Marketing blogs with substance: Brand

By Ben Whitmore, Lemon Tree Agency Manager

Are you in business for the now or for the future? 

With so many tactical trends focused on generating sales today, brands often neglect to plan for the future – namely an organic future that relies more heavily on affinity and connection than immediate sales and paying to play. 

Google ads, Facebook, Instagram, email marketing, retargeting – they’re all great tools for generating sales and understanding your ROI. But what they’re not so great at doing is building your brand equity for future sales.

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Emotional vs functional marketing

Who is your ideal customer and how does your product help them? How does it make them feel? Are your products disposable or long-lasting and sentimental?

Disposable products do well in a see-ad-buy-now landscape because they don’t generally evoke a lot of emotion upon purchase. A well-made jacket or pair of shoes, on the other hand, may instil the sort of sentimentality that keeps consumers coming back to you for decades to come (and bypassing the paid-for ads to do so).

Think about your childhood. Can you still remember the jingles that marked the ads between your favourite TV shows? As a kid, I would religiously watch the Sydney to Hobart yacht race with my family. All those sponsor brands taking pride placement upon the sails of the leading maxis meant nothing to me then. For all I knew, “Ella Bache” or “Tag Heuer” were likely just the names of the boats and held no significance to a 10-year-old. 

Yet 20-something years later, when I see these brands, I’m transported back to those times and naturally feel an affinity toward them. Sure, 20-years may be a long-reaching strategy, but it’s important to think, at least a little, about this when setting your budgets and planning out your marketing activities. After all, it’s so easy to simply put your money into the digital funnel where X money goes in and Y comes out. However, thinking into the future, will this strategy evoke any kind of affinity towards your brand or products? 

As the digital world becomes increasingly dominant, we find that many businesses are making these short-term investments without considering the future or how they’d be able to weather the storm if one of these channels were to fold. You may have other channels to invest in, but at the end of the day, it’s the longer-term investments that will build a timeless and enduring brand and loyal customer base.  

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The power of long-term thinking for building brand affinity

As consumers, we all love to signal. Signal our status, signal which tribe we belong to or signal our values, so we seek out and borrow from brands that can help us to do just that. This is another reason long-term brand building is so important. 

When you get to a point where several brands are offering the same potential for signalling, however, it’s only that affinity and brand equity that will set you apart. A childhood memory, a love for a particular sport or celebrity that your brand is associated with. Or perhaps it’s a particular campaign or design that speaks directly to the heart of your customer. One thing we do know is that it’s rarely (if ever) that keyword-optimised ad you ran on Google or the Instagram story you posted months ago that will build a deep loyalty to your brand. 

Don’t get me wrong, those activities are an important tap on the shoulder to remind customers that you’re there. But often it’s not just your products that they want to buy, it’s what they represent and how customers can use them to market themselves to the world in a similar way.

Here’s an example.

There are plenty of coats and at all kinds of price points that will do the job of keeping you warm. But when a customer pulls on a Patagonia jacket, they’re signalling to the world that they live for the outdoors and care about the environment. You could just as easily get yourself to work in a Toyota, but when someone steps into a BMW, they’re signalling success and status. 

Why? Because of good brand building. Over a long period of time, we’ve learnt or we’ve interpreted through their marketing and brand representation, that this is what these companies represent. So when we want to be represented the same way, we know exactly where to go and who to spend our money with to do so. It may be a 20 or 30-year journey to conversion, but this is the pay off for the long term investment that these brands’ make through collaborations, sponsorships, and countless campaigns where they’re not only speaking to today’s customer but also their customers of the future.

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So next time you’re planning out your calendar, ask yourself what’s really most important for you, your business and your brand, and have a think about how you can diversify your activities to include both short and long term strategies. 

Your brand is the foundation upon which your entire business is built. It’s the instinctual feeling people have about who you are and what you do.

Your brand values, on the other hand, are the foundation from which all other brand elements should flow. They serve as your guiding principles, helping you to separate right from wrong and allowing you to find clarity on the things that really matter to your business. 

Disclaimer: Before we dig into the tremendous value that stems from articulating your values, we want to make something really (really) clear. When we talk about brand values, we’re not talking about those fluffy (and often generic) words found on the about page of a website that no one outside of the leadership team has ever heard of.

The kind of values we’re talking about are the deep and meaningful kind. The ones that are truly authentic, actionable and timeless. The kind that aren’t just words on a page but words to live by.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s dig in!

01 Brand values encourage brand loyalty

In a time when competition floods almost every market (thanks internet), we need to find ways to differentiate ourselves from those operating in the same space. But that doesn’t mean developing a new product or creating a really distinctive logo – because these things can easily be replicated. 

By differentiation, we mean the things that no one else can offer because they’re utterly unique to your brand. And these things are your brand purpose, your brand promise and your brand values. 

Of course, external attributes like your brand identity and personality are incredibly important, too. They help to establish awareness and encourage familiarity with your brand. They also help your audience develop a certain level of affinity and maybe even loyalty.

But to connect with your audience on a deeper level in a way that no other business can, you need to tap into the intrinsic elements that motivate your brand. The ones that give meaning to what you do and support you in driving change. And when you can articulate these in a way that really resonates with your audience? Well, there’s nothing more powerful than that for creating deeply loyal customers.

02 Brand values help to guide business and partnership decisions

Having a clearly defined set of brand values is really handy for assessing business decisions and partnership opportunities for alignment with where you’re headed as a brand. 

Consider this. You’re an up and coming e-commerce brand that prides itself on sourcing eco-friendly products from local manufacturers. Part of the reason you exist is to support these small businesses and to encourage consumers to spend their money on goods that have little impact on the planet. As business starts taking off, a manufacturer with an awesome product (at a great price) reaches out in the hopes you’ll take on their stock. But once you dig a little deeper, you learn that some of the manufacturing processes are pretty harmful – despite the materials themselves meeting your eco-friendly criteria. 

Of course, you could argue that the products themselves live up to your standards. But as one of your core values is to minimise impact on the environment, taking them on would mean falling short of the standards you set for yourself. And as well as being inauthentic to yourself, you’d be inauthentic to the customers who really resonate with your brand values. Sure, there would be some who might not care. But your loyal customers, the ones that make up a large chunk of your revenue are probably not going to be doing business with you again any time soon. 

I guess what we’re trying to say is that it’s pretty easy to jump the gun when an exciting opportunity presents itself. But think – is this decision likely to lead you closer to (or further away from) the brand you want to be?

That’s the power of articulating your brand values; they make it really easy to spot something that just isn’t the right fit for who you are as a brand. They ensure you stay true to your customers and that you don’t dilute the message of what you stand for – no matter how enticing an opportunity might seem.

03 Brand values give your employees a standard to live up to

For values to be truly authentic, they need to radiate through every interaction your customers have with your business – and that includes interactions with your employees. 

With clearly defined and articulated brand values, your employees have total clarity on how they’re expected to act and react when representing your business. With a clear understanding of what it means to embrace and embody your brand values, the chances of an employee contradicting your ideals drop dramatically and the authenticity of your brand values is more likely to remain intact.

With this in mind, brand values are a really good gauge to use during the hiring process and to assess whether a new recruit will align with the direction of your business. Articulating your brand values will also help to attract more of the people you want on your team while perhaps discouraging those that may not share your attitudes and beliefs.

04 The takeaway

At the end of the day, values are only as valuable as your ability to live by them. So before you set your values in stone, make sure to really think about how you’ll prove to your audience that they’re authentic.

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Ready to learn how to best communicate with your designer? Let’s jump into the interview with designer, Bianca Taylor-Andrews.
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