Catching consumers’ attention is critical to FMCG brands, particularly for product launches, which makes high-impact visual design a prerequisite for success.
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Branding: Steves&Co.
Elevating brand connections: The art of crafting engaging experiences
The positive impact of rebranding
Sustainability: What does this mean for creative and marketing agencies?
Is your brand hitting the right tone of voice?
Steves&Co. rebrands to steer the agency closer to its core values and services.
Storytelling: your brand’s secret weapon.
Harvard Business School professor, Gerald Zaltman famously found that 95% of the purchase decision-making process takes place in our intuitive subconscious, and is rationalised afterwards by our conscious minds. Is your brand utilising the art and science of storytelling to increase sales?
Imagine that two businesses are selling the same product on the same platform within the same price range. What makes a potential customer choose one over the other? The answer lies in our ability to tap into an essential element of human behaviour, and one that is often overlooked in the commercial sphere. Whether they realise it or not, people automatically seek out – and respond to – stories. It’s literally written into our genetic coding: since the beginning of time, human beings have recounted stories to express, entertain, and educate. So how can they be used to connect with your audience and grow your brand?
When we speak about storytelling in marketing, we’re not weaving once-upon-a-time tales with long-winded plotlines. We’re also not talking about corporate social responsibility or day-to-day happenings in your business. In a commercial landscape where almost every industry is saturated with cold, homogenous content bombarding consumers from all angles, storytelling is an extremely powerful marketing tool. It humanises your brand and creates a cohesive narrative structure to your content by establishing your brand’s purpose and values.
This is where the largely emotional process of decision-making, and commercial storytelling, intersect. When marketing their services, most businesses focus on explaining ‘what’ they do and fail to communicate ‘why’ they do it – beyond turning a profit. This ‘why’ is what we call the brand’s purpose, and neglecting to establish this at the beginning of a brand’s journey puts it at a significant disadvantage to its competitors. Used effectively, this tool has the demonstrated potential to establish a unique relationship with your customer and foster brand loyalty by creating an instinctive connection that can’t be forged through numbers, logic or charts.
This process also includes defining your brand values, the set of principles that guide all communications and help establish your brand identity. All of these elements come together to build an absolutely critical pillar of marketing that ensures both initial and repeat business: consistency. This in turn cultivates trust in your audience, which makes them more likely to connect and engage with your brand.
So – we may like to think that we make business and purchase decisions based purely on logic. However, as we have established, history and science say otherwise. In order to effectively tap into the selling potential of storytelling then, we must first establish an authentic and engaging brand story, brand purpose and brand values – which forms the blueprint for all subsequent content as part of a harmonious wider communication strategy. The effectiveness of this technique can be seen in the success of every major instantly-recognisable brand, from Coca Cola to Apple to Nike to Disney. These titans of industry, although varied in their product offerings, have only these elements in common: a concrete brand story, an iron-clad commitment to their values, and unwavering consistency in their communication strategy. It’s a failsafe process that has time and time again proven to drive engagement, loyalty, and sales. Is your brand taking full advantage of the incredible potential of storytelling?
Creating and growing professional brand and communication strategies is what we do best: contact us today to find out how we can help your business reach new heights.
How to Pivot Your Messaging.
E-Commerce: It’s About Resilience.
At this point, it doesn’t matter what you’re talking about, it all comes back to one thing:
COVID-19. Businesses across all industries – except maybe supermarkets and pharmacies – are struggling to deal with the fallout of the crisis. In circumstances like these, we need to strengthen our businesses to safeguard against current and future volatility, while also building business-as-usual operations.
That’s where e-commerce comes in, as the unquestionable solution for the problem of self-isolation and avoidance of in-store shopping during this particular crisis. And – bonus! – it supports existing, day-to-day business even when there isn’t a global pandemic.
But what is it about e-commerce that makes it so valuable? Well, it’s convenient, flexible and works as a safety net to support existing revenue channels.
Convenience
It’s the most obvious, but also the most significant: online shopping is convenient. Businesses are always there and always open. Customers aren’t limited to opening hours, and during extreme circumstances like we’re facing now, physical stores don’t need to remain open at all. And with shipping time globally getting shorter and shorter, the one major downside of online shopping is rapidly disappearing.
But it’s not just convenient in its accessibility; e-commerce has the convenience of information. The amount of information available to customers online makes it easier to compare products and find the best item at the best price. Businesses can get in on the information action as well. With analytics integration, we can monitor users and understand their buying habits, where they’ve come from, what products they’re considering, and more. This allows us to better respond to their needs and motivations.
Flexibility
More than ever, for both consumer and business, online shopping is flexible. E-commerce is no longer limited to just a shop website, now including other channels like social media, online marketplaces, influencers and apps. With multi-channel integration, we can meet new and existing customers in different spaces and in different ways depending on the channel.
This allows businesses to be reactive, proactive, engaged and engaging.
It’s already played out during this crisis: brands in China that had an early shift to focus on digital marketing and e-commerce showed increased sales overall, even compared to the same period last year when there wasn’t a global pandemic.
For businesses that only have a single e-commerce channel, the flexibility is still there. From scaling up or down business with minimal costs, to increased agility in how we can respond to online trends. Creating a new digital banner for a website, for example, has a much shorter production time than designing, producing and installing a window display. And that window display relies on customers being out and about to see it …
Safety Net
In times like these, online shopping is without a doubt the safer choice for individual and collective health. For many people around the world, it’s the only choice. While we’re currently living through an extremely rare situation, the safety net of e-commerce for consumers and businesses alike is an integral part of its value.
For some, it comes back to accessibility. There will always be people for whom physical shopping isn’t an option, whether due to age, disability, location, disease, or something else. But more than that, e-commerce creates a stable and consistent integrated revenue stream to support established business. Whatever products or services we’re selling, by having two largely independent channels operating, we’re crafting a safety net to use when one is threatened. That, more than anything else, is the key to resilience.
E-commerce is not about replacing brick and mortar stores; it’s about diversifying and integrating your channels to support each other and to be there for your customers where they expect to find you. Research – and common sense – shows that when physical, in-store shopping is inconvenient or challenging, people will turn to online shopping.
With greater convenience, flexibility and as a safety net in times of uncertainty, e-commerce is resilient and it makes our businesses more resilient.
Get in touch to find out how our teams can support your business in finding the right e-commerce solutions. Growth starts here.