To succeed and prosper in today’s highly
competitive, fast-moving world, brands
need to be agile to be able to adapt, react
quickly and not be immovable.
Brand Gen Issue Four
Brand Gen ISSUE FOUR
Brand is
essential.
‘Brand’ has gone
from a lofty
marketing concept
to an essential
component of
business strategy.
No business discounts the importance of brand—it is discussed at high level,
is as relevant for B2B as B2C, and is key to business valuation. Not so long ago we
spent a lot of time and investment explaining what brands were and why they
were worth spending money on. But today all conversation is about the brand
story and how to bring it to life.
Today everyone has a brand with celebrities to students being encouraged to
develop their “personal brand” This is the ‘brand’s golden moment. Never has the
concept of brand been more prevalent and more relevant. And yet, at the same
time, traditional practices of brand development and management are undergoing
huge change. What was long held as sacrosanct to brand is now increasingly
anachronistic, deliberately looking at ways to embrace change, to be maverick,
to kick the old habits of being consistent and therefore, static.
Hart D’Lacey © 2015
1
Brand Gen ISSUE FOUR
Today’s
marketplace
demands
a new
approach.
Today’s
brands
must be
agile.
Hart D’Lacey © 2015
Historically, brands were constructed
with the intention to convey carefully
chosen words such as reliable,
friendly, authoritative. The earliest and
perhaps most recognized form of this
intangible collection of values was a
logo. It symbolised the brand promise
and all that it stood for. Brands were
also expressed through advertising,
packaging, marketing collateral,
business point of sale, product design,
websites, and more. There were
seemingly numerous places where
a brand lived, and success meant
ensuring seamless alignment across
all customer touch-points.
The brand manager’s role was to
holistically and consistently deliver
brand, to sound the same, look the
same, and feel the same. The greatest
challenge for the brand manager wasn’t
defining the brand but managing the
brand. Most importantly, successful
brand management meant exercising
rigorous control over all the places
the brand lived. Great brands didn’t
change; in fact, variation was seen to
dilute the brand.
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Brand Gen ISSUE FOUR
How to be an agile brand
1
Ability to adapt.
Above everything, agile brands are willing
to change and change quickly. They under
stand that success requires being both
nimble and responsive to opportunity. Nike is one of the best examples of an
agile brand. What began, as a track shoe
became the leader in its category. The
company also developed in to a leading
fashion brand, a maker of technology
applications and hardware, and an innovator
in marketing. Nike has staid true to its
core, but where and how its values are
expressed has changed and continues to go
through, dramatic evolution and reinvention.
Hart D’Lacey © 2015
2
Principled.
Arguably, principled almost seems to stifle
agility, but agile brands must also be very
clear about what they stand for. They should
seek new ways to deliver value and ensure
relevance, but at the same time are guided
by an inherent promise that is true and
lasting. It is this balance between standing
for something but not standing still that
makes agile brands successful.
Waitrose believes in championing British
produce, treading lightly on the environment,
supporting responsible sourcing and treating
people fairly. This allows them to make
peoples lives better and this has become
the platform from which new and innovative
ways to deliver on that promise are always
being explored.
3
Co-creation
Gary Hamel, author of leading the revolution,
said, “if you want to see the future coming,
90% of what you need to learn, you’ll learn
from outside the industry. Indeed we live
in a world of co-creation., where companies
are beginning to see the need to involve
people outside of their organization in an
effort to remain relevant. Agile brands are
sustained and shaped by ongoing
conversations, through a network of
customers, employees, partners, and
communities; they invite collaboration
to ensure they have vital relationships and
ongoing market relevance.
3
Brand Gen ISSUE FOUR
How to be an agile brand
4
Have the advantage
Forward thinking, agile brands constantly seek new possibilities to increase value and refine strategies. This means being action
rather than reaction. If we don’t seek new
ways to define the brand, we risk being
defined by others.
Virgin has long been clear about what it
stands for—maverick, challenging the
status quo, being irreverent. And to keep this
fresh and relevant, it knows it must lead
rather than be led. Arguably, no brand
is better at defining its own future,
challenging assumption and changing itself
before anyone else does.
Hart D’Lacey © 2015
5
Multichannel
Agile brands look for new and meaningful
platforms, mobile, digital, media, and
physical experiences. The evolution of
digital has shown us that we must assume
change will continue also that we can
only guess what that change will be. Brands
will be continually challenged to follow
consumers across an increased number of
connected devices and highly fragmented
customer journeys but effective brands
learn to adapt to the context of the
medium—whether Twitter, Facebook,
or pop-up retail.
6
Global reach
No business remains untouched by
global activity, trends and forecasts, here
there are opportunities to learn from and
reach new customers. Even if your business
is limited to a local market, nearly every
business can face unexpected competitors,
innovations, and insights from outside their
region. Brands must be able to learn from the
global marketplace and ensure they are
relevant to the needs of local markets.
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Brand Gen ISSUE FOUR
A change
of thought.
The biggest obstacle
or challenge to being
an agile brand is your
own limitations.
Hart D’Lacey © 2015
Consistent to relevant
Brand mark to brand experience
For many of us in branding, consistency
was viewed as the guiding principle.
The height of this was reached when
the brand looked and felt exactly the
same everywhere. Perhaps this has
been given too much importance,
where the brand was policed with
rigor. Consistency is good, just as
long as its not restricted to the point
of irrelevance.
There are many ways to define “brand
experience,” but simply: It happens
whenever and wherever a customer
connects with the brand and its values.
Launch to transform
In the past, new brands or revitalized
brands were “launched.” It was as
though once a product was brought
to market it was complete, this is an
outdated mindset, brand should never
finish. Don’t think of it as a project
with an end date, instead the evolution
should be a regular conversation
and a fundamental part of your
brand strategy.
It is easy to limit our understanding of
this value to just the offer itself, when in
fact that value can be delivered through
customer service, through packaging or
the physical environment. Its right that
the customer should have a consistent
feeling about the brand but this is built
through a series of actions that deliver
on a brand promise. The focus of an
agile brand should be the experience:
delivering on a brand promise across
platforms, geographies, and audiences.
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Brand Gen ISSUE FOUR
Reactive to active
Guidelines to principles
If we accept that the brand is
something that must be preserved, an
agile brand is one that must continually
improve, and this suggests that brand
managers adopt a new role. Rather than
being ‘brand police’, brand managers
should lead change. Looking for new
opportunities to evolve the brand and
create value. They should help push
the organisation rather than letting it
be pulled.
Guidelines are the brand bible, they
layout often in great detail, the dos and
don’ts of the brand. The problem with
guidelines is that they are often rigid by
definition, they stifle innovation, they
are intended to eliminate flexibility, and
they reduce the brand to a set of rules
and procedures. Increasingly, we see
success when a brand is governed by
a set of principles. Brands need to be
guided, but given the nature of today’s
fast-moving marketplace, guidelines
can be quickly superseded. A clear set
of principles empowers the brand
to offer support in unexpected
situations and can be an inspiration
for new opportunities.
At its
simplest,
an agile
brand
is one
most
likely to
say yes.
If we agree that brands must change
and evolve to be successful, then we
must adopt an open mindset that
looks to the future, listens to the
marketplace and embraces change.
The greatest challenge to building
an agile brand is thinking differently
about brand governance. It will
require branding agencies to give up
some old habits and practices from
which the craft of branding was
invented and create a new approach.
We look forward to participating in
this reinvention.
Hart D’Lacey © 2015
6
THANK
you.
BRAND GEN
ISSUE FOUR
HART D’LACEY UK
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