How Do You Make Your Brand A Shared Ideal To Improve Customer Engagement?

Improved sales are founded on powerful brands. The landscape is littered with good ideas and superior products that simply do not make it to the next level of customer engagement, trial and retention.

Many marketers think it’s enough to have a great product or service, or a great idea with which they advertise and market that product or service. Why so many companies, and what they offer, die too soon on the vine is because they haven’t tapped into what drives customers to become part of the brand ethos, which in turn creates a foundation for improved sales performance.

There are three key things to think about as you pay attention to the power of your brand as a company asset and converting that power into more successful sales outcomes. It’s one thing to prospect well and identify who is a prospect and who is a possible suspect. Behind it all, your sales funnel will benefit from brand leadership, and involving possible and current customers in what drives you as a business. Sales performance is more than functional; it is also most importantly emotional.

1. Most buying decisions are not conscious.

Work in retail and grocery has especially proven this out. People don’t shop consciously, they shop for what they know, how it makes them feel, and how it fits into their view of the world and themselves. This goes for the Dollar Stores of the world as much as it goes for luxury items. The function might be price savings, or it might be status-related. But in all cases, the purchase decision has more to do with how the purchase makes them feel than anything else.

2. Brands aren’t built on ideas; nor are good advertising programs.

It’s been said that one good ad can do more than 20 mediocre ones, but what does that mean? What it really boils down to is all successful brands are built on ideals. Ideals have attachment that mere ideas do not. Anyone can come up with a good idea, but, aside from executing well on that idea, it doesn’t have the fuel you need to architect and substantiate a powerful brand over time. Ideals do. Ideals have emotional resonance and relevance. Discovering what ideals your company believes in and strives for mean something to customers in ways that connect them to the world in which you operate and the world in which they live. There is a connection. The more you can connect deeply and psychologically with your customers and prospective customers, the richer territory you can mine in the mind of those you want to connect with over the long term.

3. Driving your brand ideals down into your internal communications and teams.

All human beings look for meaning, and ideals are the driver behind meaning. If you can live your brand ideals every day in the smallest ways within your company, it will both enrich the experience of your employees through a brand story that has meaning to them, and make it easier for them, and more likely that they will, serve as ambassadors in the markets and communities in which they work. Shared ideals bond your brand and what it sells in powerful ways that deepen meaning, inspire, and deliver results within and without.

When you start to truly consider the powerful asset you have in your brand, and orient its expression and experience to ideas that resonate with everyone who interacts with you, or needs to communicate your interests, you are on the path to stronger organic sales and a more successful business.