Dynamic times impact all businesses dynamically with the constant change in the business environment, market dynamics, competition, and eventually consumers. Audiences form, develop, and change their perceptions about various brands constantly, as their personal experience or perceived image is based upon the experience of other users. This makes an impact on their decisions of buying, supporting, and promoting the brand. And that creates a path for brands in their journey, that is smooth, potholed, or rocky and how they need to develop, mould, change, and adapt their brand communications to retain and grow their audience base.
Brand communications while focusing upon building the image, continues to facilitate the very ultimate objective of any business i.e. generating sales. In the continually developing business environment, it is most important for a brand to continually meet the needs of its audience and ready to offer more as and when required. In fact, the brands need to regularly look into this aspect and be available to their audience’s solutions to possible needs and requirements in the future even before customers demand or start looking at options available to them.
How does a brand ensure a constant peek into the minds of its stakeholders? On one hand are functional factors of any brand, which are linked to user experience for the consumers and on other hand, there are emotional factors leading them to associate, engage, like, relate, and continue to use that brand. Functional factors and emotional factors can change with demographics easily. Whether it is about offering product features or it is about following ethical practices, everything makes a meaningful impact on what the target audience perceives about any brand.
Research and development from all angles including new product development, new feature development, distribution, packaging, advertising, and promotions are crucial for keeping the brands relevant in the minds of their customers.
It’s all about identifying the trends, opportunities, needs, and exploring the mindsets of the audience in a regular and sustained fashion that will allow brand marketers and brand communicators to work together in ensuring that their brands remain relevant to their audiences. It is important to assess and understand that the innovations around new products, features, categories, or sub-categories, etc., are definitely required by the consumers. And this is something that will hold for long and extend their loyalty towards the brands.
Researching and launching the innovations is one part, and another is successfully communicating to the audience, where the audience clearly and distinctly is able to build an association. The audience should be engaged thereafter to experience such usefulness, need, requirement. Brand communicators need to work upon developing a strong feeling and emotional connection of must-haves in the minds of consumers about such innovations and developments.
It’s all about continuous transformation and aligning with the constantly changing needs of consumers in a smooth and adaptable fashion. Most importantly, this transformation needs to be communicated in the most aggressive but amicable fashion to the target audience. This transformation also has to be practical, realistic, useful, necessary, and timely for the consumers, which will ensure brand relevance in their minds always.
Relevance ensures that a brand remains strongly entrenched in the mind space of its target audience and enabling it to face any challenge in the future with a rapidly evolving business environment. So, it’s all about awareness and sensitivity of the market, developing trends, the shift in consumer habits, change in product usage, and the emergence of new competition, etc.
Eventually, it’s about building and maintaining trust among the audiences and brand relevance is best poised to achieve and enhance this. Being relevant today, tomorrow and in the future for their audiences, brands will ensure a loyal engagement for themselves and their audiences will become their ambassadors too.
The views and opinions published here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the publisher.
Praveen has been closely associated with many national and international events related to cinema for children, art and culture. He has a well-rounded experience that cuts across all key sectors of PR & Corporate Communications.
He started his career with URJA Communications, an advertising agency specialising in technology brands, where he was instrumental in developing the PR division. Post this, he had a stint with Horizons Porter Novelli, a global public relations consultancy. Thereafter, he was heading the IT & Telecom division at Clea PR, a leading Indian public relations and communications company followed by a fairly long stint with Omnicom Group agencies viz. TBWA\India and Brodeur India.
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