As a team, we encounter a common concern in our meetings and conversations with brand managers. “Things are on track, the campaign continues successfully, we are close to our goals in sales, but how should we prepare the brand for 10 years from now?”Although it cannot be expressed exactly in these sentences, brand managers ask us professional communicators to prepare the brand by foreseeing the future. There is a formula we apply while evaluating this process with our strategy team and preparing to respond to the future expectations of brands. In my article today, I would like to briefly explain the formula we apply for brands that want to maintain their success in the future or want to avoid being stuck in failure.
Focusing on the Conventional: It is necessary to determine the situations that become ordinary, routine and, in the term of communication professionals, which become conventions. It is extremely important to identify the thoughts, assumptions and convictions that identify with your brand and its target audience, and that you now consider as a part of the brand. After determining the factors that you think protect your status and your market position, we think about how you can turn this situation in your favor over time. The question of how to change the traditional becomes our starting point. While grouping the answer to this question; we include topics such as marketing, consumer and advertising in the process.
Breaking the Ground: We have often witnessed that the search for consistency has made the brand obsolete or led to the emergence of similar campaigns. In this step that challenges conservatism, we try to act and take action contrary to the traditional ideas we find. We appeal to previously unused channels, unchallenged audiences, and deliver different messages. To explain the first and second steps with an example; You are a brand that produces sports products and you believe that heavy sports are made by men, you do not address women in your communication plan. However, we see in the studies that the generation Z, that is, the mass that we can call as a child now, attaches great importance to sports. In the future, women of this generation will do intense training that you consider as heavy, even when they are pregnant. In other words, the stereotype that a pregnant woman cannot exercise will be broken. We can give this and many other examples.
Setting a New Vision: Setting a vision is a step similar to teleporting the brand into the future with imagination. We imagine the future on a very large and inclusive scale, and we make the brand the main player in this process. Based on the example above; a sports brand can become not only a sports brand, but also a lifestyle and subculture. If we summarize in one sentence how we prepare our brands for the future; by determining the traditional, we come to the comfortable area, ask the question “what if it was like this?” in the light of research and data, and reveal a new vision with the answers we receive.
Dwt Mandalina / Ayşegül Baysal / Digital Strategist
