Identity, a relatively contemporary concept, has emerged essential and precedes brand image and positioning now. In today’s saturated and cluttered communication era, we need to define (Identity) the brand much before it gets perceived (image) by the target audience. Today’s scenario is much more complex than what it was a decade back.

To understand this, let’s try and decode. Your identity card succinctly tells who you are. This is extremely subjective and non transferable. Thus brand identity is the distinguishable features that help audience to instantly recognize the brand. In the perspective of communication, it is the unique essence of the brand that is sent out to the audience, and it remains the same across all its products\services\communication. With the tangible and intangible characteristics of the brand, it gets its heritage.  This heritage then should be thoughtfully curated to create value in the matrix of the cluttered market.

Position of your brand in this cluttered market, plagued with several me too s, is an uphill task.  You need to position your brand based on the 4 pertinent questions:

• For what
• For whom
• For when
• Against whom

All customer decisions are based on comparisons. With reviews and opinions all over different media (old and new), the present scenario poses a much greater challenge, hence a well strategized positioning (with right media mix) with prudence and precision is need of the hour!

Gone are the days, when you had only Face book and Twitter to create a social connection with your clients and prospective customers. The fleet-footed evolution of the social media provides you with a myriad of platforms aka screens to make ‘out of the box’ campaigns! Indeed an exciting time for the marketers.

Now, this calls into question, does this ‘many screen’ scenario make your life any easier? Dwell on this: you have a compelling story, your research analytics prompt you the perfect prospective platforms, you have carefully crafted creative content yet you don’t make any impact!!

Why???

There is an interesting biological angle in the whole story! The prominence of social media with too many screens and options has rewired our brain. Studies say that average human attention span is decreasing; however, our multi-tasking ability has increased. Hence, while waiting for an elevator in a mall, airport or a super store you no more get engrossed in the innovative, engaging interactive display of the digital OOH, you are either answering to mails you intend to or inattentively scrolling down your inbox, ignoring various painstakenly drafted shout out mails by various companies or you are simply in a chat in the constantly live Whatsapp. So what happens to those thoughtfully created content and well-sketched business plan.

The omnipresent social media never goes on a vacation!!!! And the social media marketing evangelist tells you “always be present in the social media space”, this puts you under a perpetual pressure. However, in this high-tech era, we have our marketing automation tools. Viola!! The repetitive, energy-consuming tasks are taken care of .You have powerful programs customized for your target population all round the clock. You save money and time. What more do you want?

But, social Media, as the name suggest, is social, humane, it is unique in the way it connects and engages. The beauty lies in its two-way communication. You interact with your target audience. A continuous flow of emotion less robotic content can alienate you from your target community. And hence sadly, your carefully crafted contents are finally sent to the spam folders. A spam bot is what you position yourself as, in this highly competitive and cluttered market space.

Social media marketing is a skill which you acquire through experience. The cut and try, hit and miss cases give you the seasoning, the maturity and the sophistication in creating content, strategizing your marketing activity. Automation tools have to be effectively and judiciously used through creative thought process to build a brand which connects!

Everybody loves to read a story…

And in today’s digital era, where a consumer keys in as she thinks about a product or service, the importance of building an online persona of your brand becomes very important. And blogs allow you to tell your story and position the persona of your brand. Thus the persona of the brand is now what your customers say and feel about your product or service or organization. Hence it’s the content you have on the social media that creates a significant impact.

Subsequently, your customers start engaging with you through your blogs. The personal interaction with them brings your brand closer to them and helps build trust in you! Getting the content viral is something which every marketer aims at. Viral is nothing but the positive effect of ‘word of mouth’. Until date nothing could beat the word of mouth marketing. And this is done by the readers of your blogs. The readers eventually become your best brand building evangelists!

Is it as simple as said? No, unfortunately it isn’t. Bad blogs can not only be ineffective but a bad content can totally delineate your customers from your brand. The dissociation can be damaging to the extent of completely destroying a brand.

The most essential and preliminary step of blogging aka branding is to understand the need of the customer. Each audience has need. You need to understand and empathise with their intents. And then you know the destination. Accordingly you need to ideate the content to connect to the core. The emotional connect that you create with your blog is what imparts the timeless unique identity to your brand, which in turn stands out and forms an indelible bond with your coveted customer.

Nonetheless, to achieve all this you need to understand the dynamics of the disruptive marketing and identify the intent of the leading customers. Once you can answer them with your well researched, well strategized and well curated blog, you have established your brand story.

Experience economy is believed to be the next economy after agrarian, industrial and service economy. The main characteristic of the ‘experience economy’ is that in this economy, ‘experience’ will be sold as a commodity instead of as a value addition to service or goods/product economy. Now many brands provide experience of the brand for free to customers so that they buy the product or take the service. For example, in Music World stores, you can experience music using headphones for free before you proceed to buy CDs. So as of now experience is provided as a value addition. But now the time has come to commoditize and sell the “experience” to buyers or guests for a price. For example, people go to Disney Land and spend hundreds of dollars just for the experience. Similarly, Hard Rock Café is a theme restaurant where people do not go to dine but to gather ‘memorable’ experiences.

In the experience economy, a place may be developed using infrastructure and props to enhance certain kinds of experiences. It is staged. People enter an experience zone having certain expectations. The developers have to ensure that these expectations of the guests are fulfilled and they get their money’s worth.

In the experience economy, people pay for sensations. The components of experience can be anything and everything under the sun. It depends on human nature and what they wish to experience: physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual. Moreover, as experience is subjective and personal and differs from person to person depending on attitudes, mindsets and culture, people will have different kinds of experience from the same place.