In the book Brand Together, the authors elaborate on the need for companies to involve employees, clients, and customers in the process of co-creation and innovation, to enable a brand to succeed. Companies, the world over, have started understanding the importance of ‘co-creation’ as an act of engaging with all stakeholders and shaping collective thinking into business ideas. The advent of social media and its sweeping impact across consumer segments have lent a new meaning to this concept.
Social media is changing the game so far as brand management is concerned. This has both a positive and a negative side. Brand managers are certainly having to work a lot harder to cope with the influences and pressures social media brings to bear. But at the same time, there are also some great opportunities waiting to be exploited.
Brand managers too often take their brand for granted. They believe that as managers, they and they alone are custodians of the brand. The brand ‘belongs’ to them. They fail to appreciate the powerful role that consumers play in shaping the brand and building its reputation.
More recently, however, the concept of co-creation has begun to emerge. In co-creation, brand managers recognize the role played by the consumer and actively engage with consumers to build and evolve the brand together. Social media can play a big role in this process of co-creation. I will come back to this point later in the article, but first, let us remind ourselves of what a brand is.
you are only as good as your reputation
As I wrote in this column a short time ago, a brand is not a name or a logo. These things are symbols of the brand, in the same way that words are symbols of ideas, but they are not the brand itself. Brands are built through people’s experience of them. Did the brand deliver on the promises it made? Did it provide the value, the expected utility that consumers want and need? This is what marketers refer to as the ‘bundle of benefits’, the whole package of tangible and intangible, physical and psychological benefits that we derive from the purchase and consumption of goods and services. We choose brands that provide the benefits we are looking for; in other words, we choose brands that satisfy our physical and emotional needs and make us feel good about ourselves.
This story is from the November-December 2017 edition of The Smart Manager.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the November-December 2017 edition of The Smart Manager.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Building A Quality Culture
A strong company culture defined by its values, beliefs, and behaviors, has a profound impact on its products and services. More so in today’s VUCA world, where to stay relevant and maintain a competitive edge, it is critical for organizations to build a culture that focuses on quality. Suresh Lulla, author of Quality Fables, elucidates through significant examples how creating a culture of quality is imperative to driving success and productivity.
Customers For Life
The history of General Motors in India can be traced back to the 1920s, when it became the first automotive company to set up an assembly plant in the country. The relationship since then has not been as fruitful as GM would have hoped. GM’s flagship brand, Chevrolet, was introduced in India to build upon the success of the popular Opel marque. However, success has been fleeting at best—an issue that GM India is determined to rectify. It aims to do so by adopting a two-pronged approach: using customer feedback to influence product development, and delivering a superior sales-to-service experience.
The Digital Shift
… technology will radically disrupt HR in the near future. Indeed, it is already changing the way HR works and the role it plays and opening the door to a new type of “digital HR” function.1 The rise of digital and social media is changing the dynamics of HR and creating new ways of hiring, engaging, and retaining employees.
The Story Of Telling
“The best brands are built on great stories,”* this remark by Ian Rowden best captures the strategy of diligent brand building. Much more than attractive logos or the products themselves, what builds a brand is how successfully a story is woven around it. Brand marketers have to be good storytellers indeed.
Complexity Is Simpler Than You Think
Kay Kendall and Glenn Bodinson, authors of Leading the Malcolm Baldrige Way, shatter myths about excellence models such as Baldrige and EFQM.
Proponents of Isolation Never Become Victors
Multilateralism in the political and economic space has always led to frameworks that favor the mighty. WTO was no exception. With agriculture kept out of its purview, it could never become a truly fair and free trading system. China was the only large emerging economy that exploited relative openness in low-cost manufactured goods to take full advantage of the system. Other emerging economies could at best garner minor gains.
A History Lesson (From Year One) for Trump and the Brexit Crowd: Isolationism Has Never Worked!
Professor Stephane Garelli on growing isolationism.
A Win-Win Game
Business is not a sport where some stakeholder has to lose or fare badly for others to do well. Building an atmosphere of trust and transparency between all stakeholders will help companies retain them even during adverse times.
A Sustainable Model
With a total market value of $4.3 trillion and an employment base of at least 1.3 million direct employees and millions of others indirectly employed, platforms have become an important economic force.*Companies today are constantly looking for ways to build platforms—Infosys Ltd announced its plans of monetizing its platforms to make them a $2 billion business by March 2021. But are all platform businesses successful?
Custom Made
…three in four consumers said they receive too many emails from brands, and one-fifth said they could not handle the current volume…69 per cent have ‘unfollowed’ brands on social media, closed their accounts or cancelled subscriptions.*In these times, when the market is flooded with products and services, the most efficent way to engage customers is to offer them customized content. To achieve this, brands need to focus on observing the nuances of individual preferences.
