Why Video Personalization can be Good for your Brand Management
Reading: 5 mins
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““Branding is the art of aligning what you want people to think about your company with what people actually do think about your company. And vice-versa.” ”
Intro
We live in a time when the perception of someone or something is often more important than the reality itself. Brand management is the set of tools a company uses to control that perception. It's a complex, rapidly shifting balancing act that can quickly go horribly wrong (just look at facebook and Spotify) and it's hard to follow a playbook for getting it right. But factors like innovation, meaningful customer engagement and a personal approach are three tried and trusted ways to boost your chances of success. That means that video personalization can be a fantastic way to enhance your brand management strategy and here we will explore why.
What is Brand Management?
Brand management is the establishment, maintenance and improvement of your products, services and brand perception. When practiced correctly, it increases customer loyalty, promotes meaningful brand awareness and creates pricing leverage. Its overall aim is to improve the relationship between the company and the customer and differentiate your product from your rivals.
Although brand management is part of marketing, there is a distinct difference. Brand management is responsible for creating and maintaining the brand itself, while marketing is the practical application of brand management – focusing on the enactment of campaigns to promote the brand and build engagement.
Why is it Important?
While it does deal with specific data and numbers, brand management also deals with something more abstract - emotions and feelings – which can be hard to quantify but whose importance cannot be underestimated.
Your brand is the way the public perceives your business. If done correctly, it will generate brand loyalty which means a customer will buy a product or service based on their loyalty to that brand.
It is important too because it leads to other benefits, such as word-of-mouth advertising.
Photo by Alexey Mak on Unsplash
Effective Brand Management
The first step is knowing and understanding your customers. From there, it's necessary to sync the company’s vision with the customer's needs and meet their expectations. Good branding should express the values and ideals of the brand in a clear and transparent way. Customers appreciate honesty and sharing. A brand should have a story, one that is engaging and that customers enjoy and want to be part of.
The full impact will not be immediate, and it takes time and effort, but focussing on reputation and impressions creates trust and this in turn creates brand equity which is an invaluable commodity for a company.
Effective brand management requires more than just a strong logo. To succeed, your company needs to stand out from your competitors and create consistently positive experiences for your customers.
It's a continuous process that doesn't end if success is achieved. Look at the big brands - they have stayed successful because they are constantly re-inventing themselves. Consumers’ needs change quickly, and a company needs to be ready to adapt. Dynamic evolution is key, using modern technologies and strong customer understanding to stay up-to-date and relevant. The ability to be innovative allows the brand to not only meet expectations, but to be able to go beyond that and offer something more.
Photo by Engin Akyurt from Pexels
The Importance of Perception
Brand messaging is the combination of the language a company uses in its public communication and the way that products and services are described to the customer.
This will result in creating a certain perception of your brand and can influence and attract customers to make a purchase. Even if they have not made a purchase or are not intending to, positive brand messaging will create an emotional reaction and will be noticed and remembered.
The decision to make a purchase might have nothing to do with the actual quality of the product - it's about how the customer feels about it. This is the power of brand loyalty. You might not be able to touch or hold emotions, but they are real. Feelings and shared experiences are crucial in brand management and so inviting people to emotionally invest in a brand needs to be part of the strategy.
But feelings are delicate things too. Good brand management can engage and attract customers, but the opposite is also true – if it's done badly, it can put them off.
Customers can be wary of constantly being sold something and are tired of being bombarded with irrelevant ads and information. Building trust and positive experiences can often be done without the need to sell anything. Sometimes merely reminding a customer that they are valued is more valuable than an instant sale. Quality engagement can lead to loyal customers and sometimes even that holy grail of marketing – brand evangelists.
Consumer society is transitioning from the Age of Standardization (the maintenance of uniformity and consistency across global markets) to our current Age of Personalization, where customers are treated as individuals with individual needs.
Marketers talk about personalization constantly. Customers don't, but they do experience it and have become used to it, to the extent where they now almost expect personalized experiences. So it's important to meet those expectations and be innovative in the ways that the customer is engaged, and their loyalty retained.
A few months ago, my wife ordered some skin care products from a company in Japan. When they arrived, there was a hand-written note inside the package thanking her by name for her business and wishing her a nice day. She was so excited about this simple gesture from an unknown person halfway round the world that it's made a permanent impression on her, and she is now a regular customer.
This is part of brand management. Things like this, no matter how small, make a difference. A hand-written note might be impractical for a larger company dealing with hundreds or thousands of daily customers but any effort at personalizing the consumer experience can have an impact on improving the brand perception. But how can you do that that with many people at scale? Thanks to data automation, personalization at scale is now possible at many levels.
Photo by Filip Koubek
Why Video Personalization is Perfect for Brand Management
Perfect brand management makes people want to identify with a particular brand whose products and services resonate with them and give their life meaning and significance. It means connecting on a personal level and this cannot be done by using a one-size-fits-all approach.
A key purpose of branding is to differentiate the product in the marketplace and make it stand out from competitors. Boldly using innovation and technology in new and different ways can do this. These days, one of the best ways to really stand out is to provide a personalized experience that is customized to each customer's individual needs.
Video personalization is the natural progression of all these key elements of good branding management in this modern digital era. It's an affordable, data-driven, but human, approach to improving the consumer experience that allows a brand to show it is innovative, progressive and caring.
Danny Holman, Motionlab