No matter what size, businesses are currently facing an era of change. Even though market opportunities are at their most abundant, the threshold for challenger brands is lowering, technology disruption is affecting each and every sector, and communication channels are shifting at an unprecedented rate.
It’s not as if organisations aren’t aware of this either. While many businesses constantly review their structure, resources and strategy, the focus and experience required to assess your brand is no small task. Brand managers need to constantly evaluate whether their brand has any disconnect from future ambitions and, more importantly, whether it is at risk of becoming a barrier to future growth.
If things are going to plan for your brand, then great, no need to worry. But if you’re sensing the pains of disconnection, it’s entirely possible that your business has outgrown its brand. It does happen; it actually happened to our sister company RT not long ago. Taking the important steps to realign how they communicate with their client partners and the market.
1. YOUR BRAND COMMUNICATIONS AND MESSAGING ARE NOT ALIGNED TO YOUR FUTURE REVENUE STREAMS
Many businesses will face the desire to diversify at some point on their growth journey. When we gain deeper insights into our customers, their behaviour, the market opportunities, and look to marry those with new propositions, it’s easy to for a potential brand comms disconnection to occur.
Say you’re a leading product retailer in a specific sector. You have been selling and marketing a your products, gained success, and then seen your client base grow steadily over a number of years. You’ve found effective messages to help acquire new customers and the most rewarding channels to share those messages. However, through trend monitoring and market analysis you can see future opportunities in adjacent markets and a new type of customer. You want to unlock these new areas of income but ensure they aren’t held back by your current brand positioning and market messaging.
You are faced with many new proposition opportunities for potential growth but unsure of the impact on your already established brand. The risks of launching new ideas to generate future revenue streams might disrupt relationships or simply be misaligned to your customers.
When launching your new service, product or into a new market sector, making the difficult decisions to use your existing core brand, or if greater success will be achieved with a launch under a new brand, requires a considered approach and strategy. Historically this was a long and costly process, taking many months and sometimes years.
With our new approach to rapid validation and lean principles we are able to de-risk ideas and new market launches through speed and fast prototyping. Getting those ideas and products to market rapidly and with real client feedback to steer direction and the scaling of resources is exactly where LEAPS can help you change the game.
Understanding your organisation’s ‘brand elasticity’ will help form the strategy to experiment what new areas you can successfully leverage your brand equity in the pursuit of future income.
2. LOSING MARKET SHARE WITH INCREASED PRESSURE FROM RIVAL COMPETITION
If anything is a certain in any industry, it’s that someone else will be doing something similar to you, at some point or another. Every brand has competitors, whether they’re disruptive to your marketplace or not. However, if you’re suddenly noticing your market share decrease, this means your customers are – or at least think they are – getting a better deal elsewhere.
Is there a solution? Absolutely. But you need a new strategy on how to appeal to your market again. Whether that’s completely recommunicating your business, rebranding it, or just redefining who you are for your customers, watching the competition take over is no tactic.
Simply put, you need to work to outsmart your competitors, and that will begin with rethinking the strategy behind your brand’s existence. This can start with re-positioning or new proposition development using customer insight mapping and customer journey evaluation, and go right through to market gap analysis and innovation workshops.
Ensuring your focus will provide essential, sustainable value for your markets. But, you need to equip yourself with the clarity, commitment and confidence needed before setting off.
3. YOUR VALUE PROPOSITION IS NO LONGER CONVERTING SALES
We can’t stress enough how fundamental a compelling value proposition is to your brand. This is not only in place to educate and acquire customers, but to also provide a foundation for lifetime customer value and retain their loyalty.
This latter point is crucial. Contrary to popular belief, your long-term customers are not as cheap-to-keep as you think, and these customers benefit from your value proposition as much as your on-boarders. To ensure long-term value for your customers, you have to know the life-cycle of your customer journey inside and out.
The buyer journey is becoming more complex, with just about anything a customer needs to know about a brand, product and service available online. Before a potential buyer wants to hear your pitch, or even a single word from you, they need to know as much as they can before they even think about enquiry. The wealth of customer-shared experiences across social media now highlights any gaps between claimed value propositions and real customer experiences of the value.
So, going back to your current value proposition. If it’s failing you, you may be missing one (or more) of these fundamental drivers of brand value:
- Awareness: It’s not visible for your customer
- Understanding: It’s not clear enough for your customer what and where the value is
- Desire: It’s not delivering specific, quantifiable benefits
- Alignment: It’s not relevant to your customers’ real problems and needs
- Fit: It doesn’t differ in value from your competition or provide for your audience anymore
With a strong, well-pitched value proposition, and the services and products to deliver this promise, you are only going to help this process along, and inform your customer before they take action.
4. TOO MANY OF YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE DRAINING YOUR RESOURCES
Have you ever looked around your office and thought, “Wow, everyone seems to be working so hard. But why aren’t we seeing any profit?”
(For some of you, the term ‘busy fools’ may come to mind).
This may sound strange, but there is such a thing as having too many customers. Worse yet, many of these can actually be unhealthy or misaligned customers that are working against you rather than with you.
