The business world has seen a lot of changes since the beginning of the 21st century. The changes never seem to cease. We’ve witnessed the appearance of new niches, the boom of social media and the incredible amount of info which is released daily. Brands stopped swaying to slow dances. They’ve started flirting in Latin rhythms with their audience.
For novices in the world of entrepreneurship, it is essential to understand the past. This will enable them to perceive how to position their brands high in the right niche.
With that in mind, here are some expert thoughts on the state of brand positioning in this century as well as some predictions regarding the future.
The necessity for multi-dimensional brand models
As times changed, factors which made up a brand in the 1980s were no longer the only relevant ones. The fast pace of business market development influenced a change in the perception of branding.
Things evolved quickly and since brands became multi-dimensional. Research was conducted to determine the main brands in a niche. It was conducted into the manner in which consumers see your brand and the influence of the brand and customers on one another.
The future will continue to develop in this regard. It’s quite clear that to improve brand positioning, you need to put more emphasis on the customer than on the product. The way customers perceive the product and your brand are crucial elements of success.
The preciseness of audience targeting
Following the idea of prioritizing customer’s experience and opinion, the desire for precise targeting grew. Nowadays you need to learn as much as you can about your audience. You need to be informed about their environment so you can concoct the perfect strategy. This needs to be done to make your brand more prominent.
Software solutions for gathering data on customers will become more and more sophisticated. The more information you acquire, the better. The info that is sought after is related to demographics. This includes gender, age, marital status, income, occupation and data related to psychographics. Psychographics includes things which interest them and those that frustrate them.
The globalization of brands
Since the internet changed the way the business is conducted and made items from, for instance, Spain, more easily available in Australia, brands started adapting to this climate by tweaking their brand identity so it would be appealing to foreign customers as well.
Nowadays and in the future as well, brands are created with the innate intention of catering to a global customer base. So, as a novice, you can take your ideas to the most popular brand design agency from Sydney and let those experts create a brand identity based on your ideas for a product you would be selling in let’s say, Finland.
Such agencies will also offer a plethora of services so by hiring just one, you would tend to multiple elements such as branding, marketing strategies, website design and more.
The importance of brand tracking
With the business world developing fast, we see the appearance of many new brands each day but not all of them manage to win their place in their niche.
To find some pattern in a fast-evolving environment, brand tracking has increased in value so that business owners can observe the changes in their brand positioning and understand what needs to be altered and in which manner.
Core metrics include data such as who has heard of the brand and customer opinions. Other metrics include who is and who isn’t buying the product and the position of the brand among others. Two other key metrics that are include are: Conversion rates and who the brand advocates are.
Those key questions might change in the future, as well as the manner of acquiring the answers and the frequency of conducting this type of research.
Conclusion
The Internet has given us access to a never before dreamed amount of data. Sadly, instead of being ecstatic about having so many things at the grasp of our hands, we’ve become oversensitive.
Customers do not want to lose too much time searching for a piece of info or a product. They want their content to be concise, quickly delivered and engaging. Customers want to perform the purchase process from the comfort of their homes.
So, brand positioning relies on taking that multitude of information and turning it into intelligence which is then aimed at their audience.
The inclinations will not change in the future. Data about customers will remain highly relevant to creating a marketing strategy that caters to their needs and interests. The scope of influence of brands will outgrow any local and state boundaries. They’ll reach the most distant corners of the world.
Watch this space for updates in the Opinion category on Running Wolf’s Rant.
