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By liberating brand power through proper integration, cultural change and technology, businesses can be transformed.
Reconceptualized as a powerful business enabler, brand can help facilitate transformation, inform decision-making and drive strategic and operational goals across an organization.
There is no doubt that banishing the perception of brand as a sub-discipline of marketing requires great technology, data and intelligence, but it also warrants bold, savvy leadership from senior marketers, who must empower the wider business to use brand in different ways.
To unchain your brand power, elevate its influence and enshrine it at the core of your business, marketing chiefs must first be able to assess its impact. Brand equity is just as important, if not more so, than any other item on a company’s balance sheet. Failure to recognize this can no longer be forgiven. Tools are available to measure and maximize brand value; it's time to embrace them.
Five key strategies to unlock brand power
1. Maximize brand value:
More than ever, consumers are favoring brands they know and trust and, as such, companies with higher brand equity are more likely to grow market share and bounce back quicker from the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Maximizing that equity requires chief marketing officers (CMOs) to demystify what brand means to all stakeholders in a company and showcase its unifying value across the whole business.
Discover the value of brand power in a competitive market.
2. Solidify the role of marketing:
Brand is not the only thing that needs demystifying as the entire role of marketing is often misunderstood and undervalued. CMOs can overcome this by partnering with other parts of the business to demonstrate the wide scope of their remit and to lead a cross-organizational brand ecosystem. Acting as the connecting tissue, marketers should leverage data to demonstrate the real business impact of an integrated brand.
Discover why collaboration between marketing and sales teams are vital to business success
3. Leverage meaningful tools:
Customers are forming opinions of companies through an unprecedented number of touchpoints and interactions that, coupled with regional variations, make it difficult to gain a holistic view of their behavior and a clear, consistent picture of brand equity. Tools to quantify a brand’s contribution to company revenue are vital. When used in conjunction with other consumer insights and purchase-funnel tracking, they enable CMOs to see the crucial bigger picture.
Connect with your customers, build brand strength and get an edge over competitors. Learn how
4. Close the gap between marketing and sales:
Brand is the ultimate lever for enabling sales growth, but in many companies a broken relationship between sales and marketing can equate to a broken brand. To increase synergies and reduce friction, sales and marketing objectives should be aligned, and the intelligence they act on shared and owned in tandem. GfK’s brand framework helps connect the dots, bringing sales and marketing onto the same page to drive results for the business.
Align your brand with long-lasting purpose. Learn how.
5. Measure consumer values:
The widening number of stakeholders companies must engage with, and the judging of performance on social impact as well as just financial metrics, has catapulted brand purpose to the top of boardroom agendas. Companies must now be able to measure consumer sentiment beyond traditional areas of customer service and user experience, understanding exactly how they can align their values with their customers’.
Uncover the debate around today's buzzword 'Brand Purpose'. Discover more
