With the Royal Wedding now over, Mark Melling, Head of RYOT Studio at Oath takes a look at the secrets to finding your own perfect royal match when it comes to brands.
The world has been swept up in wedding fever, as the new Duke and Duchess of Sussex tied the knot this weekend, declaring their love for one another.
Brands too are looking for their ‘happily ever after’, exploring ways they can create long lasting relationships with consumers. But when it comes to developing brand love, like any other relationship, there needs to be love, trust and mutual respect.
Our research from a recent Brand Love Index, which surveyed more than 150,000 consumers from 13 countries, revealed four crucial factors that are proven to help brands engage with consumers. Here’s how brands can make sure their relationship goes from strength to strength.
Date 1: Getting the chemistry right
One of the key elements to any relationship is trust. Consumers are more likely to support brands they believe they can trust and that truly understand them. For marketers, this means they need to use a variety of data to build a clear image of their consumers in order to create a tailored and personalised connection.
There is an abundance of data available to organisations, including purchasing history, geolocation, mobile usage and ad performance statistics, which can help brands create bespoke content that is more likely to resonate with consumers in the long term. Developing trust is essential for consumers, especially when sharing their data. Organisations therefore need to work hard on their relationship building skills if they want to create a successful online community, where marketers can develop personalised messaging, offers and experiences.
Date 2: Making it click
Marketers need to be able to spice things up both on and offline. Most relationships will go through stale patches, but it doesn’t need to be the case between consumers and brands. 19% of a brand’s love is typically driven by its ability to keep things exciting and set new trends. Consumers are more willing to stick with brands that are innovative and who are continually looking to elevate their brands experience.
A brand’s ability to exceed their customers’ expectations by offering something unique and providing a service that outshines their competitors, is a key driver for garnering brand love. Marketers need to focus on the overall experience of their brand, and by developing customer-made content, through the use of AR and VR technology, they have the potential to blow their customers away and generate highly-engaging and personalised touch-points.
By combining offline excitement through experiential marketing, instead of traditional display advertising and generating online engagement through live video, brands are more likely to be successful when unlocking the key to their consumers hearts.
Date 3: Opposites Attract
Creating chemistry between brand and consumer can be easier said than done. For marketers, the secret to being on the same wavelength is understanding what consumers want and how they want to be communicated to at different stages of their lives. Whether that’s through driving innovation or maintaining a strong level of trust, knowing your consumers desires and needs is always an important factor.
Native advertising, for example, is a great way to refresh campaigns with new tactics as it allows brands to tailor their messaging depending on who is seeing them and where. Brands which use tactics like native video to place engaging and informative videos alongside the content their consumers are already benefiting from, have seen as much as a 50 per cent increase in brand admiration.
Date 4: Don’t get political
On most first dates it’s probably best to steer clear of political chatter. The same rule applies for consumers and brands, with seven out of ten consumers thinking that their brand shouldn’t go hand-in-hand with any particular political party. Consumers increasingly expect their favourite brands to share similar values to themselves and want to continually be seen using and advocating brands that share values like quality and diversity.
Sharing and communicating effectively, is ultimately the best way to build a relationship, either between people or brands and consumers. This means that marketers should be crafting a much more compelling and creative narrative to show off their brand’s ethos, beliefs and purpose.
By Mark Melling
Head of RYOT Studio
Oath