Throughout AdWeek, marketers and brands shared how to be disruptive, innovative and stay ahead of the curve. But the key to success, as Campbell’s Global Director of Digital Marketing Umang Shah reminded us, is to stay perpetually relevant. Complacent or out-of-touch brands will lose customers to competitors, because, as Nader Ali-Hassan at Progressive shared in a different talk, “we are all going after the same customer.” As new technologies come to market, and existing technologies innovate, brands have to stay relevant. The question is, how?
First, stay fearless. The most obvious way to stay fearless is by having a lot of money. Deep pockets allows brands such as Apple to innovate more freely, without market or quarterly restrictions.
However, such a luxury is rare for brands, and in its absence marketers must be more calculated with risks. We can do so by being fearless through our greatest asset, data.
Brands who root creative executions in data, can do so and know the idea will resonate. Therefore, these brands are able to intelligently take informed risks.
For example, Netflix uses Audience Insights to determine which original content they should produce. Most recently, Netflix decided to revive the canceled British television show “Black Mirror,” after noticing strong viewership of the original seven-episode series. Similar research was applied when deciding to order “House of Cards,” “Arrested Development,” and “Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp,” all three of which were deemed “too risky,” by Hollywood standards, but were transformed into audience favorites for Netflix through data insight.
Second, make your audience your top priority. As Shah said, focus on the outside-in, not the inside out. As audiences shift to such segments as wearables, Snapchat or Periscope, there is some level of expectation for brands to have a presence. However, just because millennials are doing it all, doesn’t mean you have to as well. Brands should focus on understanding the core behaviors and passions of their most valuable customer, in order to create a compelling experience for them regardless of channel.
To stay perpetually relevant, brands must utilize data to understand their audience. Armed with this data, brands can confidently keep audiences engaged by crafting campaigns, products and experiences around their audience’s passion. Data dissolves fear and by doing so, it enables decisions previously thought to be “too risky.” It’s the key to not only breaking through the clutter of the competition, but also to pleasing your audience. And it’s how, in today’s crowded marketplace, a brand can stay perpetually relevant.
To learn more about staying perpetually relevant, request a demo of the People Pattern platform below.
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