How can brands grow in a digital world?

Bernstein

It is clear that digital—from social networks and apps to blogs and digital platforms— has fundamentally changed brands and branding.

From being just another channel, digital today is fundamental to what a brand is, and how it is experienced.

The traditional touchpoints through which brands even a few years ago reached consumers have been turned on their heads.

Incumbent brands that could once just put money behind brand awareness and conversion efforts at a few reliable points along the purchase funnel (and expect an uplift of sales) are facing significant competition and general customer apathy.

This new competition is coming from both the innovations of age-old competitors as well as from upstarts that can more effectively capture new customer preferences.

Modern consumers armed with ample choices expect to interact with brands as easily as they can hail a Grab or Go-Jek, or order on Carousell or Lazada. They have no patience for poor customer service and are empowered through technology to let the world know how they feel when companies fail to uphold their end of the bargain.

The question all companies need to be asking themselves is: How does my brand thrive in such a complex and challenging environment?

Here are seven actionable insights on how brands can navigate and grow in today’s digital world.

1. Grow together: Build businesses around people

It might sound old-fashioned, but brands must put customers at the heart of their businesses-especially in today’s social media climate. Customers don’t want to be catered to superficially-they want the brand to seamlessly operate within their busy lifestyles. By interacting in new and creative ways with customers, successful brands are creating better products, services, and experiences that both foster and sustain growth.

2. Growth through seamless experiences

Successful brands understand that every touchpoint is an opportunity to shape perception and future purchase intent. With today’s consumers existing in numerous digital spaces at once, understanding the customer journey and every relevant interaction with your brand is a requirement. These efforts are crucial to understanding the purchase processes and post-purchase behavior, which ultimately leads to a smarter allocation of brand investment dollars. Better, more meaningful experiences will also generate positive word-of-mouth; not only lowering cost of new customer acquisition, but generating increased overall loyalty.

3. Growth through storytelling

Stories have always been central to the human connection. Today’s brands need to connect with real people-not just demographic “audiences.” Successful brands view stories as much more than content-they embody them, creating storified experiences with you as the protagonist.

These are narratives that speak to our needs, interests, and (sometimes latent) desires, rather than simply telling us what we want to hear. It is key how your content comes to life across all of your owned properties: website, social channels, newsletters, apps. Successful brands understand how to leverage various owned channels for maximum engagement and exposure.

4. Growth through purpose

Successful brands today aren’t purpose-led, they’re purpose-bred-built to solve a problem, created around a need. It’s not about adding purpose as a sheen or a tactic-brands are differentiating themselves by building purpose into the very DNA of their organizations.

It’s an approach that is vital to fast-rising millennials seeking to lead more purposeful lives-personally and through the brands they bring into their lifestyles. And it all begins with a central mission to change something in the world for good.

5. Growth through transparency

With so much information at our fingertips, the world is an open window. As customers give up more data for more value, brands are breaking down traditional barriers between themselves and their customers to cultivate legitimate connections.

They are putting it all out there, sharing information about how their products are made, what they’re doing with your information, and how the company makes money.

By building accountability into their identity, they’re growing trust and long-term loyalty.

6. Growth through data
With the rapid evolution of technology and fall in the cost of data storage, massive piles of data have become the norm—and so has the challenge of making sense of it.
But breakthrough analytics platforms have successfully streamlined brands’ ability to garner a complete understanding of their customers and segments, and how they best fit into a user’s lifestyle. Doing so not only informs targeted and timely messaging, but allows personalized and optimized interactions with prospects and consumers.

7. Growth through new markets
All brands that aim for sustainable growth have to think globally from day one. And it’s often by responding to a challenge in a single region that brands create a unique, differentiated approach that has others clamoring for it. Some are taking advantage of their inherent agility to bring emerging technologies into people’s daily lives, while others are expanding even deeper into customers’ growing lifestyles.

Today, brands and businesses need to move faster than ever before. That’s because they are expected to move at the speed of our demands—at the speed of our lives. We use brands to control and design the lives we wish to lead, because brands are the vehicles which empower experiences. And driving these experiences is data and technology, powering better choices, meaningful narratives, one-on-one attention and new form factors.

As every interaction is optimized, as Gafa brands (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) alter the definition of service and connectivity, as people gain access to greater and more nuanced choices, our expectations from brands are on the rise.

Digital is no longer a mere tool—it is both an experience and a behavior, and deeply woven into our daily lives, and that of our customers.

Like the role your smartphone plays in your life, digital should be central to the brand, acting as a red thread that helps bind and grow the organization, and helping you get closer to your customers.

(The author is gen. manager and exec. director of Interbrand, Singapore and sr. client executive in Asia-Pacific.)