised face or to sort out the supply chain before we make claims we can’t deliver on.

In short, the strategy needs to either bring about change within the organisation that can cause external perception to align with your claims or to readjust your brand to the set of values you can actually abide by. Insisting that you’re one thing when you’re not is what creates the swathe of blurred, insipid, or forgettable brands that are around us and that we ignore all the time.

Fun and games

Let’s move onto a couple of easy to carry out and practical sessions to have with your team. 

Brand association

Create a list of nouns from across our lives. 

Include fashion brands and a food item, vehicle type and a famous landmark, a famous person and an item of furniture, etc. 

Make sure each is associated with a deeper personal meaning. 

Then ask quick-fire questions to every member that take the following format:

If our brand were a [sport], what would it be?

If our brand were an [item of furniture], what would it be?

And so on for up to ten different questions. Analysing the results can take a while and is worth the effort. 

You’re looking at your data set in two different ways.

The first is an understanding of the internal alignment to these questions and the second is the emotional backstory for each item. If all the team mentions a sport that’s fast, exciting, and carried out by an individual – snowboarding, base jumping, sprinting, etc – you know that there is a shared understanding of what it’s like to spend a day at work. It is perceived as fast-paced but with little need for teamwork. If some mention a team sport, others go with boxing (high-impact, no teamwork) and yet others mention something like curling or fast walking, then you probably need to work on what it means to form part of your team before you can expect uniform brand-aligned behaviour.

Go into the exercise knowing exactly what each item represents. 

Your fashion brand, for instance, will help understand where your brand is positioned in the team’s mind. The brands mentioned give you an idea of how contemporary, accessible, premium, and audience-relevant your brand is.

Time travel

Pick a time that’s three to five years into the future and describe an event. 

You could pick one of the following examples or devise your own based on your brand’s activity:

• It’s the year 2024. Our brand is acquired by a major multinational. Which one is it?
• It’s [today’s date] in 2025. Our brand is the subject of a fantastic news item across all media. What’s the story about?

This will give a snapshot of what an ideal state for the brand would look like within a few years. This aspirational state is a possibility, even if everyone in the room acknowledges that there is work to be done to get there. 

Planning your 2022 brand strategy around this aspirational state that the team has already visualised is a powerful way of getting everyone on board.

For most of these, it could be useful to have the sessions facilitated by someone external to your organisation. This gives you a handful of benefits, the most important being objectivity and to diminish the likelihood of your sessions either devolving into an unstructured moan about what’s wrong with the organisation or a practical conversation about how to bring operational improvement. Both are important but beyond the scope of a brand discussion. Speak to your brand agency. They’ve done this before and will make the most of your efforts.

We are the brand. The brand is valuable.

In essence, your brand is too precious an asset to leave to chance.

We can’t afford our marketing planning to distract us from the fundamental importance of brand. Marketing will give us short-term sales but brand helps us to build long-term, value-based relationships. 

With 2022 on the horizon, we need to plan for a stronger brand. We should start by taking a look at the brand’s fundamentals, move onto obtaining a snapshot of our brand perceptions inside the team and with our audiences, and then create a strategy for 2022 that addresses any discrepancies.

In the same way as Nike tells us to just do something tiny today to make ourselves a better version than the person we were yesterday, we can do the same with our brand. 

Doing the least possible for our brand is better than neglecting it altogether. 

The great thing about it is that we are where the brand resides so most of the work is carried out inside the organization, shoring up the brand by encouraging the team to work as one.

Isn’t that what every great organization is based on?

Once again, in five sentences:

1. Revisit your brand fundamentals and revive the spirit of the brand with your team.
2. Do these revised underpinnings have an impact on your brand expression? Is it time to refresh identity and tone of voice?
3. Obtain a perception reading from your team and, if possible, from a sample of your audiences.
4. Assess the gap between your claimed brand values and the perceptions you’ve collected. Devise your 2022 brand strategy around narrowing this brand gap.
5. Rally your team around the brand, keep it alive, and cement its strengths.

The post Do you have a plan for your brand in 2022? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

But it isn’t just about a television show. 

FRIENDS has moved past the point where you can call it a television programme; it’s become a cultural phenomenon. It’s a television show that survived the fall of television, found a new home in streaming, and keeps producing tie-in deals with big corporations who otherwise have no link to the television or entertainment industry. 

It defies age. You can’t pin a FRIENDS viewer down by class demographic. It goes beyond simple nostalgia. 

What FRIENDS does have is good writing and humanity. 

FRIENDS: the Brand

It’s not a leap of logic to assume that the people who watch FRIENDS also own at least one piece of FRIENDS-themed paraphernalia. 

Take it a step further: there’s at least one FRIENDS quote or episode you can recount verbatim. 

Without prompting. 

Without looking it up on Wikipedia. 

It’ll be something innocuous – looking at a specific shade of purple, watching a pair of movers load a sofa into a house, or listening to a British cook talk about trifle. Suddenly, your brain makes the connection. 

The rest of the episode plays out in your head involuntarily. 

The FRIENDS branding machine isn’t a complicated one, but it’s effective. 

More importantly, it’s memorable. 

From the title cards to the pops of pick-it-out-in-a-lineup colour to lines perfect for a soundbite, FRIENDS’ greatest asset is its memorability to the point where the show can really be considered a kind of advanced form of advertising jingle. 

You’ve heard of ‘Have a break, have a kitkat‘. 

Imagine it as an entire programme. 

Why should agencies care?

