Do we need new, resilient brand models?
Introducing brand fitness, moving beyond data and insights, + an exercise in big picture framing.
Brand success in today’s hyper-fast cycle means persevering through the noise and trends that drive our consumer society. Brands are constantly in transition, constantly shifting and morphing in response to new social and economic realities. But it takes more than good strategy and the right insights to stay relevant. It takes stamina and resilience. It takes brand fitness.
Since the pandemic, the term “resilience” has occupied our minds – and our headlines. The act of being able to flow with changes, developing the capability of not only adapting, but thriving. It’s our new business and personal goal.
For brands, resilience is a first step toward becoming more future-able. Because the future is no longer a decade away. When we speak of the future now-a-days, we speak of a 1-3 year cycle in which things could change on a big scale.
(In comparison, a macro scale future is 10-20 years at least. But that exceeds most of our imagination capabilities.)
To achieve resilience – or as Nassim Nicholas Taleb takes it even further in his new book, Antifragile – traditional brand strategies and operating systems are no longer valid. They haven’t been for quite some time. We just couldn’t accept it yet. Then the pandemic hit, and it showed us, among many things, that the playbook to brand relevance and long-term success has changed. Brand leaders are now focused on making their brands more resilient and more fit in new fluid and holistic ways – through more fluid and holistic strategies, initiatives and approaches.
This is brand fitness: Building a more robust, pliable system to thrive through changes, adeptly develop new skills, and being able to recognize patterns and act on them.
Personally, I like the term fitness because it describes an active, regular practice, much like our own fitness routines. Brand fitness is more concrete and understandable than resilience, which, let’s be honest, is a vague term for most non-native speakers.
Fitness can have many variations. In today’s diverse economic landscape with hyper-specialized niche brands existing alongside global mainstream giants, fitness is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It exists in variations and depends on the type of organization, brand and its customers. Speaking of: It’s also important to remember that customers no longer have one set of characteristics, easily collaged onto a single persona. Each customer can embody more than one, even multiple, personas.
Brand, communication and marketing professionals often grapple with this. When I find myself too deep in a brand bubble, and need to zoom out again, I just take a look at how I shop across different categories like food, clothing, travel. What set of values comes into play and with what priority? How do those priorities shift when I decide what to buy? What categories elicit stronger brand loyalty than others, i.e. clothing versus airline providers? And why, why, why?
Beyond data and insights
Common practice today is to just look at data and interpret insights. Looking at a trend like sustainability, though, we realize that it’s not a single, straight-forward motivation that drives us. The data may point in many directions, or may be incomplete (there’s only so much organizations can collect).