“Brand is a CONNECT between consumers and companies”.  This is a very simple yet powerful definition.

This so called ‘connect’ has undergone a seismic change recently. This change can be attributed to continuous evolution of technology which has really simplified a consumer’s life. Brands are continuously finding it difficult to establish a connect with their consumers and more so in this digital age. Earlier, brands had fewer, what is popularly known as, “moment of truths”. Consumers didn’t have access to much information. Hence choices were also limited. Marketers hardly focused on their prospective consumers. Advertising was seen as a potent weapon as a brand building tool than customer satisfaction and other elements of brand building. Customers had very limited options to voice their feeling about brands.

Digital has had a transformational effect on how brand business is done. According to Interbrand.com, Google was ranked 38th in 2005 out of top 100 brands whereas in 2009 it is ranked top 7th brand of the world. Considering the fact that Google stared its operations only in late 1998, it’s a huge achievement. Brands like Google, iPod, Facebook & YouTube have proved the notion wrong that brands take a long time to become the top brands.

Digitization has empowered the customers with unlimited tools to make them heard. Abundant access to information, thanks to Google, has left little room for brands to act smart with customers.

Brand touch points have increased in comparison to what they used to be. More interestingly, customers now have the power to make them heard at every such point through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Orkut to name a few. Brands are now aware that negative word of mouth spreads faster than positive word of mouth. Hence, brands are continuously employing “Online Reputation Management” tools to cater to disgruntled customers.

Digital has proved that brand building need not be an expensive activity. Brands are constantly exploring the power of ‘viral videos’ which are rather cheap to create and still give the brands great mileage. The recent “miss u maggi” campaign, by Nestle on YouTube has close to 1 million views so far and still counting.

PR seems incomplete without ePR. Upsurge of blogs and review websites have made people trust their peer group more than the advertisements. Worse, users may give more credence to feedback posted by a stranger on a website more than what a brand is communicating.

Today, marketers are in a better position to understand online behavior of the users that visit their sites. Web analytics tools can be of great help in understanding what pages are most visited by users, what is the path traversed by users before making some purchase on your website, how many users are coming through paid media versus how many users are coming organically etc. Never have brands got so many insights to serve their customer better, all thanks to this Digital Age.

Brand building has become more comprehensive today wherein customer satisfaction, customer experience, customer delight get equal, if not more, weight age which probably only advertising once enjoyed. Digital empowerment has changed the rules of the game. It has opened up a bag full of opportunities for the brands. It has taken brands a step closer to their customers. And the good news is that you can be a top brand in few years if you are updated about the game. You are closer to your customers than ever before. But the point is: Are you listening, do you even care to have a INTELLIGENT DIGITAL INTERFACE?

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Leave your mark the power way

What makes our favourite apparel shopping website so good? How do we pick the e-commerce site that’s best for use? What makes us choose the digital tools that we work with on a daily basis.

For every digital product that we use, we can ask ourselves multiple questions as to why we chose it. We might say that it suits our needs, is very flexible, has a great functionality and gives us an amazing user experience. But how did we reach this conclusion? Before we had an opportunity to form an opinion, we first had to pick the product.

Selecting digital products in today’s world is an extremely challenging task, there are tons of digital products with similar functionalities and that have similar offerings. The task is, how do we choose the right one for us?

What we usually do is google the most popular digital products and then take a leap of faith. Here, in lieu of searching for the right one for us, we already trust those most popular products, we just need to figure out which one fits our needs better.

Question now is how do we trust these digital products that we have never used. The answer is a good digital branding.

It’s more than the logo

Digital branding implies having the vision as to what your brand is and what is its value. Tagline, colours, typography, shapes of the logo, tool, app, presentational website, newsletter, etc., all of these things are a part of the bigger picture defined by your brand’s voice tone. 

Google drive, Nike, NY Times, Zara, all of our first associations with such brands would be based on the visual aspects. There is a reason why we remember the brand’s logo so distinctively and underestimate the importance of other things like emotional branding and the brand’s voice tone. 

It’s the same thing as humans, in order to be able to relate with something, we need to bond with it emotionally. Shapes and colours are just the well thought out branding-strategy. What comes before this is the core of brand identity, i.e., emotional branding.

It is essential to have a clear vision of your identity because it’s the thing that you’ll build your brand on. And thus to create that emotional connection, you have to have a clearer vision of your brand.

SOMETHING SPECIAL OF YOUR BRAND

You need to figure those couple of qualities of your brand that make it special, make it stand out from the competitors’ brands. For instance, you own an IT company that provides software for easy data managing. Now being able to say that your brand is absolutely safe and secure is not equal to the uniqueness of your brand. It’s not the same thing.

For finding out the traits that make your brand stand out, we have to dig deeper in your company and your product. The answer lies within your business model and values. The ideology taps the psychology, it is how we connect to anything. The trigger is always the same’- we connect to the story behind the brand. 

We realize the importance and benefits of having a close knitted relationship with our clients. The process of discovery whilst coming up with an effective digital branding strategy, will also give us the best understanding of the brand. And when we have that, our digital branding strategies get aligned with our clients’ goals, which ultimately results in our clients’ products reaching the top of the ladder. 

VOICE TO THE BRAND

How many digital storage tools are you aware of, other than Google Drive and Dropbox? Not many, well you aren’t to be blamed. Their positioning in the market is so good that there’s no space to introduce a new one. Apart from good functionalities, they have “users’ trust”, which they have built over many years. And by doing so, they have built their entire brand.

When we know our client’s vision and goals thoroughly, we can start building a brand that would be positioned in the market in a powerful manner. This way we can help them reach their target audience and at the same time we can save their time and effort that is needed to achieve good results. Yet, building a brand is not at all easy, consistency is everything. Once you make your brand clearer, the other things will become a lot smoother. Having a defined and powerful tone of voice for your brand will always help you stay on the right path of your goals. Now when you give your brand a defined voice and complete the branding, your product will be rightly positioned in the market and would stand out from the others. 

“Start working on your digital branding now, now is better than ever!” 

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