The true value of storytelling and good design is hard to measure. When you have an industry that relies so strongly on both, identifying what makes good design and what makes good storytelling shouldn’t be like finding the .psd file in your recent saves. 

Sometimes, it is. 

And it will continue to be. 

Good storytelling relies on understanding your audience and understanding what your audience wants to see, and on telling a story they want to hear. 

What FRIENDS does well – what FRIENDS continue to do well – is to tell a good story. 

The audience want Ross and Rachel to get together. 

They get together in the end. 

The audience want a reunion or a movie. 

The reunion is happening now. 

It’s important to clarify here that good storytelling does not mean a good narrative. Good storytelling is more a case of mechanics: how memorable is it, do people care about what’s happening, how does it work within your larger world, is it going to outlive you, is it going to be unseated when the next hot thing comes along. The narrative matters only as much as how you choose to tell that story, and to what point you allow your audience into the narrative creation process. 

Brands work the same way. 

When you tell your story to your audience, are you actually telling them a story they want to hear? Does it feel like a story?

Would you get invested in it?

Would you care if it was over?

Friends: the Story

The story of FRIENDS resonates with people who were born even after the show was finished. When we ran a FRIENDS-themed quiz night way back in 2018, the winning team was made up of teenagers who’d never really tuned in to watch it or understood the shift that FRIENDS introduced in the television industry, but they knew more than the people who did. 

Why? 

They learned about it through the people they cared about: their family members, their friends, their siblings. They learned about it through memes, side-references, jokes about pivotal moments. 

At the core of FRIENDS, there’s a distinct, intangible humanity. 

When combined with the eminent memorability of FRIENDS, you don’t have a show: you have a brand that keeps on giving. 

Can agencies pull off the same thing?

With good storytelling, agencies can do a lot more than they think. 

With beautiful visuals, good storytelling, and a compelling narrative, agencies can transcend the limitations of just ‘pushing’ a brand. 

But it’s not easy. 

It’s not just a case of understanding your audience anymore, or really just a case of telling a good story. 

You have to back up your story with good. You have to be able to withstand the pressure of understanding that every bad decision you make will become public knowledge — and to understand that it’s still worth doing things, even with that risk. 

You have to understand that you need to do things. 

Not-for-profit things. Not-for-PR things. 

The storytelling will come later. 

But you need to act first. 

And you need to act outside of being a brand. 

Consider it this way: television comedy shows didn’t start and end with FRIENDS. 

Frasier. 

Cheers. 

Everybody loves Raymond. 

Everybody Hates Chris. 

There’s thousands of others that we can keep listing here, but only one is a 17-year-old television behemoth that still brings in profit, that still gets people talking, that still remains strong enough to sell tie-in products. 

And that’s the power of good storytelling, of humanising a brand, and of knowing when to act. 

If FRIENDS can do it – a show that hasn’t aged well, a show that’s only surface-level good, a show that even its fans admit is dated, even while they extoll its virtues – why can’t you? 

And the answer to that is this: you can. 

But you have to take risks. 

And you have to trust in the story you tell. 

The post Lessons Learned from Friends appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

From second-place-PC to ‘broke’ memes to semi-relatable work from home advertising, Apple’s nudge-nudge-wink-wink referencing doesn’t really hide, or try to hide, the fact that they’re controlling each step of the story we’re inventing about them. Whether it’s to announce a new product – and sending the internet wild with rumours – or updating their iOS with security features that alarm developers, it’s Apple’s world, and we’re all just living in it. 

It doesn’t stop them from making missteps. But those missteps are, largely, swept underneath the rug, forgotten about entirely, or later spun into something better. 

With Apple’s latest tracking measures, it’s too soon to tell which of these options is going to win out over the rest. Our early prediction is that it’ll be spun into something better. 

iOS 14.5, which changes the advertising game for personalised recommendations and measurements on iOS devices, has brought with it a whole heap of articles talking about Apple’s new ATT transparency. 

Whatever iOS 14.5 does, the fact that everyone’s talking about it, and about Apple, is noteworthy. This isn’t the first time an Apple event or update has spread like wildfire over the internet, bringing everyone from the fringe edges in to give their opinion; in fact, it follows on from a long history of advertising-through-rumour that seems to be working pretty well for Apple. 

Here’s how this story developed. 

Apple and iOS 14.5

The story of iOS 14.5’s tracking developments actually started in June 2020. 

At its annual June Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced that iOS 14 would bring about a change in the way that developers treated privacy: specifically, every developer who wanted to use Apple’s App Store needed to self-report their privacy info and summarise their privacy practices in the App Store. 

This was a feature Apple had already used – in the form of the Intelligent Tracking Prevention, for Safari – but the App Store had, until a year ago, remained unaffected by privacy concerns. 

Critics of Apple called them hypocritical for it. 

Apple responded late, but they responded with what their critics wanted. Would it affect developers who relied on ads? A little – but the story had shifted away from Apple for a little while, making Apple the people’s friend again. 

This is a pattern that Apple does and does well. 

SKAdNetwork Development

In 2018, Apple introduced the SKAdNetwork, an API for 11.3 that allowed ad networks to directly attribute installs from the app store, further protecting their consumers. By giving them impressions through iTunes, Apple doesn’t need to share a personal IDFA. 

This didn’t really get a lot of traction in 2018. 

It did in 2020, after the Worldwide Developers’ Conference. 

