Six disruptions that will change the future of brands

• We bring to you a series of columns from industry experts, looking back at the last 10 years.
• The columns will explore how the media, marketing and advertising industry has transformed in the last decade.
• N. Chandramouli, CEO, TRA Research lists down the disruptions that have attempted to improve communication, its strategy and its implementation in industry.

The world’s commerce and therefore, mankind’s development, is crucially dependent on marketing communication - the type of communication that helps promote brand ideas. Though the potential of these trillion dollar ideas to grow and build the future is high, their ability to contaminate and destroy opportunities is equally astonishing. Innovative and useful products fail, organizations are unable to align vision, investors are quickly disheartened and seek exit – and all this and more, not because what organizations did was wrong. Most times it is because organizations could not effectively communicate their service, vision, product benefits correctly, or because they totally misunderstood their audiences.

When communication fails, it destroys human potential, and in the progressive destruction of each such opportunity, the collective future of mankind is adversely impacted. Using communication sustainably is most essential because opportunities of an eternity are embedded in the seed of every communication.

Communication gone wrong has disastrous consequences. So here I will list down disruptions that have attempted to improve communication, its strategy and its implementation.

1. Brand metrics have changed: Old, antiquated brand metrics like Brand Health, Incremental sales, Brand equity, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), Customer satisfaction, Market Share, Wallet share, Lifetime value, among many other such Brand-centric models have become passé. The only reasons these models continue to be used is due to the dual conundrum of inertia and paradigm blindness.
What’s the disruption? In the last couple of years, there are hundreds of brands which have adopted a consumer-centric brand model, called the Buying Propensity Brand Model to measure and evolve their brand. The customer centricity brings in greater awareness, better relationships and better confidence to the brand to evolve customer-centric strategies.

2. The age of selling is dead: Most of the brands still try and sell to the customer, a model which is no longer relevant in the new-age world. This is an age where all arbitrages have been obliterated – there are no differences of access, price, knowledge or availability. This 150-year-old model, often abbreviated as AIDA, is well on its way to its grave.

What’s the disruption? In a world when the customer has a plethora of choices and the means, the only way a brand can engage is by helping the consumer buy. The Buying Model is in. It requires a brand to invest deeply behind understanding why consumers trust and desire a brand. Trust is the transactional element while desire is the deep psycho-socio-cultural aspects that lend to buying a brand.

3. Brand loyalty where a customer is loyal, is no longer a truism: Brand loyalty implied that a customer would be loyal to a brand. This concept may have worked in an environment when there were only a few choices, for who does not remember the 5-year waiting lines for a scooter.

What’s the disruption? Today, it is a buyers’ market, where the choices for the customer are plentiful and more. As the relationship quotient of the new-age millennial customer is oriented towards fulfilment and not longevity, the term Brand Loyalty implies that the brand has to be loyal to the customer.

4. Old departments are getting dismantled: The sales department struggles to understand why a customer is not buying. Almost every brand custodian is astounded by the happenings with their brand. They do the same things as they were doing a decade ago, and yet things are not working.

What’s the disruption? The new department being set up in organizations is the Trust Department. Evolved organizations understand that their value is in the trust that the customer holds in their brand. The future of this is that you will see Brand Trust experts on the Board soon.

5. Media is dying, but it is alive: For those who will know, nearly a dozen media houses have shut down in the last 6 months. What happened in the US over 2 years, compressed itself to just 6 months, accentuated by the slowdown of the industry, and therefore also advertising

What’s the disruption? New, independent, subscribed media with exclusive information is getting more traction than that which gives generic information. It shows the need to have information that is exclusive, for news no longer implies knowing what others already know.

6. Noise versus voice: The current techniques of communication are similar to dynamite fishing - blasting of fish with loud, high impact explosives, stunning fish into stupor (and even killing many in the process). Imagine the fish to be the customers, and the dynamite to be the decibels of advertising. We live in a world of stunned customers.

What’s the disruption? Giving a voice to your brand has replaced the noise that made sense some years back. The narrative of the brand has to be as exciting and engaging as that of a good friend. This transformation is changing the way some brands think about their customers and themselves.

To survive and grow, brands need to shake up the dust from their coattails, be willing to take risks of changing their brand models and build relationships with the customers. These alone will create and maintain the keenness-to-buy among their customers.

- By N. Chandramouli, CEO, TRA Research