Brand Is No Longer About Name Recognition
Originally published as part of, “The Day Before Digital Transformation” by Phil Perkins and Cheryl Smith
The stories the world uses to describe your organization are outcomes of previous experiences. Businesses are usually rewarded for doing one thing well, and it becomes the story that the organization tells its customers. The organization focuses on and optimizes to become known for a set of skills, services, or products to do that one thing. Those factors are a condition of the organization’s original creation.
The question digital transformation leaders must now address is how do we position our brand and reputation to help create believability in our digital transformation when we are telling a new story that might not be supported by previous experiences?
At the beginning of the Digital Age, the word ‘brand’ primarily meant name recognition (do I recognize the brand?) and recall (do I think of the brand when I need to solve the problem it is known for solving?) There were only three major TV channels for national advertising, and newspaper ads provided solid local coverage. Marketing and advertising were relatively straightforward value propositions. Deciding on how to present the name and logo took most of a leader’s time. Brands invested heavily in name recognition to create instant recall with consumers so that a consumer would reach for their brand while standing in a retailer aisle. Many people today still remember brand jingles and recognize logos, decades after the products have left the market.
By the middle of the Digital Age (2011) there were 1,776 commercial TV channels in the US alone.[i] This does not include the number of digital news sites. Eliminating the traditional news sites that have gone digital, there are an estimated 38 digital-native news sites that average at least 10 million unique visitors per month, according to the Pew Research Center.[ii] In addition there are multiple non-traditional options for reaching consumers today, including apps, newsletters, podcasts, and aggregation platforms like Apple News. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram are widely used, with all news outlets having an official presence on each.
Since there is no longer one place (or three places) to get news, there is no longer one place (or three) to advertise to create or sustain a brand.
In the digital age, the historical definition of a brand—name recognition and recall—has become substantially less important and has less impact than recommendations from an individual’s social network, even one comprised of hundreds of strangers. This involves a new type of storytelling—storytelling created primarily by your customers and not solely from your marketing ads. Digital transformation leaders must embrace this new world.
Digital leaders understand that their marketers must now become the quarterbacks of the social narrative. They must actively listen on social channels and help create a positive environment around the organization and its new efforts. When they hear about a problem or situation concerning your organization’s product or service, they must quickly respond with empathy and facts to steer the direction of the conversation before uninformed theories emerge.
Having eyes and ears in all the social media platforms, monitoring for any reference to your organization or issues of interest, is both a science and an art. The science is straightforward: there are digital tools available that allow you to do name and context monitoring for your organization, critical partners, competitors, and issues of importance to your mission and goals. Keeping on top of what is being said, by whom, when, where, and why is relatively easy to do today. In fact, there are several companies that offer this type of monitoring as a service.
Understanding what is important and responding to those discussions, however, is much more of an art. The best digital monitoring teams are professionals who know when to intercede and when not to. They know how to present the facts or lead a discussion, and the type of ‘voice’ to take when doing so. Do they respond representing the organization? Do they respond as an individual employee of the organization in question? Do they respond simply as an interested observer? What exact language do they use to reflect the points they are trying to make?
Watching expert, passionate internal teams monitor and lead the social narrative discussion, 24/7, is an eye-opening experience. One company the authors have been involved with has become so good and has built such trust with the public that when a competitor had a major problem, customers automatically turned to their company as the source they had grown to believe and trust to get the facts of the situation and for information about what to do. Becoming the ‘go to’ company for a competitor in an emergency initially surprised the team, but they operated true to form. They worked with their peers at the company with the problem and quickly provided facts and the appropriate recommended actions for those involved in the situation at hand. It did not take long to create a level of order out of complete chaos. Although they did it for a competitor, this raised their own brand’s reputation for honesty, trust, and support under all circumstances, even to help a competitor. This is brand power that cannot be bought at any price.
Another example of quarterbacking the social narrative is something most of us have done many times over the past few years. In physical retail stores, it is typical to see people opening their Amazon app and scanning the product they are holding. The Amazon app gives them user reviews and price comparisons. Amazon owns that moment—it is part of our muscle memory now to check the app. Being part of our decision-making process regardless of the retail source gives the company an opportunity to steal that sale from the retailer. Worst case for Amazon, it has tracked that you were looking at the product, noting its popularity regardless of where you ended up buying it. It has become the de facto quarterback for retail purchasing.
