FutureBrand news, views & insights: February 2024
“A healthy brand is an active brand”
It’s a new year and so it feels appropriate to start with a story of a new client.
Especially after the first newsletter of last year started with a story of a pitch loss.
Either way, I find there’s always the opportunity to learn something new, and there it was in the client’s brief at the top of the very first page:
It’s not something I’d heard expressed that way before now, but it’s spot on.
Too many brands are inactive. Passive. Detached. Bystanders in their own business. That’s an unhealthy position for any brand to be in, and that inactivity inevitably leads to indifference.
On the contrary, an active brand is positive, productive and fit for purpose.
Because a brand is what a brand does.
And most brands can and should do more. To become active, engaged, drivers of choice.
That might mean any number of opportunities, based on a diagnosis of your own brand’s health:
Is your brand strategy inspired by – and aligned with – your business strategy?
Does your brand strategy show up in the key moments that matter across the customer and employee experience?
Are your own people engaged with the brand? Are they equipped with the tools to deliver it?
These, and more, are all important questions to make sure your brand is fit and healthy – and ready to help your business make a measurable impact.
What will your brand do this year?
What’s the point of brand purpose?
It’s a few months now since Unilever’s new CEO Hein Schumacher announced his plans to stop “force-fitting” purpose into the company’s brands – think Dove, Lifebuoy and Lynx, to name a few.
It’s a topical conversation to say the least, especially given how far Unilever has tried to promote brand purpose, albeit to varying degrees and effects. And it’s all the more interesting to read FutureBrand’s Global Chief Strategy Officer, Jon Tipple, share his thoughts on the subject.
In his own words, simply put:
“It is crazy to suggest the brand purpose era is over – we're just getting started.”
Dig a little deeper and Jon highlights how:
“The problem is that we’ve become far too basic in our idea of purpose. We’ve pigeon-holed it into this very virtuous, do-good thing…We must get used to the idea that all brands need a purpose, but that purpose doesn’t have to be super virtuous. It can be utterly sinful, and that’s fine too.”
It’s a long read, and an insightful one too, so feel free to click here to read Jon’s thoughts for yourself in full.
Technology made tangible
One of the key imperatives for any brand is to turn strategy into reality.
It’s a pivotal imperative that our Head of Strategy Victoria and I recently discussed in a wide-ranging interview with Mi3’s Marketing Editor and Associate Publisher, Nadia Cameron, about all things business and brand, marketing and technology.
What’s more, it’s a theme explored ever more fully at this year’s Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. Our global FutureBrand team were there to get a glimpse into the technologies that will be shaping our future and they posted this latest dispatch on what we can all expect.
A change in business, change in brand?
The new year has barely begun and there’s already been one big acquisition been made, namely Sara Lee – by the same people who acquired and subsequently led the turnaround of another iconic Australian brand, Darryl Lea.
Mumbrella shared the story and asked our Strategy Director Emma to share her thoughts too:
“We should take confidence from the fact that new owners have a track record in this space after years at the helm working to turnaround Darrell Lea. If they’re going to change the fortunes of this Australian icon, brand is one of the most powerful levers they can draw upon – all the ingredients are there, now is the time when a change in brand can change the future.”
All too true and it will be interesting to see how the brand might evolve and grow in 2024 and beyond.
Decisions, decisions, decisions
Whatever your brand might do this year – whether it’s related to purpose or experience, technology or turnaround – making decisions is a natural and necessary part of the process.
But decision-making can be difficult.
Consequently, we find that much of our impact relies upon our ability to help organisations make good decisions. In a recent project retrospective, we reflected on the key ways in which we do just that:
Collaboration: when you help create something, it means more to you.
Empirical evidence: from data to ta-da!
Prototyping: to test, learn and iterate the future (or simply to socialise the future implications in vivid ways).
How we apply these and other approaches depends largely on how the organisation itself makes decisions, what we can learn from the process of other decisions that have recently been made, and whom the decision will impact.
But there is also one simple hack for making any decision, and that’s to ‘phone-a-friend’. To ask someone who’s made the same kind of decision so that you can learn from their experience and benefit both from what they did successfully and from what they might have done differently. Simple, but effective.
That’s it for this first newsletter of the new year. As ever, I hope you find it insightful, perhaps even useful – and please do let me know what you think, I’m always happy to hear your feedback.