Was it planned this way? Apple has always been notoriously consumer-friendly, championing privacy at every moment. It’s conceivable that Apple planned it this way since 2018, slowly changing their own reputation from ‘another’ tech company relying on user data to the only tech company that protected user data. 

And in the day and age when privacy is worth its weight in bitcoin, being on the side of the people is a powerful narrative. 

What happened next?

Tim Cook said, at the beginning of 2021, “if we accept as normal and unavoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated and sold, we lose so much more than data; we lose the freedom to be human.” 

It’s powerful coming from anyone involved in the tech industry. 

Coming from Tim Cook, the CEO of one of the biggest tech companies, it’s world-shattering. 

At this point, developers are still struggling with SKAdNetwork and with the new privacy changes. Furthermore, it’s becoming evident that Apple’s own ad network gets more functionality out of the buggy SKAdNetwork than advertisers normally do. Two of the parameters needed are only found in Apple’s Ads Attribution API, and are responsible for optimisation. 

In the SKAdNetwork, those parameters are absent. 

Rumours, of course, were plenty. 

In April 2021, further continuing the story, Apple began to reject app updates that conflict with the App Tracking Transparency Framework. A good move for consumers, as it enables them to protect their own privacy, at the cost of third-party developers. 

At the same time, Apple is planning on expanding its own advertising business. 

Apple is exempt from its own network. 

None of this is evident immediately unless you follow the story down to the root. 

And that is the beauty of the Apple narrative control: to hold a story right down to the punctuation marks without ever ceding more than you planned. When information is currency and spreads around the world the second a company does something self-serving, it’s amazing that Apple seems to be above it. 

Controlling the Narrative

Every company in the world would control their own story if they could. 

The problem is the internet doesn’t let you. 

And the internet is forever. 

Companies that make mistakes are criticised all over the internet. People write blogs about what XYZ brand did to incite ire in the vox popoli of Twitter. Entire Facebook pages are dedicated to shitty customer service. 

Apple is above it all, somehow, while also being entrenched in it all. 

Whether you’re a fan of Apple or dislike them implicitly, their mastery of story is unparalleled. By creating an advertising style based strictly around rumours and a lack of information given, not only can Apple handwave its less successful decisions as a mere rumour, but stories where they’re clearly in the wrong take digging to uncover. 

And it won’t affect their bottom line. 

Nobody is boycotting Apple based on iOS14.5. 

Nobody is boycotting Apple at all. In the year when most companies saw an economic downturn, Apple’s Q2 2021 earnings showed a 54% year-on-year revenue increase.

Much of it is down to their storytelling. 

Tips for better storytelling

We can’t tell you how to write a story that’s going to resonate with every individual member of your audience. 

Nobody can tell you how to write that story. 

It doesn’t exist. 

What we can do is help you write a better story. 

Here are our top three tips for writing a better story:

• Don’t write your story around your product. Sounds detrimental? Sure. It is. But the way people tell a story, your product is never going to be at the centre. Your product is at the side, in the background, enabling the story to work. It’s the bottle of Kinnie your audience picks up from a crowded supermarket shelf and drinks with friends later, the makeup bag tucked into a purse before a first date. 
• Know what you want to say. When you start writing any narrative, you need three things: a hook for people to watch, a reason for people to keep watching, and something to take away from it. Out of all three of them, it’s the last one that’s fundamental, the last point that’s going to have people remembering your product in the long run and picking it up when they see it. Good ads make a point. Great ads make a point and are memorable.  
• Make your world real. Maybe this is a personal preference, but a lived-in world, real and alive, is much more interesting than a static placeholder. It helps people exist in it, put themselves in the shoes of your protagonist. It helps your product shine. Making sure your world is true-to-life makes it easier to relate to the story. Relating to the story makes you want the product the narrative is talking around. Rinse. Repeat. 

On Apple and Storytelling

Our head of brand likes to say that humans are just storytelling monkeys. All we want to do is sit around a fire and keep each other entertained. 

Whether Apple is the villain in your story or the hero or a bit player or waiting in the wings, the pandemic and post-pandemic era has highlighted Apple’s true marketable product: its ability to tell a story, and somehow have Apple involved.

And just like a campfire tale gets passed around from person to person, changing details but leaving the core of it untouched, we all follow Apple’s example, and we tell our own stories. 

With Apple involved, of course. 

The post Apple’s iOS14.5: A Masterclass in Story appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

And then there’s the European Super League. 

From a brand perspective, the European Super League is the kind of PR nightmare that no amount of spin or publicising can really improve on. Like decorating a sneeze-and-it’ll-fall-off bumper with a sticker, trying to justify the existence of the European Super League in the face of overwhelmingly negative reactions isn’t going to do much except stave off the inevitable downfall. 

Which, as of this moment, has happened: the League is cancelled. All the teams have withdrawn. 

The European Super League: A brief explainer

On the 19th of April, 2021, the Times published that six English clubs signed up to play in a 20-team-only European Super League. The League, which would have had 15 permanent members as ‘founder clubs’ (12 of which had signed up at the start), would abolish what it viewed as ‘poor quality’ games while also (and this is important) help elite European clubs recover earnings lost during the COVID-19 period. The fifteen founder clubs would govern the competition, and matches would be played both home and away. 

The competition would feature uncapped solidarity payments, much higher than those offered by existing European competitors, as well as €3.5 billion to offset the infrastructure costs. Brands such as JPMorgan Chase added extra incentive by backing the competition to the tune of $5billion. 

Winnings would be split at: 32.5% to the founding teams, 32.5% to participating and invited teams, 20% on merit, and 15% on broadcast audience size. 

