The present trend of branding in the digital era is now changing drastically and playing significant role in transforming the overall game for the brand marketers. Highlighting the best for the marketers is now the call which can shape modern business era. To discuss this, an exclusive session on “Role of Brands in Digital Era” took place in Bangladesh Brand Forum premises on 9th December, 2018. To conduct the session, Bangladesh Brand Forum brought two eminent professionals – Jonathan A.J. Wilson PhD, Branding Professor & Consultant, Author of Halal Branding and Mohamed Geraldez, California Based Entrepreneur & Investor.
They talked about the important aspects of the issue and helped the participants to understand this with real-life examples.
BRANDING IS ALL ABOUT IDENTITY MANAGEMENT
Today, all the businesses are roughly following the same rule when it comes to branding. Marketers should consider the brand senses seriously for managing their identity. Brands are supposed to control all of these brand senses – Smell, Sound, Taste, Touch, Sight. These can ultimately drive authenticity of the businesses, the sales, loyalty of consumers and social media engagement. “Businesses are utilizing digital media for their identity management which is actually a positive use of technology”, said Jonathan.
RESEARCH IS IMPORTANT
Marketers should always be aware about researching and experimenting newer things and procedures. What customers are getting today, probably cannot satisfy them tomorrow. So, experimenting about newer ways of introducing something should also be the concern. “Whenever I come across some pieces of research articles, I always challenge them saying that the article could be even better if they had incorporated the facts with some other techniques and researches”, said Jonathan.
TIME IS MONEY AND MONEY IS TIME
In the age of social media, people are the brands themselves. When it comes towards the case of themselves along with their brands, it becomes branding. People are now concerned about becoming the best version of themselves while being the actual themselves. People want the brand to be more efficient & creative. When the consumers see that certain brands are satisfying their needs keeping pace with the change of time, they actually become interested to spend money for it. Stressing on the importance of the fact, Jonathan said, “We actually have to show the process what we are doing to drive real and authentic customer experiences. You can control how you want to show people the best side of you. The moment you can do this, you will be able to actually make the way of wealth creation. And that’s really important.”
LOYALTY DRIVES PROFIT FOR SHOP OWNERS
Taking into consideration the customer loyalty factor, Mohamed Geraldez brought out the fact that if consumers become happy with the service, they will keep coming back to a particular shop owner. The moment marketers can identify and satisfy the needs of the customers, be it customized or generic, they can build loyalty among them. “When I become satisfied with the service of a particular shop owner, I will go back to him repeatedly; maybe just to ask how he is doing in his business. That’s called loyalty,” said Geraldez.
ADVERTISING, BRANDING, COMMUNICATION & DIGITAL GO HAND IN HAND
Logo plays a very important role in Branding. A black t-shirt having the logo of Nike or Adidas becomes much more acceptable to the consumers. The more popular the brand is, the more the price goes up. This is the actual scenario of current trends. A little branding can boost up the preferences towards the product; however, the bigger the branding is, the more is the willingness to pay for the product. When these advertising, branding and communication get digital, greater influence on the purchase behavior can be seen.
Along with having a meaningful logo, brands need to tell a story, make promises to drive great consumer experience and build reputation by keeping the promises. It has to be converted into social and economic welfare for the consumers and the companies themselves. And digital becomes the most efficient tool to communicate all of these together.
O.C.E.A.N – THE BIG 5 PERSONALITY TRAITS
Thinking about the personality of a brand and the culture of an organization is very important.
People’s psychology can be based on major 5 personality traits – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. Based on these traits, marketers can shape their branding strategy accordingly.
Openness: Brands should be open for newer course of action considering the fact that many individuals are more likely to prefer variety and spontaneity, new experiences, adventure and artistic interests.
Conscientiousness: People who often prefer a planned branding activity to spontaneity, are often considered extremely reliable. These people must be taken into consideration by the brand marketers.
Extraversion: Sometimes brands need to be extrovert by always publicizing themselves in public. This gives the brands greater exposure.
Agreeableness: Identifying the trusting and helpful people for brands can play a significant role in terms of brand existence.
Neuroticism: Brands should always consider innovation. This is how they can get neurotic about the people who gets bored easily and tend to build up negative notions out of it.
The session concluded being an interactive one by encouraging the audiences with a question-answer session. The audiences participated enthusiastically and the speakers tried to give them some important excerpts of the real-life business scenario by answering their questions.
