What Makes A Digital First Brand Successful?
I was invited by Hug Digital and Grey Advertising to speak at their new event which is designed to bring the creative, media and comms industries together to foster better mutual understanding and working relationships. Called “The Crunch” as it was an evening brunch for creative and communications professionals, I thought it was a phenomenal idea and I loved the topic for our conversation. We had to create a 10 min talk on Digital First brands…the variety of approaches from the various speakers was amazing and I for one thought the event was fabulous and much needed here in the UAE.
As a result I thought I’d share with you my thoughts and what I spoke about during those 10 mins a few weeks back. So here goes!
I want to start with a bold statement. The Brand is the single most important element to a business or organisation.
Branding is actually a position that has been carefully established over time and multiple touch points within and externally to a business. It’s a set of customer promises and experiences based on communication and service.
Not delivering on these promises and what a brand stands for will lead to failure just ask former mega brands Woolworths, Borders, Blockbuster, Blackberry and Nokia because once you fail to communicate what your offering is, why it’s relevant and then deliver exceptional customer service pre, during and post sales today’s consumer will have no hesitation in finding a company that will give them what they want. Brands that don’t live up to their promises rapidly experience:
1. reduced competitiveness
2. inaccessible products and services — even worse….
3. irrelevant products and services
4. customer confusion and dissatisfaction
In return for their loyalty which provides millions of dollars for savvy businesses customers expect a lot from the companies they buy from and advocate. They expect brands to understand them perfectly. They want personalized brand experiences that are tailored to their every moment.
And digital first brands have the opportunity to give just that — to get down to that person, that place, and that unique moment.
They have the data to serve up relevant content and experiences in a personalized way — essentially wrapping around a person and his/her environment at the perfect point of time. That’s what it’s all about. And when you pair that kind of deep knowledge of audience and what they’re doing with utility + entertainment, you’ve have a very powerful thing indeed.
Historically, brands used to rely heavily on brand marketing and advertising for awareness of their products and services.
But now many brands are born solely online or as an app. In essence, they are screen only experience(s).
Is there a secret sauce that creates GREAT brands fit for the connected person and world in which we live in? The question every brand that wants to be digital first should be asking is, “In today’s busy world, what value does this thing add to a person’s life, right now?” WHAT IS THE BENEFIT/RECIPROCITY that they are getting for their precious attention?
If you analyse most of the great digital first brands + from Amazon to Airbnb, from Uber to Google they all have 1 key element that ties them all together — great digital brands are true utilities.
Once you get into someone’s life and seamlessly integrate into their everyday, that’s when you find success as a digital brand. WeChat for those of you who haven’t heard of it is a powerful combination of Apple + Amazon + Snap + Zuckerberg + potentially Bitcoin all in 1 mobile experience. 60% of users open the app more than 10 times a day, with 1/5 opening WeChat more than 50 times per day.
A testament to a great digital brand is the number of “super users” the brand has acquired, as in the number of people that can’t imagine not using them every day. This moves the brand beyond traditional marketing and advertising, it’s brand awareness, loyalty and value through repetition of usage and word of mouth.
With a billion people using WeChat ‘behind the firewall in China” WeChat is a phenomenal brand entity and it hasn’t even tapped into the older generation there yet. Most people who use WeChat are “super users” of all the experiences it offers, over ½ a billion of those user spend more than 90 minutes a day on the app.
Why? Because WeChat offers everything from free video calls and instant group chats to news updates and easy sharing of large multimedia files. It has a business-oriented chat service akin to Slack. You can use your phone camera to scan the WeChat QR (quick response) codes of people that you meet, replacing the need for business cards. You can shop online, pay for goods at physical stores, settle utility bills and split dinner tabs with friends, just with a few taps. You can easily book and pay for taxis, dumpling deliveries, theatre tickets, hospital appointments and foreign holidays, all without ever leaving the WeChat universe. For an example of how powerful this platform is, WeChatPay alone generated 40% of China’s mobile payment volume as of the first quarter of 2017. Now that’s true utility.