On paper, it isn’t a bad idea. On paper, it’s been something in the works since 1998. 

What happened?

Pre-COVID, there is every possibility that the European Super League would’ve succeeded. 

Post-COVID, the world is trickier. 

Backlash was near immediate. Everyone from football governing bodies to government entities to avid sports fans spoke out against the creation of the European Super League. Players released written statements. Bans for the competing teams – from domestic, European, and world football competitions – were in the works. Analysts tore apart the European Super League’s plans, pointing out that their proposed hybrid system would lead to a hoarding of the majority of the winnings by the founder clubs, while reflecting back any financial fallout on the rest of the European football teams. 

One by one, clubs that had initially been announced as founder members withdrew: first the six English clubs, then Italian Internazionale. With six of their biggest draws down, the Super League released a statement that the project would be ‘reshaped’. 

On April 21st, 2021, the project was nearly, if not already, dead. 

Two days. 

That’s all it took. 

But why would it have worked?

Fan support carries a lot of weight. 

Think about it in terms of football fanatics. These are people who will travel to see their favourite team in person. Who follow each match religiously. Who spend money on merch. There is nothing as powerful for any brand as a dedicated fan, and football being one of the most popular viewing sports in the world, on paper having a league dedicated and created to showcasing the most ‘valuable’ teams only makes sense. 

In theory: football fans would pay for it. 

An avid Manchester United fan would visit all the games, both home and away. They’d buy the kit. They’d go to each and every fan event. Because of the play style of the competition, that’s thousands in ticket sales and merch sales, not including hotels and accommodation. 

So why didn’t it work?

Fan support carries a lot of weight. 

But so does what’s going on. 

The European Super League comes on the heels of an entire year and a half’s worth of existing in the same reality as a global pandemic. Not being able to travel, not being able to see and support teams in person, not really having much to look forward to except the idea that, one day, this’ll be behind us and everything will be fine again. 

In addition, it comes after a year of the slow realisation of the masses that big businesses and corporations will do whatever it takes to get money – at the cost and the harm of the consumer.

Beyond that, the fundamental tenet of football – that teams qualify to play in important competitions based on merit on the pitch, not based on how much they’re worth or whether they were already purchased a place in the line-up – was forgotten in the bid to create a European Super League and prevent something like COVID-19 from ever cutting back into profits. 

Profits earned and kept by teams which already made more money than their lesser-supported European peers. 

There’s more. 

Most of these teams are ancient, in the sporting world. They have stories and backgrounds and personalities, whether true or ascribed by the fan and later canonised into reality. These stories matter to the fans. 

These stories were not taken into account when it came to creating the European Super League. To make an event that capitalised on the bottom line, sacrifices needed to be made – and the sacrifices made was the story behind the brand itself, the story that drew and held fans from the moment they saw their first game to however old they are now.

However, the people who created this League, the owners, don’t see the stories. They see profit. They see a pandemic cutting into their means. They see a crisis to be fixed. The stories are something to be monetised, not protected. 

And in ignoring how the teams came to be to create a money machine, they also ignored how important story is to supporting those same teams. When the backlash hit, it wasn’t just for the money; it was for wandering so far from purpose and story that they couldn’t see the point of view of the audience any longer. 

In a nutshell

Brands can learn a lot from the European super league fiasco. 

Here’s our top five lessons. 

1. If you have brand values, stick to them. They’re there for a reason. While it might not be evident that fans support you for them, brand values are what distinguishes you from your competitors. Hold onto them. 
2. Listen to your audience. When it comes to power plays, brands have to bend to the needs of the present and their audiences, or risk fading into obscurity. We all know about KODAK. 
3. Reach out to your audience. Take their feedback. Listen and do better the next time along. When you listen to your audience, you’re listening to the people who support you the most. 
4. If you’ve made a mistake, never double-down on it. It’s the worst thing you can do. Apologise with sincerity, move on. The internet won’t forget easily, so give them something better to talk about; redeem yourself with community outreach, with honest change, with visible regret. More than ever, brands are seen as extensions of humanity. So humanise. 
5. Don’t focus on your bottom line. It needs to be something kept in mind – you need money to run a business, after all – but doing things for your bottom line will ultimately break you if you prioritise your bottom line over your audience. 

Most importantly? Don’t drop the very thing that your audience supports you for. 

That’s just crazy. 

The post European Super League: Lessons Learned appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

For the sake of this blog, let’s start with a quick description of the term brand and how it will be interpreted – even before we get to brand communications and audience engagement. One of the easiest ways to go about it is to say what a brand is not. A brand is not your visual identity – it does not reside within your logo and end there.

A brand is the set of perceptions that your audience forms about your brand. They form these perceptions as they experience your brand – mainly a result of the brand’s behaviour but also thanks to the stories your brand tells in the form of brand and promotional communication, pricing, product offering, packaging, and all the other touchpoints your brand uses to come in contact with the world outside.

Of course, your logo and visual identity are essential. They are the quickest way of jolting an individual’s memory and call up all the perceptions that person has about your brand. They will recollect what they think your brand stands for, its reason for existence, its values or principles, and a clear understanding of its personality.

With a strong brand, one look at your logo and the person viewing it will recall a very defined set of recollections. Strong brands are consistent in their behaviour, have the ability to focus on what they represent and differentiate themselves clearly from the competition. They are charismatic to the point where they are believed to be unmatched in their category and their personality is unfalteringly clear and defined. They can change significant portions of their identity to suit the times they’re in without denting their brand value.

