The next wave of brand-building: Making brands the relationship customers look for

Brand-building is about to make a quantum leap when it comes to dealing with their customers. The emphasis will shift from “relating” to “being.”

For a company to become more profitable, the marketing campaign has to be more personal. Algorithm and tracking of customer behaviour have to give way to the human touch. Finally, and this is the shift equivalent to a digital earthquake, in the new age of content marketing, entrepreneurs are advised to discard everything they know about building a relationship between their brand and the customer – and instead let their brand be the relationship.

As explained by the Harvard Business Review, the dynamics of the marketplace is being redefined from the usual consumer-buyer approach to a more personal one that sees both the buyer and consumer becoming a partner or a member of the family of the brand.

By portraying itself as a birthplace of champions, Nike has jumped from being a manufacturer of power sneakers to a “coach” that powers up its consumers into “winners.” Ride-sharing company Uber shed off the trappings as a mere transport provider for passengers and evolved into a “friend” giving personalised and high-quality lifts to “other friends” who needed comfort and respite from the traffic as they zoom to their next appointment. The homeowners who use Nest’s smart smoke detectors and thermostats regard the brand not as a supplier of high-tech gadgetry but as a “protector” and a “guardian of their security.”

One idea runs prevalent throughout this evolving relationship: the emotional connection. Customers stick with the brand not just because they have learned to trust its quality and reliability, but they feel that the brand (or the people behind it) is genuinely concerned about their well-being. As B2B Marketing puts it, the buyers feel that the brand has become part of their lifestyle; it is special and indispensable to the way they live. The brand has become an extension of their being, and not just another item that they can replace with that of the competitor’s.

Obviously, creating this kind of relationship and the familial sense of belonging behind it takes time. It is also quite difficult to achieve, especially when the usual marketing tools like analytics, behavioural tracking and profiling tend to impersonally lump the individual consumers into one monochromatic herd. Instead of fulfilling their objectives of drawing the customer in, too much automation can drive them away.

In Forbes India, Anamika Sirohi writes how she was “turned off” by one store’s newsletter campaign that kept sending her email and text notifications every time they had a new red-coloured item on their shelves. Sirohi kept receiving glowing email items how the store just acquired a new pair of red shoes, a red bag, a red shirt — simply because Sirohi bought a red handbag from the retailer a few months before. What the bright boys in the store’s marketing department failed to realise was that Sirohi bought the red handbag as a gift for someone else, not for herself.

The store lost a customer because they relied on number-crunching automatons and did not make the effort to complement it with a more personalised, human approach.

Customisation and investing the necessary time and energy to make the customer feel special and that his concerns are addressed are still key to building a relationship with him – and in time, making his experience organic to the brand’s overall marketing ecosystem. One app that had seen the signs early and latched on the personal approach is interestingly enough, a content curation platform and news provider to its still-growing 80,000 membership: Born2Invest.

The app’s users from all over the world click on it every day to update themselves on business news covering a whole range of industries that are happening in hundreds of countries. Far from just being article skimmers, they use the information to make business decisions, run their organisations, and make smart investments.

Born2Invest’s CEO and co-founder Dom Einhorn narrates how his approach became more personal, distinguishing the app from its counterparts: “Our news team curates news from reputable international agencies and converts them into easy-to-read but still substantial bite-sized pieces that the app user can easily read and absorb while he’s working or in transit. However, we also have homegrown journalists in several countries who localise the news and make it more relevant to the app reader living in that particular region.”

He adds, “While adhering to the highest standards of journalism, they do give it the depth and the emotional heft that make the app user feel connected to the news that is going on, especially if it is occurring in his own backyard. It’s that awareness that they will receive content that is accurate, objective, and yet attuned to their needs that makes our readership loyal and increasing.”

The Content Marketing Institute echoes this by its own tips on how to humanise brand marketing: “Mass marketing is last century. Cast too wide a net, and the meaning of your content marketing is lost.”

It makes other suggestions: Tell a story, instead of a product pitch. Show the human faces running the organisation and let the customer get to know them. Make the information you give them so relevant to their lifestyle that they make it part of their daily habits. Above all things, humanise your brand. Redefine its role with the customer and they will become part of your overall “family” and will never let go. Let your brand be the relationship they look for.