Brand opportunities aren’t what they used to be

A young woman recently spent most of her day browsing an online shopping site—in breaks at work, over lunchtime, whenever she had some free time available.

That evening, she spent a further two hours taking a closer look at the products she was interested in.

Then, finally, of all the products she had spent her day researching, she bought just a tiny fraction.

On the face of it, this seems like a startlingly inefficient virtual shopping trip.

However, our shopper is not all that unusual.

Consumers worldwide spend far more time browsing products on e-commerce sites than they do actually buying them.

They visit these sites many more times than they make purchases from them.

The young woman’s online window-shopping shows how people are increasingly taking control of when they want to be engaged and inspired by brands—and in many cases they are choosing touchpoints that aren’t traditionally considered brand-building channels at all.

If marketers are to continue building effective brands, they need a new definition of what constitutes a brand-building opportunity.

Brand channels used to be defined by their ability to reach target audiences at scale. However, reach is no longer a differentiator for any media platform.

When the same consumer can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, not to mention TV, outdoor ads and more, the ability to reach them isn’t the issue—it’s what happens when you do that counts.

Brand opportunities are defined by the state of mind of the audience, not the fact that the audience is there.

Kantar TNS research discovered only 20 percent touchpoints were delivering nearly 80 percent of the impact. If businesses are to become more effective in redefining brand opportunities, they need to invest wisely by identifying the key touchpoints that matter to the brand and then delivering excellently across them. It is also pointed out, however, that the majority of moments that matter in order to maximize impact are not paid media moments.

Recent Kantar TNS analysis of equity for one FMCG brand is fairly typical. It showed that the touchpoints where it competed most effectively on reach (TV ads, print ads and word of mouth from family and friends) were also the touchpoints where it underperformed in terms of engagement.

The context in which this brand outperformed its competitors was less conventional. It turned out to be the occasions when celebrity chefs used it as an ingredient in their recipes, providing unique endorsement, relevance and credibility.

What gave this brand its competitive edge wasn’t just the ability to reach more people; it was the ability to create more unique and influential brand memories.

Marketers can’t create memorable memories simply by chasing their audiences across the internet. This quickly becomes exhausting: it exhausts resource, budget and organizational energy.

Marketers need to get selective—but they need to get selective intelligently, by focusing on how brand memories actually form.

People don’t remember every encounter with a brand—they remember encounters that flood their brains with emotion, and align with their motivations and priorities at the time.

Brands succeed by being selective—choosing the contexts and experiences that would most suit their ability to build influential memories among their target audiences.

But the creation of initial brand memories in this way is only part of the journey that brands must take in the multi-touchpoint landscape.

Memories don’t stay fixed, like a video recording of our past experience. They are recalled and reshaped every time another relevant experience comes along. Every encounter will either reinforce or undermine the memories formed by their previous brand activity. They must therefore select their touchpoints carefully.

By focusing on the moments that matter, marketers can still stay in control of brand memories—and exert more consistent influence over their audience’s choices.

Building brands across channels and devices is no longer simply a creative challenge—or a media buying one. It’s also an exercise in organizational change.

Brand marketing isn’t what it used to be—and the departments that deliver it can’t stay the way they used to be either.