Monday, August 11, 2008
The First Step In Great Branding: Insight
byHere’s a recent quote from Allen Adamson’s blog (author of BrandSimple and the soon-to-be-released BrandDigital):
“The first step in any good brand strategy, the first step to becoming a successful brand, is to get significant and useful insight about your customers. What, as a brand, can you offer that is relevant to them and is different from what they already experience?...In the brand world, understanding what the people want and delivering it better than the next guy is the real heart of gold.”
The operative phrase in Allen’s quote is “significant and useful insight.” When you think about innovative brands such as Apple, Google, Toyota, Procter & Gamble, and Target, it seems these companies know what the consumer wants before consumers know they want it. This isn’t an accident. It is from these brand leaders developing significant and useful insights better than their competitors. The importance of insightfulness is it allows marketing to create higher interest and a better return on investment because it is connecting to what as yet might be unapparent wants and needs.
Obtaining deep insight about the consumer requires a perspicacious nature and a lot of hard work. Useful and significant insight can come from many sources:
• Listening to customers through traditional- or digital-based qualitative and quantitative research;
• Gathering, interpreting, and codifying the buzz on social networks;
• Listening to comments, praises or gripes left in an online forum;
• Tracking media stories and consumer generated media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, podcasts, etc) for thoughts, opinions, patterns and trends;
• It can come from transactional or marketing data, but it takes someone who can distill a sea of facts and figures and turn that data into useful knowledge and patterns;
• It can be inferred by interpreting people’s wants and needs based on observing their behaviors;
• Deep insight can come through innovation — people understanding how emerging technologies will ultimately create new benefits for consumers, and the concomitant opportunities for products and services that will arise out of this new technology.
The list above is not comprehensive. Innovation itself is part of the insight-gathering process, and there will always be new ways of developing a deeper understanding of customers or prospects. The companies that have created great brands understand the value in this process, and their dedication to insight gathering will be instrumental in their continuation as brand powerhouses.
