✨ Simple Brands
🤖 Content Shock
📢 Brand Relevance
✨ Simple Brands
In a noisy world, simple brands win.
Simple brands make life simple. They cut through the clutter by delivering what customers want, when they want it, without hassle. More importantly, they communicate it.
You know exactly what simple brands deliver because they tell you!
The first Principle of my book, Sticky Branding, is Simple Clarity. Simple Clarity is the ability to describe your brand and what makes it unique simply and succinctly — ideally in ten words or less.
Simplicity strengthens a brand in measurable ways. According to the Global Brand Simplicity Index:
- 63% of consumers are willing to pay more for a simpler experience.
- 69% are more likely to refer a brand that proves a simpler experience.
As people, we gravitate towards things that are simpler and easier to understand. This doesn't necessarily shape all of our decisions, but it does effect them.
This means your brand positioning and brand messaging are more important than ever. Companies that are clear, bold and deliberate in what they do stand out, and customers love them for it.
Discover how to create simple, effective brand messaging in our upcoming course on Maven. It's a 2 week course starting June 17.
🤖 Content Shock
Every week companies are creating more marketing content, and much of it is very good. They blog, podcast, and participate in social media. They create and they share, but does anyone care?
Creating content can be a lonely road. You put good stuff out into the world, but you don’t get a lot of feedback.
90% of internet users happily consume in silence. But the scarier fact is your content might not even be seen by your intended audience! 😱
According to a research report by Moz, 50% of articles published have no likes, shares, comments, and probably no views.
It’s easy to say things like, “Good content rises to the top.” But it doesn’t!
Even before the advent of generative AI, consumers were experiencing “Content Shock.” There was more digital content being produced every day then there are human hours available to consume it. With AI, we are creating more content in a week than we can consume in a life time.
This leads to the ultimate question: How do you stand out in a noisy world? The answer is your brand.
Instead of pumping out one more social media post, look forward and reframe your value proposition:
- Who needs my company and its expertise the most right now?
- What products or services can we deliver to solve real problems that are valued?
- How can we proactively sell and deliver our services to the people who need them most?
In a world of noise, focus on the customers that truly need your services. You build your brand doing great work for your customers, not feeding the social media content beast.
📢 Brand Relevance
Brands have a shelf life — typically 3 to 7 years depending on the industry.
For example, the software industry changes a lot faster and more frequently than the construction industry. Irregardless of the pace of an industry’s change, all brands need regular maintenance to remain relevant.
You can see the aging process every time you redo your website.
Typically a corporate website needs to be overhauled every four years. It starts looking tired in the third year, and dilapidated in the fourth.
The challenge with an out of date website is it’s just the tip of your brand’s problems. It’s a little like a home renovation. You start with your kitchen, and soon your renovating the whole house.
To maintain brand relevance, shift your approach to branding.
Instead of treating branding as an event, invest in it as a process. Small incremental changes to your website, value proposition, marketing assets, and strategies on a regular cadence will keep it relevant and top of mind — while avoiding expensive rebrands!
🤔 Thoughts on Today’s Issue?
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