Can brand communication also become a problem-solving activity?

Organisations become complex as they grow. Increasingly diverse audiences come into play as the companies become larger, including internal stakeholders and external stakeholders. In such situations, it becomes important that marketing teams collaborate and cooperate well with various ground-level teams to make any campaign successful. Large multi-layered organisations having multi-site operations often have to deal with diverse and complicated sets of audiences, where the message delivery may face many hurdles.

Have you ever thought, what does the audience look for while receiving any communication for anything? Be it a product or service or any other image perception building communication, there’s one key element that is always addressed by the communication. Given any situation, brand communication is always addressed to the consumer with a specific task of addressing specific issues.

Whether it is about protecting the brand and ensuring that it resonates well with the audience or it is about launching a new product or service in the market or introducing new variants, brand communicators mostly deal with novel and complex situations. These situations are rather real problems experienced by the consumers and the ultimate audience mostly.  And brand communicator’s responsibilities lie in fixing them through communication.

Brand issues like any other corporate problems have to be addressed systematically. While managing it the businesses undertake to assess and analyse the situations, find out or develop alternatives, decide the best possible alternative and then implement the same. It goes true for the brand communicators also, when they deal with the problems that are related to the audience.

Often brands fail in the market due to poor problem solving through communication. Either the problems aren’t recognised at all, or they take time to show up and the damage is already done by then or they are not dealt with properly in time. Complex problems need not only be looked at from the lens of system and processes but also the application of common sense and creativity should be applied. Brand communicators can play a great role in solving such problems through communications.

While addressing these situations, research plays a key role in the identification of the problem and going to the root of the same. Research helps in understanding the goals and the barriers being faced in achieving those goals while assessing any problem. Once a problem is identified, careful observation and researching upon the facts are required to be done. Once there is clarity on this, possible actionable solutions and their impact can be analysed and discussed, before the implementation.

Brand communicators are required to be involved in all these stages before accepting or carrying out any course of action. This is then followed by gathering feedback from the consumers and monitoring the same to assess the impact achieved by the implemented solution. The entire process involves many things from the perspective of brand communications including active listening, asking questions, acknowledging problems and difficulties, being receptive to the brand issues with an open mind, etc. before arriving at possible solutions.

Communication for a brand is ultimately aimed at strengthening the relationship between the brand and the audience. Challenges faced by the brands in terms of its growth, market presence, consumer acceptance, their likes or dislikes, preference vis-à-vis competition and a myriad of other problems are most often solved through proper brand communication with appropriate messaging.

A suitably crafted and creatively thought out communication influences thinking at a deep level among the audiences. The message is what you are saying and how you are saying has a power of piercing through the preconceived notions, stubborn ideas and non-responsive attitudes of the audience and help solving complex problems associated with brands!

The views and opinions published here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the publisher.

Praveen Nagda

Praveen Nagda is the CEO of Peregrine Public Relations, a full-service corporate communications and public relations consultancy firm delivering a pan-India reach to its clients. He also heads White Coffee, an independent events & celebrity engagement company.

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.