Apple is a strong band where consumer electronics are concerned. Asus makes an even broader set of devices than Apple does and competes in the same markets. The Asus brand is worth a respectable $1.7 billion. Apple is worth 154x that at $263 billion. Yet Apple’s products are not 154x as good as those made by Asus. And if Asus had Apple’s logo, I bet the figures would be exactly the same.

If we acknowledge the monetary value of brand equity, an even more solid argument in favour of a brand’s behaviour and personality is a comparison with Samsung, the electronics giant that produces a staggering spread of consumer devices.

Samsung, while undoubtedly manufacturing excellent products, has a deeply boring persona that’s punctuated by one or two very glitzy campaigns every year. Love it or hate it, you have a clear idea of what Apple stands for. Do you know as much about the story of Samsung and would you even care?

Brand behaviour vs Brand Communications

As humans, we decide who to trust based on people’s behaviour and not their words. When is the last time you believed a stranger who said, “Trust me.”? 

When brands speak and when audiences listen are very often disconnected. Just as we gain significantly more information during a conversation from non-verbal cues than we do from the words actually spoken, our own personal relationships with the brands we know and love are built on our experience of the brand and not their overt communication.

It follows that brand behaviour is significantly more important than brand communications. A brand’s audience is, by definition, getting more savvy and better connected every day. One person’s experience with your brand can travel far and wide. And that experience is a well-informed one to begin with, with audiences making increasingly high demands of the brands they choose.

Luckily for the market, brands can no longer make claims they cannot possibly uphold and are called out for aligning with a cause that’s purely self-serving. Luckily for good brands, there is a very rewarding audience out there, willing to reward the brands that behave according to a sound set of principles with their cash or their crypto.

[Example: Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. It is built on one of the first blockchains that doesn’t support any of the fancy stuff that the new ones do. It is also an expensive one to run, with newer blockchains having significantly lower overheads. But Bitcoin has a strong brand. It is worth almost half the entire cryptocurrency market capitalization. One bit of advice to anyone with a good idea is that no matter what we say about brand, first-mover advantage remains one hell of a driver.]

In essence, brand thinking must originate from behaviour and brand communications should be crafted around this behaviour. This validates brand communications and adds significant value to them. The audiences that sit up and listen when certain brands speak are those that know the brand to follow through on their communication. This consistency of premise counts. Our audiences will forgive a font that’s slightly ‘off-brand’. I’ve looked at brand communications, horrified that the designer had used Arial instead of Helvetica. Seven other type nerds noticed. No one else cared.

Communication is, of course, part of a brand’s behaviour. The messages a brand decides to send, the way in which it reaches its audiences, the personality with which it communicates, and the values it upholds are all being assessed, consciously or unconsciously, by a brand’s audiences. The more behaviour and communication are one, the more likely an audience is to engage with the brand.

Why do brands communicate?

Brands communicate to inform. They use this opportunity to express their core beliefs and, while they do so, they inescapably betray their personality. If the personality is true to their fundamentals, then it is one we believe and engage with. So when brands inform us about something promotional, a new product offering or a pricing update for instance, the audience is also assessing the brand’s personality.

Whether we like it or not, we form an opinion heavily based on the personality of the communicator. Quite why brands separate ‘brand communications’ from ‘promotional communications’ is often puzzling. You’ve seen promotional communication that violates a brand’s core values for the sake of a quick sale. It is a wasted opportunity, a case of marketing spend that could easily have been marketing investment.

Very often, too often really, brands speak because they want to say something and not because they have something to say. These tend to be the ones that audiences stop listening to. They are the ones that complain about low audience engagement on their social feeds.

This does not always stem from a desire to be every-present. Many brands make the mistake of originating communication based on their activity rather than on what audiences want to hear. It is easy to assume that if you’ve spent a lot of time, money, and effort doing something, then your audience wants to know about it. Sometimes, all it takes is to ask an appropriately cynical audience about whether the public will care about this piece of communication before spending a ton on spreading the word.

There are exceptions of course, those brands that are so innovative (or traditional) that their process is an integral part of the story. It takes cunning or humility to know whether the brand you represent is one of these or not. For every story told that we don’t want to hear there is probably an interesting story that the brand hasn’t thought of telling.

“We’ve spent a million refurbishing your favourite clothes store.” No one cares.

“Now even better tasting.” One should hope so.

“We understand that you want [this] so we’re giving it to you.” Mildly condescending, wholly untrue, and no one cares.

We’re all guilty of this behaviour. We’ve all had budgets to spend, campaigns that must go out by a specific date because it’s back-to-school or just-before-summer or those awkward shoulder months. It is an inevitability but one that can be mitigated by a degree of empathy with our audiences.

Brands that see most reward from their communication, the ones that drive sales through deep audience engagement, do so by cleverly putting themselves in the shoes of their audiences. They take the time to understand the specific profile of their carefully defined audience. They are ruthless at eliminating all the stuff that audiences don’t care about. Even if they are itching to scream about some obscure feature because it took them two years to get it right.

These are brands that don’t sacrifice their ideals because of the nature of the opportunity to communicate. A 2-for-1 sticker at point of sale is as important as any other piece of communication and it deserves to represent the brand with respect. In the eyes of your consumer, how a brand does anything is how a brand does everything.

What kind of communication do audiences relate to?

