How To Build Brand Trust – 4 Essential Steps
What?? You’re kidding!! You just can’t trust anyone anymore!! How often we hear this reaction these days. Sadly the level of trust around the world has declined dramatically over the past few years – Government, CEO’s, foreign countries with corruption, our Congress, and many brands (company and product/service). Branding is basically about developing emotional connections – i.e. trust-based relationships that will cultivate greater loyalty for purchase decisions. Emotions are the primary drivers for behavior and these decisions, not cognitive thinking. And there is no emotion more important...
Read MoreNew, Undeniable Evidence Supporting Emotional Branding and Advertising
Hats off to P&G. The overwhelmingly positive response to their tearjerker commercial targeting moms in the Sochi Olympics (“Pick Them Back Up”), was the latest example of the buzzworthy power of emotional branding and advertising. Almost 20 million people have viewed it so far online. This type of emotional advertising is pretty new for P&G, – as Jim Stengel, former chief marketing officer at P&G pointed out, “there was not a whole lot of recognition of the emotional connection with a brand or company” until recent years. Another example of how emotional advertising or...
Read MoreHow “Experiential Marketing” Builds on Key Trends
“Experiential Marketing” is all about engaging customers to try a product or service. It has emerged as an ideal vehicle for creating new trials and sustaining customer loyalty in both B2C and B2B circles. Our society has become quite cynical about all advertising, so it is looking for alternative, more credible ways to learn about products and services. Concurrent with this shift in buying behavior is the serious decline in “brand trust”, arguably the most important emotion for developing a sense of confidence for all purchase decisions. There are several types...
Read MoreWhy “Experiential Marketing” Offers New Opportunities
The world of marketing is constantly changing, especially with new definitions and approaches. The latest is “experiential marketing”, which is basically about interacting with your customer. In light of the pervasive suspicion of traditional advertising (e.g. TV, print and radio) these days, consumers prefer to experience a product or service in the context of how they would use it in their everyday lives. While the concept of engaging your customer to try or use a product/service more often is not new, there are two driving forces that make experiential marketing more relevant today as an...
Read MoreMillennials: A Conundrum or Opportunity for Re-Building Brand Trust?
Recently I was interviewed by William Arruda, founder of the pioneering personal branding firm, Reach 360. Much of the discussion, fed by insightful questions, concerned that elusive generation, the millennials (those born after 1980), and how their unique expectations and usage behavior are changing the marketing tactics for many companies. How are millennials different from other generations? Where to start! They are significantly more tech savvy, so independent that it is difficult for many to work on a team, more entrepreneurial and creative, and sometimes work-shy. A 2011 study of...
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