What’s also a smart strategy by Tencent is it’s harder for people to remember who to go back to and why leave now they have what they need in 1 place where everything lives. It’s a crowded space and building brand equity is a big challenge. What TenCent/Wechat have been able to do is build community and loyalty at scale by being ubiquitous and accessible whilst facilitating normal every day HUMAN life.
A successful digital brand needs to work and be compelling screen after screen, frame after frame, pixel after pixel. And the thing is that people don’t look at it for very long. We have very short digital attention spans. Our hands are moving faster than we can even process. It’s a real challenge to stop a user in their tracks, but that’s the goal.
Another smart strategy which is being replicated by the successful players is that WeChat is in a perpetual state of redesign. Think about how often Facebook updates its platform. There’s an opportunity to change things a lot easier when they are happening digitally.
Continually tailoring a brand moment to better fit a person and his/her world. And that’s exciting in a brand world where consumers are at the center of everything. This is because WeChat is seriously commited to their user experience — how many brands do you work with that could say the same? Can we even name any local digital first brands that evolve and adapt at the pace we see from Silicon Valley or China? This is why they fail…..that lack of commitment to UX.
Then there’s also the challenge of balancing how much you push your digital experience into the future. Digital brands always have to be one step ahead. But at the same time, the experiences have to resonate with people. You can’t push too far or not far enough. And what I mean by that is I worked on a voice to text business back in the UK ten years ago. People just weren’t prepared to use voice commands back then to activate their devices. Mainly because smartphones had only just started to really penetrate our consciousness. The application was way ahead of its time and fortunately got bought by Nuance and now powers the infamous Siri.
Digital always looks forward. It never looks back. It doesn’t even stay the same. And it’s not slowing down. It’s a big, growing train, moving forward — full speed. That’s both an inspiring realization and an exciting challenge we have to accept and let fuel our creativity, innovation, and design approaches moving forward. There’s absolutely no doubt that digital experiences are going to become way more powerful over time. That means less paper, fewer stores, more connectivity, more automation, and more machine learning. But I think it’s important to remember that as brands get more advanced and even more connected, they also need to behave more humanly. We see a lot of attempts to humanize the digital customer experience for a reason.
I think a lot of the times when brands fail in the digital space it’s simply about people trying to solve something that never needed solving in the first place — does anyone remember Google Allo? Exactly — one of the worst app ever known. This app was safe, but users didn’t like it! It missed out on the core principle of humanizing the experience + being useful. People, for the most part, don’t want be trapped in a world that feels separated from their own. Brands that forget this I believe will be the brands that fail in the future. To be digitally first is hard enough but you can’t forget there is a person at the end of your brand communication or experience. Remember humans are powered by basic human nature — tap into their need to derive status, they’re influenced by what other humans do, and act in ways that makes us feel better about ourselves.
So to summarise: to be a successful brand in the digital age you have to ensure you follow the golden rules of:
- USEFULNESS — actually help solve a real problem — for me this is Careem here in the UAE — I loathe Uber — I don’t like being charged for a service I have yet to receive and Careem is a fabulous local alternative for me which I feel good about (the human thing) because I’m supporting local business
2. ITERATE — once you’ve built usefulness + are driving WOM + advocacy it’s time to include complementary features + services within the brand experience that ensures that those you’ve fought so hard to attain don’t leave your brand world because they don’t need to to complete things they find necessary to do every day — for me this has WeChat
3. COMMIT TO UX — be utterly and relentlessly focused on the customer experience, ensuring that you’re keeping up with the pace of evolution but not outpacing the comfort level of your customers for me this is Instagram — I currently connect Instagram
4. REMEMBER AS A BRAND YOU NEED TO RESONATE WITH HUMANS — you aren’t the machine, the machines should enhance experiences but not replace the need to address basic human desires for: status, Whatsapp.
So what you do you think a brand needs to do to be a digital first brand? Have you come across many in your day to day work? If so please share them with me? What are your favourites and why….