Speaking of Amazon and your brand, the reviews that accompany every product on its site have become more powerful swayers of opinion than multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns. Careful monitoring of those reviews by organizations that sell on the site is a critical task for the social listening team. Although there are rules about who can leave a review, Amazon sells more than 12 million products, not including books, media, wine, and services. When Amazon Marketplace sellers are factored in, the total product count balloons to more than 353 million.[iii] It is impossible for Amazon to police the reviews about your products, even using its sophisticated algorithms. That is up to your teams.
A brand is no longer just a memorable jingle or logo. It is where we story the emotional content of our interactions with an organization. Those memories (good and bad) influence our decisions even when we are not consciously aware of them. The more people believe in your brand, the more they are willing to stay with you because they believe they know the outcome—how your organization will react—if various conditions and situations might arise when they use your product or service.
Understanding the emotional impact of brand has become critical in the Digital Age, particularly given that virality—customers recommending your products and services to friends—is the name of the game. This is a different view of brand than we had in the past.
This understanding of brand becomes critical as the organization expands its efforts beyond its existing products or services. Regardless of brand positioning in the past, the new realities of the organization’s digital transformation must take root with every group including every customer, every employee, and every partner. The storytelling transformation will take time to perfect, and it is dangerous to try to expand it too quickly. For this reason, successful digital leaders know to bring together a small team from both sales and marketing—and from the social media monitoring team—to perfect it before scaling it out. Unintended consequences always have been, and continue to be, dangerous.
When starting to introduce a new digital solution, the social media effort needs to be expanded to include targeting selected customers who will validate your new business model, provide early testimonials, and have tremendous impact on the strategic direction of the transformation. Many start-up executives will tell you that testimonials are one of the most important early factors in selling new customers. The social team needs to push these testimonials provided by early customers to tell other prospects that your organization has something worth evaluating, and these testimonials become the foundation for the new brand.
Care must be taken with the early customers, however. They can be a lift or a drag because they will have tremendous impact on the strategic direction of your digital product or service. Your initial advocates will understand their importance to you and will attempt to put pressure on your product or service roadmap. They will demand additional features to support their goals. If not managed, this can make it difficult to keep your team focused on goals important to expand to other clients. When building your early plans, it is critical make sure the brand and platform are built to acquire diverse clients, so no individual client gains too much power over your strategy.
For example, when SAP, a major enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor included on our early digital technology list (discussions in Chapter 8), entered the HR and payroll arenas, they co-created the software capabilities in partnership with American Airlines. This was a tremendous win. It gave SAP a major anchor client to fund the platform and establish a product direction. With a very recognizable cornerstone client establishing their legitimacy, they quickly acquired Delta Airlines as a client. There were many existing companies that could have met Delta’s, or American’s for that matter, technical HR and payroll requirements better than SAP could at the time. But SAP had built a reputation (brand belief) for being able to take on new challenges and seamlessly integrate the result into their platform. From a client perspective, purpose-built HR and complex payroll software was the superior option to software from an already established HR/payroll software vendor, particularly due to the complicated pilot and flight attendant union work and pay rules. From SAP’s perspective, if their HR/payroll system could do that, they could market it as being able to do anything. From American’s, and then Delta’s perspective, a custom-built but externally supported HR/payroll system by a major vendor was an excellent solution to their needs. SAP’s offer to do so was the clear choice.
SAP learned that there was a downside to this project. Its HR and payroll products and roadmaps became connected to the airline industry. This early traction became a trap for the brand because they were not able to create a bridge beyond the airline industry. American Airlines had too much power over SAP’s roadmap. SAP lost sight of what the goal was. It was not to make software for the airline industry, it was to get better at their core business and add HR and payroll tools for customers in multiple industries. SAP’s team was too focused on making the best result for a single client instead of adding to their capability base for all their clients.
[i]“Number of commercial TV stations in the United States from 1950 to 2017,” published by Amy Watson, Statista 2020, November 21, 2019.
[ii] Digital News Fact Sheet, Pew Research Center, July 23, 2019.
[iii] “How Many Products Does Amazon Carry?” www.retailtouchpoints.com.