A successful brand doesn’t need to market a product specifically because they’ve already established themselves as a staple of the lifestyle their customers want to lead.

A key trait of successful brands is knowing when it’s time to evolve and where the future of their audience is headed. Here are some insights into how brands will evolve in the years to come from industry experts…

What’s the future of branding?

These answers will have you re-evaluating your own brand moving forward…

“Branding will move from the outside in. Today’s focus on projecting will transform into a process of revelation. Brands will worry less about positioning to match audience and more about matching purpose to actions. Authenticity will finally be what great brands are rather than what great brands aspire to be.”

Dan Hill, CEO of Hill Impact

“The top brands of the future must create great products and be authentic in understanding benefits and identity those products provide to their users. This means first creating strong awareness, with a defined point of view about your company. Once people start to know and love you, your top ambassadors and influencers will create content and market for you. If you listen to what they’re saying, they will help craft your future performance marketing messaging.”

Erin Pederson, Founder & COO of Markett

“There is an awakening happening, and many people in marketing are not even aware of it. Recently, the major shifts of digital and social media dominated the changes in marketing and branding, then it was big data. But the latest shift, and the one that will likely have the most lasting impact, will be our increased understanding of how the consumer’s brain works.

Over the past few decades, neuroscientists, psychologists, and behavioral economists have made great strides in increasing our understanding of the unconscious mind, how our decision-making works, and how consumers really build loyalty to brands. Much of this new understanding goes against much of what most people – and marketers – assume about the mind. As this understanding gains more traction, and as we learn more, marketers will be much better equipped to build brands that truly resonant with the consumer mind.”

Daryl Weber, Brand consultant & Author of Brand Seduction

“An organization’s brand has traditionally been defined by things like logo, colors, fonts, tagline and how employees interact with customers. Increasingly, interactions with a brand are not performed by a human employee – they happen via API, Bot (via voice, chat or text), Phone Tree or FAQ on a website.

The human interactions won’t go away completely, for most companies. These new modes of communication increase the opportunities for a brand to express their qualities to their customers and partners. Brand will be defined by the customer or users methods and features supported for interaction.

Do you allow your customers to interact programmatically, via things like an API?

Do you allow them to manage their own data that you possess?”

Brett Webb, Vice President, GM North America for Favorite Medium

“Branding is getting more synonymous with personalization. The more companies put in an effort to connect to the public through branding, the more it will focus on customer experience and experience personalization to leave a mark on the customer, thus ensuring brand loyalty. Today, we are already shifting from features of the brand to benefits of the brand, simply because the consumer is more interested in talking to the brands, rather than have the brands at them. Engagement is more vital than reach. Engagement will drive business decisions, for all stakeholders. Branding, when done in the right manner for engagement, ensures the brand is in front of its target audience, baring its soul to the ones who care, and grabbing the attention long enough to make a sale, as well as promote brand loyalty. In 10-15 years, brands will become more human.”

Ankitaa Gohain Dalmia , Founder and Digital Marketing Strategist at AnksImage

“The future of branding is less about logos and more about becoming knowable, likeable, and trustable. Years from now, branding will be about organizing that experience in which a consumer takes to your business rather than forcing them into the journey that fits your business model. The common challenge will be that large and small organizations have a problem standing out. Products and services will be largely undifferentiated to consumers, and trust will be at rock bottom, especially for unfamiliar brands. So, in order for your organization to be successful, you’ll need one very important thing: a differentiated buying experience you create and own.”

Patrick McFadden, Founder of Indispensable Marketing

“I believe that in addition to websites, mobile apps and email, messaging application such as Facebook messenger will become a new frontier for brands to communicate with their users. Brands will establish personalized relationships with their customers by having one on one personalized conversations with their customers using AI driven chatbots. The chatbot will be able to address user questions and concerns, engage them with relevant content. It will become a new medium to drive inbound and outbound campaigns and more.”

Ilan Kasan, CEO of Exceed.ai

“You don’t own your brand narrative. The golden age of the television, mass marketing, the advertising rule of tell them seven times all made it possible to overwhelm an audience and own a brand narrative. Gone is that day. Today, digital empowerment of customers means one viral video from one customer can rewrite your whole narrative in a moment. What does that mean for 10-15 years in the future?”

Customers will own a brand’s narrative, and the brand’s job will be to curate, evolve and engage that narrative in real time. Extended marketing planning cycles will give way to micro strategies that evolve interaction by interaction. Fueled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), like IBM’s Watson and Salesforce’s Einstein, that intake massive amounts of data and offers adaptive insight, not just analysis; customers will dictate what a brand means to them and tell that story with more authenticity and velocity than a brand ever could. Tomorrow’s winners will be brands who start now to release narrative control and embed AI into their marketing and operations.”

Erica Warren, Chief Creation Cultivator for CreationSpeak

 

Source: Future of Everything