To answer this question, we need to ask ourselves the same question about a brand that is very far from the one we’re working on. We need to find a brand from a completely different category, one that makes us happy to be its audience, and analyse the nature of that communication.

If you were a member of that audience and were given a chance to ask a brand to speak to you in a specific way, you’d be well within your rights to tell the brand, “Tell me what I want to hear and not what you want to say.” 

Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and ask yourself: “What will I feel as a result of interacting with your brand?”

Communication that audiences will listen to is:

Human. Brands are owned and run by experts in their specific industry. The people who own the brand know how their product is better than that of their competitor’s because of some obscure technical feature. They know the industry language. They know the internal politics of the company. And they make the mistake of thinking their audience cares. Communication that starts from the inside and works its way out is destined to fail. Every time.

Real. We allow brands a little wiggle room for overstating or dramatizing their products. We know the burger on a fast food restaurant photo is not what we’ll unwrap when we buy one. But that’s as far as audiences will forgive. Brands that make unlikely claims and that pretend to be something they’re not are inevitably called out. Sometimes a simple “Would I fall for this?” would suffice before approving that piece of collateral.

Relevant. Useless brands die. Useless products by useful brands die as well. Brand communication is relevant to the time, the place, and the audience that consumes it. Converse is irreverent, very street, and wholly of today. So they still sell sneakers from the seventies. They don’t speak about their heritage overtly and they are relevant to three generations of humans who are connected by little else than their desire to be of today. Even better, speak to me about how your brand is going to make my future better.

Ask: “How will my life’s story be better with your brand in it?”

Concise.

Unusual. The creative conundrum is always where to err. Too close to what’s familiar, and it’s boring. Too far from what we know, and it’s detached. In between these is the playground of brand communication – unusual enough to stand out while retaining the right amount of familiarity to draw me in. Like every good creative endeavour, there is bravery involved, the potential for failure must be there as we release communication. If you feel entirely certain that it will ‘work’, it will do just that – it won’t offend and it won’t excite. And if it doesn’t excite, we relegate that communication to our working memory, the bit of our monkey brain that we purge when we go to sleep to make room for exciting stuff that’s about to happen tomorrow.

Mildly unpopular. If your brand is universally popular, your brand sucks. We are tribal creatures. We love to stand for something. “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC”, “Take the Pepsi challenge”. Even in products as generic as colas there exist fans. Brave brands behave in a way that acknowledges that they’re not for everyone. The brave brand that’s smart about its communication makes sure that it speaks the way it behaves. It identifies its audience and says, “This one’s for you. It’s not for everyone.”  

Respectful. Don’t tell me too much. My most precious resource in a post-consumerist world is my time. I won’t grant you much of it. Just enough headline will intrigue me, particularly if it is slightly incomplete and can be completed by me and something from my life experience. If I care enough, I’ll dig deeper, I’ll look you up, I’ll follow your communication funnel all the way to ‘add to cart’. 

Consistent. Once again, your audience doesn’t want on-brand communication to have the right colours and fonts. For an agency guy this might sound strange – what I’m saying is that if you have the right agency this isn’t something to worry about ever again. Your audience wants consistency of premise. Why does the brand wake up in the morning? What are its values or behavioural principles? What’s it promising me? What do I want to feel as a result of connecting with this brand?

In essence, do what helps you get to know your audience because it will enable you to craft the right message and use the right channels. And that’s the way you can speak to an audience and have them listen.

The benefits of relatable brand communication

Money can’t buy us love. The Beatles made that quite clear. But the goal of a brand is not directly to make money. Rather, the better a brand behaves, the more money will come in as an inevitable consequence.

[Money is the desired consequence only for commercial brands. Martin Luther King is an example of a strong personal brand that had a cause rather than profit as an intended outcome of that brand’s efforts. Analyse his brand in terms of focus, charisma, unwavering purpose, audience engagement, and many other brand performance indicators and the strength of the brand is undeniable.]

Powerful brand communication knows who it is speaking to and, just as importantly, who it is leaving out. It is better to relate strongly with your audience than attempt a weaker bond with a larger audience that will most likely never care about your brand anyway. An audience that knows it is being addressed specifically is much more likely to be properly attentive to messaging. Think of the tortuous path to accurate generational communication and you will see how hard work when addressing audiences the right way can pay off in spades.

Relatable communication tells its audience that the brand gets it, that while the brand could just get on with stuff and show us a product and a price it is willing to go a step further, speak our language, respect our time, and make the effort to earn my attention.

We all know one of these brands. They are the ones that, in our personal lives, reach for that magical bit of money we are prepared to spend irrationally out of love for that brand. They are inevitably the brands that have, over time, paid attention to our emotions and behaved in a way that earned our loyalty and trust.

Emotion in a single piece of communication does not do this. The brands that create a beautiful piece of emotional advertising once a year, for Christmas, become those brands that we can depend on for a beautiful piece of TV around Christmas. They do not weave emotion into their everyday behaviour and we don’t engage emotionally with them every day either. They remain brands that we are largely indifferent to. Coca Cola is the kind of product that has linked emotion to its product every single day for well over a century and it is one of the most loved drinks on the planet – so much so that we don’t stop to assess the product for what it really is.

In effect, brands that communicate in a way that truly relates to our state of mind are those that speak to us about an outcome, rather than a product. 

“1,000 songs in your pocket” was the line that created the iPod

“Open happiness” doesn’t speak about the product at all.

