Consumer anxiety has been building over the last two years, and it changes the face of optimal marketing and communications strategy. Rampant uncertainty is being nourished by upheaval over what the future looks like, impacting the chemistry of what people want (greater control) while the rules of culture-informed behavior and expectations around them relentlessly shift.
It’s always important to have a deep, unvarnished understanding of your brand. This clarity is what allows leaders to make smart decisions, inspire confidence, and build trust inside and outside the organization. One must: Know its qualities and strengths. Acknowledge the organization’s accomplishments. Nourish a positive vision of the business’s future. However, at the same time, the pathway to sustainable growth can be unwittingly compromised by the absence of unflinching, critical, self-examination and regular reality...
When rapid and disruptive change occurs, marketers are handed an extraordinary moment to align themselves with percolating consumer needs when the openness to engagement is fresh. This relevance breakthrough is happening right now — and is unleashed when brands work to fill the fractures in consumer confidence with empathetic support.
What is it about successful brands that attracts change over time when added size, complexity, and maturity advance to depress the culture of innovation that set the world on fire in the beginning? How can legacy brands ensure the magic that existed at inception continues, to help author exciting new categories and solve unexplored consumer needs?
Product parity exists in (too) many categories because technology advances have enabled the ability to replicate precise competitor formulations quickly. When product innovations hit a category marketplace, the clock is already ticking on adjacent businesses matching the move, an all-too-frequent behavior that carries unintended consequences.