The 80:20 split is a good place to start, and is often found to be a truism. By this we mean, you might find that 80% of your company’s resources are used to support customers who contribute only 20% of revenue. And, worse yet, sometimes that can be a negative sum in relation to the bottom-line.
We see this kind of stuff every day. It’s more common than not to find out your major clients are subsidising your business to provide services and products to customers who are not profitable at all.
Your aims should be to flip this completely the other way around. You need to form a customer base that provides a platform for growth, energy and an abundance of resources, with the ability to meet new opportunities of value in the future.
You need to discover the perfect methodology to drill down on whom your ideal customer is and how to connect with them. What is it that motivates them to respond? What are their goals? What valuable problems can you solve for them?
Together with how can you ‘re-train’ and re-educate your time-wasting, bad customers into the perfect ones of the future. If you can’t fulfil their wants and needs in a profitable way, they’ll only cost your business in the long run.
Running a fast-track innovation week through our LEAPS program is a very effective way to understand the gaps and re-alignement needed to engage with our audience in a more emotional and compelling way.
5. YOUR NAME, MARKETING, OR EXTERNAL MESSAGING ARE BECOMING BARRIERS TO GROWTH
This is often a sign during rapid growth as much as it is at times of stagnation. For example, if you’re trying to tackle international markets, but you come across too regional. Or, simply you look tired and dated next to your competition, and need to invigorate your brand identity, communications and marketing campaigns.
6. YOUR SALES TEAM ARE FINDING IT HARD TO OPEN AND SECURE THE RIGHT OPPORTUNITIES
In front of more of the ‘right’ clients is where we all want to be. The only problem is, you can’t choose if and when prospects will engage with your brand, and this is especially true when it comes to B2B brands.
As we mentioned before, buyers now do their own research and evaluation before inviting you in. It’s hard to catch customers when you want to because they are in the driving seat. Every brand in the market is competing for their attention, but customers are only becoming more and more time-poor as brands saturate communication channels. In essence, customers don’t want to hear from you until they know exactly who you are.
So how can we influence this? How do you know how much they know about you? And how do you nurture relationships through your buying life-cycle and purchasing process at a distance?
Marketing Automation software is offering a powerful alternative to traditional push marketing approaches, and quickly becoming an industry standard. In effect, it’s targeting customers only with communications relevant to where they are in the customer journey.
Leveraging personalised and triggered communications based on the behaviours and actions of a prospect is now an advantage for the modern marketer. With lead nurturing, retention and cross-selling functions, this platform is a lucrative asset when used effectively.
What’s better is that set-ups are relatively affordable nowadays, too; it’s not just for the global players.
Selecting a platform, though, on-boarding and implementing the software, establishing initial workflows, training your team, and building your database is only the beginning. Simply getting hold of it and setting it up doesn’t mean you will see the ROI.
The actual challenge is building real team operations around those systems and maintaining them for your customers. Moving from pushing out campaigns by the skin of your teeth to having a planned strategic approach will significantly test your team’s resources, if you aren’t prepared.
Don’t have the digital breadth of expertise to fit this into your workflow? Then it may be an investment underutilised, or simply not for you. But, if you want to truly want to nurture your customers then it is a solution that will provide a substantial return for those willing to invest.
7. INTERNAL PRIDE, ENERGY AND COMMITMENT FROM YOUR TEAM IS DWINDLING, TOGETHER WITH RECRUITMENT CHALLENGES
This is probably one of the most common signs that each of us is bound to experience at some point. And, we’re not talking about just disliking the look of your brand’s website or logo. We mean when you and co-workers actually shy away from sharing your brand with clients, friends and colleagues.
In times of growth, recruiting talent can be a challenge also. Without clear reasons for your team to believe in your organisation, you may suffer from spiralling numbers of expensive contractors. Not to mention the never-ending battle of wages and perks to lure in the best people. Let’s not even open the ‘ball-pit’ and slides conversation.
Finding, securing and retaining top talent is hard; this requires strategy and resources. With a gap in pride and energy of your core team, the primary drive for new talent to become one of the family has a real and expensive impact.
As much as your directors and stakeholders are the ambassadors for your brand, your employees should be the true evangelists. These are the ones who live and breathe your brand day in and day out. They will leave a footprint wherever they go just as significant as any of your customers or brand communications. So, it is vital that what they leave behind is positive.
Over time, though, teams and management change, and this is where employees begin to lose alignment with their brand. But, businesses should never stop working to cultivate their employees’ energy.
The brand your employees work under needs to excite them, especially in the way in which your purpose is communicated. How the brand and subsequent campaigns make them feel needs to feature in your brand’s mission and purpose in a way that connects and inspires them.
It’s their advocacy and understanding of the brand’s purpose that will drive its growth and success, positively and organically. This internal alignment and commitment can sometimes be tweaked using the original brand and fresh activation campaigns. But in some cases a rebrand or repositioning is required to reignite your team, your recruitment of talent, and move to a brighter future.