“Because you’re worth it” places self worth above product features or benefits

These are the brands that realise that their audiences are made up of actual humans who will only lend a moment of their time to a brand that addresses their state as a person rather than a brand that is conceited enough to think a person cares about their product. Of course, the product is at the heart of brand communication but we are drawn in with a promise of an outcome to ourselves as a human rather than the specific action of purchasing a product.

Brands that understand their audiences and create relatable and respectful communication with relentless consistency are the ones that audiences grow to love and brand live runs rings around the spark that surrounds a single transaction. And brands we know and love for a long time are the ones we are prepared to forgive for an occasional transgression.

And soon, brand love turns into the profit margin we call brand equity – so perhaps love can earn us money, even if the reverse does not apply. One way of considering brand equity is the monetary gap between the price of our brand and its equivalent generic. Ask: “Do you want your brand to be generic, in nature and in pricing?”

In conclusion, brand communication that leads to deep engagement is led by behaviour first – it is the communication that is true to a brand’s purpose and values. It is also communication that understands an audience and relates to it by being respectful and promising a desirable outcome. If a brand’s behaviour and communication is consistent with these fundamentals it can build a life-long, value-based relationship with your audience. And isn’t that the ultimate goal of any brand?

The post Brand Communications for Long-term Audience Engagement appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

After 2020, we can add another immutable truth to the list: when faced with a massive global pandemic, most people* will buckle down, get shit done, and help each other out. 

The Kinder Consumer

2020 changed everything. 

The way we thought about marketing. The way we thought about people. The way we thought about how to connect to those people. 

It also, crucially, changed the people themselves. The post-2020 consumer has no connection with the consumers that marketers have been bending over backwards to please ever since the first advert was etched into papyrus. 

They’re outspoken. They’re dedicated to purpose: themselves, others, and everything in-between. They’re loud about what they like, and even louder about what they dislike. 

Most importantly, they’re kind. 

Snapshots from the pandemic

When borders closed and countries locked down, a lot of people found themselves at home, if they were lucky, and in quarantine if they weren’t. The normal 40 hour work week shrank down to one long stretch of time after another, and without anything else to keep them occupied, those people who would normally have gone out to restaurants, or watched a movie, or worked an extra hour later at work found themselves online. Internet usage increased by 7% month on month in 2020, and social media platforms took the brunt of all that internet traffic. 

• Tiktok saw a 75% increase in usage. 
• Facebook saw an 11% increase in usage. 
• Twitter saw a 34% increase in usage. 

Worldwide, people were having conversations. 

So what were they talking about?

Everything. 

Their day in lockdown. Sharing tips on getting through quarantine. People who could make art took to creating it, publishing free zines and artbooks, spreading a little joy through Tiktok dances. Zoom was full of people having family-wide internet chats.

When lockdown was too much, everyone flocked to the internet for a break. 

There’s more. 

Strangers helped other strangers through their grief. Fundraisers for medicine, rent, and myriad other expenses were met in record time. People cared – about other people, about themselves, and about getting everyone in their community through this safely. 

Understanding the Great Shift

A global pandemic puts things into perspective: probably, you don’t need that new pair of shoes to make your life better. You definitely should reconsider the latest phone. And do you really need to buy around 100EUR worth of skincare products when your job’s hanging in the balance by a thread? 

There were people who decided that they needed to shop. They needed that pleasure of receiving something in the mail, something normal in a year that was otherwise not. 

On the most part, though, people decided, “no, not really”, and the conversations brands were having with consumers dried up overnight. 

This isn’t normal.

Typically, times of crises lead to more shopping, not less. In other words, as the going gets tougher and tougher, the wallet gets lighter and lighter. 

However, this wasn’t just a crisis, it was a wholesale mental shift. The fact that people couldn’t go out to eat or travel to distant places to escape the current situation impressed upon many that this wasn’t a drill, keep your hands and your loved ones inside the house at all times, and don’t venture out before it’s safe. Do not pass GO, do not collect £200. 

Brands, and especially big corporations, didn’t realise this. Why would they? This wasn’t anything different from a housing crisis or an economic downturn, and they’d survived those crises with only the tiniest adjustments to their profit margins. While the history of some big corporations is long, memory is short. 

Corporations forget. 

They forget what it’s like to be a consumer. 

They can’t relate to the struggle to put food on the table before buying a product. 

They don’t know how to talk to a consumer undergoing an astronomical shift in their entire existence. For corporations, there are only two facets to any reality: people buy things, or people don’t buy things. 

With COVID-19, people weren’t buying things. They were listening to the conversations that brands were putting out, but as the death toll rose higher and higher, those conversations became more of an echo chamber, brands rebounding off of brands and silence. 

That would have been survivable, if unpleasant.

Then people started talking again. 

While brands were off still having the same conversations ad infinitum, consumers were watching what else they were doing: who was paying their workers fairly, who was giving them time off to be with their loved ones, who’d increased wages, who hadn’t, who donated to the community and who didn’t care about anything but sell, sell, sell. 

When the dust had eased on COVID-19 and the immediate crisis passed, the conversations that began to reverberate revolved around help. Who’d helped? Who hadn’t? 

Brands who’d helped – actually helped, not said they would, and did nothing about it – didn’t need to do a single shred of marketing or start any more conversations. Essentially, even brands that simply acted as they would have and didn’t resort to leveraging a dire situation in their favour emerged as winners. The consumers did it themselves, going to social media to tell everyone else, and spread the word farther. 

Brands who didn’t help got the same treatment. 

Obviously, it’s easy to say which is better. 

Care and Feeding of the New Consumer

This was going to happen sooner or later. 

