Brand Managers: 3 Action Items to Forge Great Ties Between your Brand and Consumers

Brand managers are constantly seeking ways to connect with their consumers to ultimately enhance their brand performance, which leads to better sales results. As a graduate student at Northwestern in Medill studying IMC, I hold great interest in studying branding. While browsing through articles of related topics, these two articles have stand out of all that they explicitly address ways to elevate your branding strategy to the next level.

The article by Dionne Mahaffey, chief executive of the CPAI Group, Inc., talks about ways to connect with target consumers in her article Five Strategic Steps to Improve Your Branding Strategy. She believes that brand managers should invest in forging the strong connection between the company and the customer’s emotions and memories, by asking why consumers purchase the brands they purchase, and giving them what they want before they realize it. It is crucial to reflect on company’s business objective and think about how it can align with customers’ expectation. The insights can be used to forge emotional connection with the customer group.(Forbes)

Rayana Pandey speaks about connecting to consumers by delivering the right content in the article, Wall Street Journal’s New Content Strategy and What Brands Can Learn From It. She specifically comments on Wall Street Journal’s strategy of incorporating video, visuals and interactivity to grab more attention from audiences who are getting busier each day. She argues for the importance of metrics of keeping everything on track, but put more emphasis on delivering the right context with correctness and objectivity to the readers. The approach will shape the brand as a trustworthy brand to consumers. In addition, Innovation is an ultimate key attribute to grab public attention and create a stronger tie. (Marketing)

source: HDimageson

Based on my reviews and relevant study I’m doing at Northwestern, I highly recommend several action items that you should try out:

·      Connect to emotion - Form brand strategy to arouse certain emotion and relate to consumers past experience in order to create a strong relationship

·      Nickname your consumers - name your consumer segments to have them feel like being in a community surrounded by people like them

·      Surprise your audience - Create Innovative content draw attention

That is said, put consumers’ need in front of everything, stand in their shoes to think and stay visually interesting with innovative videos and image. Your consumers will be drawn to your brand ultimately.

Previously worked in The Mill in the field of marketing and advertising, I am now a fulltime graduate student in Northwestern IMC program, specialized in branding. I will be graduating this December. With profound intercultural understanding, I am greatly knowledgeable in global brands. Contact me on Twitter and Linkedin and hit me up with more marketing insights.