Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

In the era of Facebook and YouTube, brand building has become a vexing challenge. This is not how things were supposed to turn out. A decade ago most companies were heralding the arrival of a new golden age of branding. They hired creative agencies and armies of technologists to insert brands throughout the digital universe. Viral, buzz, memes, stickiness, and form factor became the lingua franca of branding. But despite all the hoopla, such efforts have had very little payoff.

As a central feature of their digital strategy, companies made huge bets on what is often called branded content. The thinking went like this: Social media would allow your company to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers. If you told them great stories and connected with them in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community of consumers. Businesses have invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. What has gone wrong?

To solve this puzzle, we need to remember that brands succeed when they break through in culture. And branding is a set of techniques designed to generate cultural relevance. Digital technologies have not only created potent new social networks but also dramatically altered how culture works. Digital crowds now serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture—a phenomenon I call crowdculture. Crowdculture changes the rules of branding—which techniques work and which do not. If we understand crowdculture, then, we can figure out why branded-content strategies have fallen flat—and what alternative branding methods are empowered by social media....

Everyone knows price matters to consumers, but a new study suggests the lowest price doesn’t always win. Even more important to consumers is the reputation of retailers—and how prices correlate to that brand reputation.

Price Still Matters

This guideline comes from Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business, which does agree that price remains an important factor for businesses. But price is a relative figure that relates to the reputation of a business, and consumers typically gauge whether a price is good based on how it compares to a brand’s reputation.

In other words, a high price isn’t a deterrent to many consumers, as long as it corresponds to a positive reputation. When price and reputation seem misaligned, consumers are turned off....

Since 2012, Cohn & Wolfe has studied authenticity as a guiding principle and business practice. Each year, our research reveals more insight on the strategic power of authenticity and its unique opportunity to build reputation.

Cohn & Wolfe has discovered a huge authenticity gap in the eyes of global consumers. With 75 percent of consumers surveyed in 14 markets believing that companies are not open and transparent, it’s clear that brands have a credibility problem.
 
Our 2016 findings reveal that cynicism towards brands is highest among Western European countries, while high growth / low per capita GDP countries recognize authenticity in brands the most.
 
Across global markets, approximately one in five consumers finds brands “Open and Honest.” At 23 percent, the US places just above the global average. In Western Europe, a mere 5 percent of consumers in Sweden consider companies “Open and Honest,” while the UK, France, Germany and Spain all match the same low level at 7 percent.  
 
Brazil, while generally higher than Western Europe, is still lower than the US at 19 percent.  
 
Even in China and Indonesia, where consumers are least pessimistic about brand authenticity, only about a third of the population (36 percent and 35 percent, respectively) consider companies “Open and Honest.”  
 

The opportunity for businesses to close this gap is staggering....

Now that the buzz and media frenzy about the demise of RadioShack and the analysis of why by Wall Street and other experts  is beginning to subside, another consideration should be examined. What happens to brands that do not remain relevant, stop innovating and sit on their hind quarters? Well in short, they RadioShack….

CEOs and executives have understood for a long time that a company’s brand is important and goes way beyond just a logo and tagline. But questions about the actual value of the brand have often relegated this vital asset to a fuzzy, feel-good, slightly nebulous item that rarely gets the executive attention it deserves.

It turns out that companies can determine how much a brand is worth. We’ve seen this most recently in the bidding war breaking out for Steinway, which is a brand that transcends time and technology. It has legendary cache, in a way that fabled brands like Kodak or Polaroid did not. We know that strong brands with good reputations have 31% better total return to shareholders than the MSCI World average....