Historically, big brands could get away with being less than responsible by the snail-pace crawl of information. Something that happened wouldn’t become public knowledge for years and years after. That’s why the McDonalds’ ‘hot coffee’ lawsuit is known as an example of Darwinism instead of ‘look at this company who served their coffee so hot to save money that the woman who sustained multiple life-threatening third degree burns’.

This is what brands are used to – information travelling slowly enough that it can be buried, without affecting the conversation about their products. 

People have been becoming aware of the darker side of brands slowly. 

As the generations shift forward, each consumer that comes is a kinder, more compassionate version of the one before; each consumer is more difficult to get through to when your actions don’t reflect your attitude. 

COVID-19 didn’t create the new consumer out of thin air. It just sped up the process into days instead of years. 

How do you market to the new consumer?

It’s not a question of marketing. 

Having the right conversations at the right time is important. Talking about your products and your company remains crucial for getting the word out about who you are. 

But it’s what you do that’s going to make the difference. 

The new consumer isn’t going to retweet, repost, or praise your brand just for existing. The new consumer doesn’t care if you have the cheapest prices or one-day delivery or if you can offer something new. There will always be another retailer who can offer the same thing, undercut their own prices, and one-up you.

What matters is what you do.

What the new consumer wants to know is this: if the worst happens, if the community needed help, would you help?

The answers don’t need marketing. They just need to happen. 

Bacardi teamed up with Olein Refiner to provide the raw materials to increase hand sanitizer production and saw a 3410% increase in conversations.  

Dyson created a brand-new production line to build around 5,000 much-needed ventilators for use in hospitals in the United Kingdom saw a 2626% increase in conversations about Dyson.

Nintendo listened to fans and released their much-anticipated Animal Crossing: New Horizons game early and saw an 8,136% increase in conversation. 

None of these brands are strangers to controversy. 

They still stepped up to help, and they saw the benefits: increased conversation, which means increased awareness, which means more people likely to engage with the brand. 

The takeaway is this: people are kinder, less tolerant, and ready to fight for what they believe in. Lecturing them doesn’t work. Pandering isn’t a solution anymore. 

Get ready to talk. 

And get ready to mean what you say.

* There are people who won’t, but for every anti-masker and big corporation forcing their people back to work in garbage bags, there are a dozen others who realise that the only way to survive is together.

The post Consumer Behaviour in 2021 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

A lot of companies find themselves doing well in the market for several years. Everything is going great but at some point they just have to get themselves some sort of communication strategy, so they come to us.  And even when they have been active and successful for years, suddenly a blanket of silence falls onto the room when we ask: Who are you as a Brand? What are your values, what guides your work and, consequently, guides your communication?
Things become even more interesting when you are speaking about companies that come from industries which are very distant from the communication fields: accountancy, cheese makers, metallurgical industries, medical treatment, or nutrition professionals, etc.
The first answer you will probably get is an operational answer: “we work with numbers”, “we make cheese”, “we transform iron into stairs”, “we try to heal people”, “we teach people how to eat better”, etc. Some other clients may think that their identity is their logo, the colours and even the font they’ve been using since the company’s origins (which is kind of true, but that’s only one of the many embodiments that the identity may take).
When it comes to creating a brand identity it’s the same as when talking about a person. You’re not defined by what you do for a living, or the colours that you wear to go to the office… what defines you is something that comes before that, it’s bigger and it guides all that you are and do.
So, before working on a communication strategy it’s essential to firstly know who you are… what your identity is. More often than not brands ignore who they are and think only about what they do. The good news about this is that it’s never too late to find your identity behind all those circumstantial expressions of it. You’re always in time to take control.
So, for all those who are always asking, “where should I start to achieve better brand communication”, here are some initial steps to move in that direction.

How do you know if there is something to be worried about?

Brand identity is the answer to “Who are you as a brand?” Think of your brand like a person, it works for your personal brand as well as for a multinational company. So be sure that you are not answering this question with things that you do, colours that you wear or the mood in which you can wake up every now and then. To get there, you can try this exercise.

1. Analyse honestly and sincerely what your Brand VALUES are. Generally speaking: what are those three or four things that make you do what you do, in the way you do it, and not in a different way?
2. Think about the PROMISE that you, as a brand, are making to your clients every day. What do you offer to your clients that makes them come to you and not to someone else?
3. Think about how all that DEFINES your brand and your job.
4. Think about how your client SEE your brand.
5. Think about how you would like your brand to BE SEEN by the clients.

If you can answer all these questions, and the result sounds logical and makes you feel happy with what you have; then you have a clear idea of WHO YOU ARE as a brand, and you are ready to communicate in any possible way your brand may need to.
Otherwise, if with each of these questions, another five new questions appear, or you only get vague replies for them; it means that you have the common situation of being unable to analyse your brand’s essence.

Don’t panic

It’s always difficult to analyse yourself objectively.
Keep calm and breathe, you simply ask for an expert’s help to take the first step in the right direction. To get to know something that is as basic and important for your brand, as it is for any person: get a better knowledge of yourself as the brand that you are, to understand who you are, and find out your identity behind the promise you are making.
Only if you know who you are, you will know what to do. And we are here, ready to guide you through this process of getting to know yourself to start turning your brand into a healthier one. So if you need some expert advice, why not get in touch?
These images were designed by one of our interns, Antonella Meli. Who doesn’t love a panicked Wonder Woman?

The post Finding the identity behind the promise appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.