Something interesting is happening in brand management. Increasingly, we read about brand-businesses that are focusing on Brand Equity. It has been decades since the topic of Brand Equity was mentioned in press releases and earnings calls. Brand Equity is more than a phrase; it is an investment in enduring profitable growth of the brand-business.
Brands and businesses are talking more than ever about the environment. The percentage of ads tested by Kantar LINK with some sort of social or environmental message (SEM) held steady at 2 percent or less from 2010 to 2019. From 2020 to 2022, it tripled to 6 percent, and is at 5 percent year-to-date. That small percentage is large for a single theme across tens of thousands of ads for a wide diversity of brands....
Market segmentation is fundamental to marketing. Segmentation is evergreen when it comes to building and managing brands.
Brands face the challenges of optimizing contradictory customer needs. This is because customers do not want to compromise one benefit for another. Leaders face the same challenges. Leaders must figure out ways to maximize seemingly uncompromising views, such as focusing on profitability and sustainability. Or focusing on core customers’ views while satisfying other customers’ views.
With somber accuracy Futurist Alvin Toffler once predicted; “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Who among us represents today’s illiterate? At the present pace of change, certainly, more marketers than we can imagine. We are either part of the old or part of the new.
