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Why brands should reset their strategies to meet future challengeS
NatWest CMO Margaret Jobling told the Festival of Marketing that brands should always make time to review their marketing activity and refresh their approach, especially with consumer attitudes changing so quickly today.
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More than once, we’ve all felt the need to just stop the treadmill, get off, take stock and start afresh. Sadly there’s just no stopping the business juggernaut, certainly not in a way that wouldn’t immediately allow competitors to fill the vacuum. But that doesn’t mean brands can’t still take the time to assess their position – review, diagnose and reset – for an effectiveness boost.
At the Festival of Marketing (FoM), NatWest CMO Margaret Jobling told delegates that taking the time to do a comprehensive brand audit isn’t just a good idea, it is essential to the future health of any business. She was speaking on a panel alongside Salesforce’s vice-president of marketing for the UK and Ireland, Jo Pettifer.
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Moderating the panel, Marketing Week and FoM editor-in-chief Russell Parsons asked Jobling how she and her team went about stripping back the brand to understand what it stands for, preparing for the retail bank’s brand refresh in the form of ‘Tomorrow Begins Today’. This involved analysing its performance through market share, brand health and its level of differentiation. Her team drew up a ‘market map’ to understand how NatWest fits into the market and what its customers’ needs are. It led the brand to discover how its core target segments had shifted over time and where it was now losing share.
Jobling was at pains to point out that this was more than a surface review. This particular project looked back through five years of brand activity at the bank. On being asked by Parsons if this was a typical timeframe, Jobling revealed this was probably more a minimum: “I’d go as far out as 10 years to get a really good understanding of what’s happened over time. You can get locked into short-term thinking.”
Pettifer added that to understand what a brand means in the current environment, marketers need “to define what’s important, to track that, to measure it” and this starts with having “a holistic view across the [customer] experience”. This is “not about volume any more, it’s about engagement”, she added.
Salesforce's Jo Pettifer on how to gain insights from data that enable better decisions
Jobling said that the last 12 months have really shone a light on what the somewhat amorphous concept of brand purpose really means, and how that is folded into core brand metrics. “We still need to be looking at how many people are aware of you, how many people consider you. But increasingly you need to measure customer experience. What are you doing that meaningfully helps customers. We’re moving beyond the standard toolkits of brand management.” She added that marketers need to ask of their brands: “What are you doing for the greater good?”
Pettifer agreed, adding: “It’s not good enough any more just to have great products and services, you have to build that emotional connection with the brand, and that’s about building trust and values.”
This means getting closer to the customer, she continued. “Bring that personalisation, bring that brand to life, make that emotional connection. There’s a lot we can do as marketers, particularly when, in a digital-first approach, trying to differentiate your brand is really hard. That customer experience is more important than ever.”
Personalisation clearly means data plays a crucial role and, while this is an opportunity, it is often also one of the biggest pitfalls marketers face. “Data is an enabler. It’s not in and of itself the answer.” She added that “the devil is in the detail” and “really understanding what inputs are driving outputs” is key.
Both Pettifer and Jobling noted that market research also needs a fresh look. It has the possibly unique potential to discover the emotional triggers that help companies not just personalise but build empathetic connections – those connections that are so important to customer experience and better lifetime value. Jobling would like to see the sector as a whole making more use of artificial intelligence and technology to boost market research’s contribution to the data and insight canon.
Ultimately, Jobling concluded, being able to step outside your own sphere of experience and understand your customers as they really are is at the heart of building brand connections. “It’s the death of any marketer to think that they’re the core target of their own brand,” she concluded. “You need to get texture. You don’t get emotion from a dashboard. Get close and remove the layers between you and the person. You have to stay curious.” ■
THE HIGHLIGHTS
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