Let's kick back and be ourselves.
Living Brands Versus Locked Brands
The world of marketing changed at the turn of the 21st century. Thanks to the internet, it was now possible to use mountains of data to drive decisions within agencies. The quick and adaptable messaging shown in campaigns taught us how to mold our own work to the new digital world. We implemented dynamic planning and responsive creative content to digital campaigns, applying them to overall branding principles. We call this thinking a Living Brand.
A Living Brand is a flexible brand. Your brand has to adapt to the realities that impose themselves. If it doesn’t, customers won’t engage and they won’t tell you what they want. And they just might move on completely.
Just as important, think about the role your brand plays in peoples’ lives, and what truly interests your customer. You can’t approach a brand as pre-packaged, as if everyone is going to respond the same way. We can’t control the variables or the marketplace, but we can control how the brand reacts—or if it reacts at all.
A brand is a living entity. It is cumulatively enriched, or undermined, over time, and is the product of a thousand small gestures. There is no one way to interact with every brand, because there is no one set way to how the marketplace operates. Marketing is a very different world than it was 20 years ago, and if you bring old tools to the new fight you risk your brand becoming stale.
Rigid brand "standards" will go out of date. You need a brand that can adjust and morph itself while maintaining enough consistency to have the power of effectiveness and efficiency. We call that "continuity." Why allow your brand to stay static while the market changes daily?
When you think about a brand as "living," it determines how you will respond when change comes.