FutureBrand

The CEO view: key themes for 2011

There has never been a more important time to connect business and brand strategy for differentiation and growth. When I talk to global business leaders, three major themes emerge that are influencing their strategies for future brand success in 2011 and beyond.

1. THE POWER OF PARTICIPATION

Social technology has transformed people’s ability to participate in creating and building brands. Which means businesses have new opportunities to leverage the value of their consumer, customer and employee networks. From co-creative consumer brand initiatives like Mountain Dew’s ‘Dewmocracy’ to customer idea forums like www.mystarbucksidea and open innovation programmes at corporations like P&G and GSK, brands are harnessing the power of their most loyal advocates to grow and develop. And powerful new brands are emerging that depend on customer participation for their success. From Twitter to Groupon and Netflix, the power of the service is driven by the active participation of its customers. Properly managed, participation can build loyalty, engagement and reputation as well as develop breakthrough business ideas. And if you look at what it has done for brands like Apple – now the world’s second largest company – through new business models like the AppStore, participation starts to look like a major driver of future brand growth.

2. CREATING SHARED VALUE

Social responsibility has become an integral aspect of corporate brand strategy and reputation management. The drive towards better global citizenship and increased scrutiny of corporate governance practices has led to significant business investment in everything from philanthropy to community engagement and active attempts to reduce environmental impact. Quite rightly, this activity – from healthcare programmes to volunteering, charitable donations and sustainability initiatives – is often informed by corporate brand purpose, positioning and values. However, there is a new body of thought emerging from Harvard Business School and elsewhere that the ‘CSR’ movement misses an opportunity to deliver genuine business benefits – it’s more about meeting externally imposed standards and subject to the whim of reporting criteria,company size or pressure to do the right thing. As an alternative, corporate brands have an opportunity to create shared value by directly applying their core business expertise to help the communities in which they operate: building infrastructure that helps their logistics partners deliver goods to market, providing technology services to local hospitals that keep the population healthy or teaching farmers to improve their yields and profitability. As those communities thrive, so too do the corporations – creating sustainable mutual benefits that go far beyond donations and tokenism. As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, ideas like shared value will be seamlessly integrated into the business and brand practice of leading corporations – helping society and the global economy to develop.

3. CUSTOMER-CENTRICITY

The best businesses have always understood their customers. As global competition increases and new markets open up in China, India and elsewhere, this becomes even more of an imperative. But what does customer-centricity really mean? Brand communications are based on building a compelling proposition around consumer insight and product truth, and the best innovation is driven by deep market and consumer understanding. But are organizations truly built around their customers? In his recent book Reorganize for Resilience, Ranjay Gulati argues that true customer-centricity has to go beyond this to inform the way businesses are structured. Customer-centric businesses, he argues, look at the enterprise from the outside-in, rather than the inside-out – in terms of consumer needs, rather than manufacturing, distribution or departmental preoccupations. This approach has led to total reorganisation for brands like Best Buy who radically restructured their business around insight-driven consumer segments, as well as transforming the retail experience better to reflect the needs of their largely female consumer decision makers. Best Buy is widely regarded as one of the world’s most successful retail brands as a result, and join Starbucks and other global brand leaders who have made customer-centricity a business imperative, rather than simply a marketing strategy.

For more views from inside FutureBrand go to http://fblog.futurebrand.com/

Patrick Smith
CEO, FutureBrand