Improving your brand purpose

Published April 7, 2014 at 10:14 am

As you know, your company brand has a very important purpose. It has meaning, it’s what you represent to your customers. Businesses that want to have lasting success would be well-advised to put a lot of effort into building and maintaining a strong brand that customers will identify with and want to become loyal to.

What can companies do improve their brand purpose?

As Adweek discussed in an article last month, consumers seem to no longer be buying into the idea that a brand is supposed to be their friend, like a person expecting trust, attention, love, and other human emotions. Although brands are intended to connect with customers, companies need to come up with new ways of accomplishing this, ways that actually attract consumer attention and deliver what customers want. As this Adweek article points out, advertising is a reflection of culture, and brands that want to stay ahead need to adapt. The main takeaway here is that brands need to answer the question of who they want to be, and doing so will help to define them in the mind of consumers.

To add to this, a recent AdAge article reported that there is conflict between customers and marketers when it comes to the idea of brand purpose. This disconnect, which was revealed by research conducted by the World Federation of Advertisers and a study by PR firm Edelman, appears to be that consumers found listening to customer feedback to be a number one priority, while only 40% of marketers saw this as important.

The research indicated that while supporting a meaningful cause still holds weight for customers, marketers can bridge the brand purpose gap by increasing focus on improving customer relationships. Listening to customer feedback should be a top priority for marketers looking to build strong brand relationships in 2014.