Brand value increases across categories

Thought Leadership Radically Reimagining Brands
RADICALLY
REIMAGINING
BRANDS WE
To satisfy multi-faceted,
always-on consumers
Stewart Pearson
Vice Chairman, Chief Client Officer
stewart.pearson@wunderman.com
ARE IN the throes of a 50-year paradigm shift,
the first significant change in the role and meaning of
brands in culture and commerce since the period of
Mad Men and the advent of television.
The future of marketing is personal, mobile, social and
local. Big data makes every experience personal. Over 6
billion people have access to a mobile device connecting
them to information, opportunities and each other. Social
networks connect individuals anytime and anywhere,
with people like them whose opinions matter to them.
Technology empowers local marketers to be relevant to
their consumers yet still benefit from the efficiency of a
global platform and content.
Always-on connected consumers engage with brands in
multiple roles. They are participants as well as buyers,
conversationalists and sometimes creators, critics or
champions, and all at different times. They expect
consistent experiences relevant to their role and informed
by their history at every touch point. They will stay
connected to and share their data with brands they trust
in return for valuable content and innovative services.
The whole consumer is a radical and new multifaceted
way of thinking about consumers as they connect as
individuals and network in communities. Brands must
be reimagined as experiences and services designed for
the whole consumer by the whole enterprise.
Understanding and staying connected
to the whole consumer
Brands do not need to limit their thinking to one
dimension. Brands can understand the potential of
consumers as buyers, participants and influencers within
a unified analytics and targeting framework. Brands
can understand the multiple roles that consumers play
in their lives, and so the multiple ways brands will need
to engage consumers to meet their needs.
Brands can see consumers truly as individuals.
The data flows from personal devices, increasingly
wearable and invisible. It will enable us to understand
interests, passions and behaviors within and beyond
the category. The winning brands of the future will
reimagine themselves as experiences and services
offering compelling reasons for consumers to stay
connected. The outcome will be disruptive new business
models and revenue streams.
This marketing model is a renaissance of consumer
relationship marketing (CRM), first envisaged by Lester
Wunderman when he created our agency 50 years
ago. To engage the whole consumer means aligning
the whole enterprise. This means change management
and organizational alignment around consumers,
experiences and services.
In the old paradigm different functions were responsible
for engaging different consumer behaviors. Buyers
were the responsibility of sales, with content focused
on product features and pricing. Participants were
the responsibility of marketing, with content focused
on brand and emotional value. Influencers were the
responsibility of PR or corporate, with content focused
on sponsorship, events and social responsibility.
Data from digital and mobile analytics, and social
listening, enables marketers to respond to the desires
of consumers with personalized content and social
experiences. Marketing tools leverage insights and
models to connect content with consumers. Yet while
a majority of enterprises understand the power of
personalized content, relatively few have orchestrated
programs in place. This is a critical gap for marketing
to address.
New paradigm changes the role of marketing
In the new paradigm, the renaissance of CRM demands
change in the traditional organization. Now we know
that buyers, participants and influencers are the same
people. They have different roles at different times, each
requiring individual response and engagement. They
have different demands for content and services, and
want them personalized to their context.
In the new paradigm the role of marketing becomes to
orchestrate content, experiences and services from the
whole enterprise to engage the whole consumer. In the
shift, marketing moves from a communication role (of
brand, product and sales information) to the mission
critical commercial and strategic role of orchestrating
engagement. To fulfill this new role, marketing must do
the following:
Access all the enterprise’s content
across all the enterprise’s silos
Weave brand narratives and see them
amplified by consumers
Connect consumers in their multiple roles with the
content and services relevant to their personal and
community desires, irrespective of time or place
Social responsibility,
sustainability exemplify
marketing as engagement
Perhaps the most significant illustration of the
paradigm shift in the role of marketing is the
consumer desire to play a role in social responsibility
and sustainability solutions. Far seeing enterprises
are responding to global trends by making significant
investments in social responsibility and sustainability.
How do they connect these initiatives to consumers
who care?
Consumers care about commitment to corporate
social responsibility. A Burson-Marsteller survey
reported that 75 percent of consumers agreed that it
is important for a company to be socially responsible.
In his book “Grow” former P&G CMO Jim Stengel
leveraged Millward Brown’s BrandZ analysis to
demonstrate that, “Maximum profit and high ideals
aren’t incompatible, but in fact inseparable.”
Using connected data marketers can identify the
segments that participate in and are motivated
by social issues. They can weave into marketing
storytelling the enterprise’s CSR content, personalized
for these individuals and the communities in which
they participate.
By adopting a whole consumer framework marketers
can bring social responsibility and sustainability to
life, expand its reach and demonstrate its measurable
business impact on brands.
The role of marketing is now to create, curate and
activate. Marketers should oversee the output of all other
functions in the company creating content so that they
can orchestrate engagement of the whole consumer.
To manage a brand, a marketing team must now be
producer, listener, analyst and developer as well as
(traditional) strategist, planner, creative and project
manager. The role of the producer means that this is a
publishing or news model, but one that operates in realtime
and is responsive and proactive. Marketers can no
longer distribute content and track the results. Marketers
can no longer manage a series of campaigns.
To grow the brands of the future the marketer’s role is
the orchestration of content for the engagement of the
whole consumer and the accountability for brand value
and marketing performance.
Wunderman specializes in social, mobile, data and
analytics, with 170 offices in 60 countries.
www.wunderman.com
20 BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands 2013 21