As customer needs and preferences change in your chosen market how do you keep ahead of the curve and ensure your brand remains compelling?
You can try hanging in there with your proven methods, which may have served you well for many years, or you can break the mould. Breaking the mould is not easy though.
Let’s look at what Nestle have been doing in Australia in allowing customers to ‘play’ with their brands as a recognisable example. Using the humble Kit Kat, customers were able to design their own Kit Kats at a pop-up Kit Kat studio. They could choose the chocolate, add in extra ingredients and even have it wrapped in customised packaging. For a well-known mass-produced product, why would you mess with it? Yes, it can be a great marketing strategy to lift brand awareness but what happens when you close the store down? Are customers going to go back to the mass-produced product or turn off it as they have a taste for something new? There are risks in playing with your brand.
But what about if you see the evolution of your brand as a partnership with your loyal customers?
What if the ‘playing’ is in actual fact learning, experimenting and searching for changing consumer trends? And engaging with your customers in this manner brings their creativity, ingenuity and passions into the mix? Now you are stepping outside your own view of customers’ needs and value, and empowering the customer at the coalface to show you where they are shifting too. Such an approach can become an integral part of the evolution of your brand, a building of core customer loyalty, development of new product and a change agent within your business.
Again, back to the humble Kit Kat and Nestle, a business that has been around for 150 years and knows what change is about otherwise they would not have survived.
But change can still overrun them if they do not maintain adaptability as a core trait.
The Kit Kat is a mass-produced product and their skill would lie in efficient and quality production, distribution and marketing. Producing custom-made Kit Kats in a pop-up store while drawing in everything they could learn from the customer interaction is a very different skill set. The point being, to engage your customers in evolving your brand may well require talents and traits not presently in your business. Also integrating those learnings into your existing business may well be a challenge and be met with fierce resistance.
So evolving your brand with customer support requires not only engagement in a meaningful way but also the ability to listen, learn and integrate all that you can from that engagement into your existing business. Now you are talking about a business that is adaptable and willing to engage and learn from the outside.
These are businesses that have a certain type of culture that is moulded by its leadership. Leaders who have the courage to take risks and are willing to challenge the past. These are what I describe as worthy leaders.
Change can overturn any business no matter how old or young it may be. So whilst you are investing in your business and compounding on everything that has gone before you are also constantly evolving, reinventing and stepping out. Stepping out so as to constantly improve the value that you deliver to your customers and always ensuring you are out-competing anyone who may seek to be in your marketplace.
Active Knowledge Question:
Do you engage with your customers to help you evolve your brand?
How may you do this is a purposely-designed manner to win their support, evolve your brand and keep it relevant and compelling?
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All the best in the success of your business,
Richard Shrapnel
