Your brand promise means nothing if you’re not influencing the people who truly drive your brand.
Recently on Now Brands Talk, we heard from Megha Narayan , Head of Marketing at Assembled , about how the expectations for a brand have changed over the years and a new way to measure a brand’s impact.
We also discussed enabling customer success teams to be brand evangelists, measuring a brand’s impact, and knowing when your brand is ready to evolve.
Let’s dive right into the conversation.
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"We now live in a world where brands are influencing people on a day-to-day basis versus once a year for the Superbowl."
The way we think about brand has changed tremendously in the last two years. “Now I think about the more powerful ways that brands can exist and influence and impact,” Megha said. Focusing on how people feel and why they feel that is one of the most important opportunities for brand to shine.
Customer success teams especially represent brand, since customer onboarding sets the tone for the whole relationship. These CS influencers and brand evangelists are often the very first touchpoint that customers have with a brand.
For Megha, customer success is the team that she reaches out to learn where to find a case study or logo.
The stakeholder, especially in B2B, is experiencing millions of brands in millions of ways in a single day. It’s partly a consequence of the digital world where there actually are a million levers that a brand can pull.
The moment of brand connection isn’t the Superbowl-level pillar of onetime hype anymore. It’s how a brand makes you feel daily.
Megha’s favorite brand interaction is Trader Joe’s, not because they have the best ads, but because they offer the best (most consistent) experience.
“Ultimately, it doesn't mean you need a big budget to influence how people feel,” Megha pointed out. “You can do some really powerful work for free.”
"Investing in your brand is almost like investing in your 401k. You have to be patient and consistent."
Brands promise a lot — but how do they live up?
"Once upon a time, brand promise was this perfectly crafted statement that lived on a website, which you hoped everyone would live up to," Megha said.
Today, that’s a naive perspective. Brand promise is meaningless unless it influences people.
A thriving community drives revenue because customers sell the brand.
“Brand is all about consistency. It's all about scalability. It’s all about flexibility, and not necessarily a superficial way we have to look,” Megha said.
These quarterly metrics are examples of brand awareness that you should track and analyze:
Brand is represented by driving the revenue needle with all of the above — and some intangibles as well.
“The most powerful measure of brand is a multidimensional one,” Megha said. “Brand isn't just one thing.”
To accurately visualize your brand, you’ll need to measure it throughout your organization. The most holistic brand picture is the truest one.
"A brand promise means nothing if you can't influence the people that are actually, really, truly driving the brand from the inside out."
While consistency in brand is very important, you also need to remain dynamic and open to evolving.
Some of us know firsthand the functional challenges of a stunted brand, either as employees or customers.
Megha’s advice for brands that are poised to evolve is to strip away the ego and ask this question:
What problem are we actually trying to solve?
The answer may start small but reveal a larger challenge, as it did during Megha’s time at Atlassian .
Design pointed out that the logos weren’t optimized for small spaces like mobile. The type wasn’t scalable either.
Product was listening to customer pain about navigation in the asset management software.
These two seemingly separate answers to the problem-solving question resulted in a product-and-marketing partnership to rewrite product strategy in alignment with brand promise and create the Atlassian design guidelines.
In other words, the exercise produced two new questions:
The decision to evolve your brand should be a cross-functional consideration, given that there are implications for product, customer success, marketing, sales, and strategy.
As Megha pointed out, brands are holistic and rooted in human experience.
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