What Is Brand Success

Brand success—to put it bluntly—means connecting to consumers and a lifestyle that is always on. But in order to truly understand what significance this has, let’s first take a look at what makes up a brand.

Outside influences and personal values, geography, and culture all influence how a consumer feels about a company and its product or services. After all, a brand is simply a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer.

In today’s world, there is no such thing as offline. Today’s consumer is always on, always connected, consistently using a combination of mobile phone interaction, consumer-generated media, at-work computing, and at-home entertainment and learning in a manner that never takes the consumer offline. This, in turn, gives marketers many opportunities to mold and shape the perceptions of their brands. Consumers need a great brand experience, where every interaction provides the experience and not just the product or service they are purchasing. So, providing our consumer the consistent brand experience they need and demand becomes our key to success.

So what’s the best way to fuel this experience? One word: integration. integration becomes so important within this environment, for even non-digital executions (magazine ads or retail displays or posters) can meet consumers while they are online with their mobile phones or iPads. Connecting these traditional experiences to a digital experience is every brand’s opportunity to create a synergized, complete effort to push consumers to the point of sale on all fronts.

This connected, consistent brand experience among several communication mediums creates opportunities and expectations for consumers, who rarely delineate between the messages they receive at work, at home, at play, in retail stores, online and within their communities. True integration, then, becomes a marriage of medium and lifestyle. This results in a participatory brand experience (as opposed to an interruptive one), where the brand becomes an influential force in helping the consumer realize their lifestyle aspirations.

When a brand is a participant in the consumer’s lifestyle, marketers may rise above choice. The consumer no longer makes a conscious decision to use the brand—the brand simply becomes a part of the consumer’s life. And that, my friends, is true brand success.