From Brand Purpose to Brand Experience
The development of high-growth, purpose-driven brand concepts and their transformation into a relevant brand identity is a key strategic success factor of well-considered brand management of consumer goods brands.
Due to the Corona pandemic, individual megatrends are currently being influenced and extremely accelerated, which has an enormous impact on society and the economy. The trends affected by such acceleration and amplification are ClimateAwareness, Health, Sustainability, New Work, Knowledge Culture and Connectivity. These six megatrends are currently experiencing a "Covid-19-Turbo" and will presumably petrify into 'Sticky Trends' even after the global pandemic situation has subsided.
Some behaviors will change permanently, others will return to a more pristine state. The hysteresis effect, a phenomenon from sociological behavioral economics, describes this paradigm shift in that social life will adjust to a new equilibrium (homeostasis) after a transient exogenous macroeconomic shock.
GenZ in particular is redefining the megatrend of sustainability in that it is no longer enough to preserve the environment (sustain-ability), but the ability to rebuild is coming to the fore (rebuild-ability). Products that focus on equity, health and sustainability are currently experiencing a massive boom.
The path to Iconic Brand Building
Iconic BrandBuilding' by Roman Klis Design aims to conceptually develop and design Purposeful Brand ldentities with lmmersive Design Experiences and to communicate consistently and holistically across all relevant consumer and shopper touchpoints:
- Brand Purpose - Design is attitude: Purpose is about why. It describes the social, ecological and economic impact. The purpose thus forms the brand foundation (normative level) for the brand identity based on it (strategic level) and the targeted implementation in the brand experience (operational level).
- Brand Essence - Nucleus and Konnectum: The Brand Essence is the core of the brand (Nucleus) and at the same time the connecting element (Konnectum). It should give structure to the brand purpose. This raises the question of the inner core of the brand: Who am I for whom? What do I promise? How do I deliver this promise? Basically, the brand essence is about defining the brand attributes, the brand benefits and the brand personality.
- Brand identity - factuality and narrative: The brand identity of a brand should be fact-based and at the same time tell a story. It is about what the brand tells semantically, semiotically and sensually. This is where the brand sensation tool, one of the fundamental tools for the brand identity development process, comes into play. It forms the bridge between the verbal positioning of a brand and the development of the design. The goal here is to transform the brand into an appropriately fitting sensory experience and enable consumers to experience the brand with all their senses: visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and haptic-perceptual.
- Brand Properties - Relevance and Distinctiveness: Different, semiological and multisensual design elements make a brand unique. These brand properties, also known as brand attributes, define a brand and ideally make it distinctive and distinctive in the eyes of consumers. Brand elements include color, shape, logo, imagery, symbolism, typography, textures, patterns and tones. The more properties a brand has, the more unique and distinctive it is.
- Brand Architecture - self-similarity and gravitas: The goal of any brand architecture is to form a self-similar brand portfolio that structures and holds the entire brand together (gravitas). The structuring of brand portfolios becomes more difficult the more the portfolio grows in the number of products of a brand through proliferation. Unifiers and differentiators for brands can be determined for this purpose. The unifiers of the brand always remain, no matter where the product is located within the brand portfolio. For the brand Ritter Sport , for example, this is the square shape. Differentiators vary depending on where the product is placed within the portfolio. The Orbit model can thus be used to create a clear brand architecture from complex product portfolios, allowing a certain flexibility without losing the essence and visually self-similar brand identity.
- Brand experience - design and communication: In brand communication, a holistic and consistent brand identity across all touchpoints is essential. This creates a strong brand cohesion and a high brand familiarity (salience) for the consumer. Creating brand experiences is therefore the critical success factor for the future. Here, the non-verbal key visual plays a decisive role, especially and increasingly in the e-commerce business. The 'V' at Ritter Sport Vegan is an example of this.
Brand strategy implications
The Corona crisis and the Ukraine war have put us all in a phase of discontinuous change. Companies that can keep adapting their strategies fast enough through agile adaptivity and respond to new consumer behavior patterns will be the winners in the market. With the lconic brand building approach, a strong and distinctive brand identity can be conceptualized and creatively designed across all consumer and shopper touchpoints of the brand journey. Simple, intuitive and smart decoding in brand packaging design as by far the most important touchpoint for consumer goods of all is the key to a sustainably successful brand business model. Successful brands that want to be competitive in the future will increasingly have to rely on strategic and operational ambidexterity. In a VUKA3 world (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, acceleration, amplification), strong brands must be both efficient and flexible. For strategic brand management, this means managing a variety of facets: stability and agility, renovation and disruption, and exploitation and exploration.