Is your brand failing to truly connect with your consumers?
Brand activation is often confused with more traditional marketing or campaign efforts and its impact is underestimated, which creates a clear gap between marketing ambitions and results as brand initiatives fail to connect with consumers and successfully convert. In this article I uncover why brand activation is important, why marketers fail to activate their brands, and what we at Mano believe are the vital ingredients to close the gap by securing an activation-driven mindset.
By Thomas Sonberg, COO, Mano.
Photo: Unsplash
Brand activation is not just an event or series of events
Where branding defines the ongoing process of creating and maintaining awareness for your brand, we refer to brand activation as a specific marketing or campaign initiative, or a series of initiatives, with the purpose of enabling consumers to engage directly with a brand through immersive digital or physical experiences.
So, unlike what a lot of people appear to believe, brand activation is not just an event or series of events. While brand activation can involve an event, its ultimate objective is to make a brand loved by consumers through brand experiences that make them feel a genuine and personal connection to the brand, thus leading to increased brand relevance and impact.
In a time where brand experience and perception are such important factors to a brand’s success, brand activation is a crucial driver in creating a measurable difference for consumers when they decide between different brands. By complementing ongoing branding initiatives, brand activation can help to meet a brand’s ambitions, and really should be an integrated part of any marketing and campaign strategy.
Marketers fail to successfully activate their brand
By working with brands and marketers around the world and across industries we have experienced first-hand the challenges and pitfalls they share when it comes to the foundational requirements for successful brand activation:
Brand activation gets insufficient attention: Limited priority is put into activating the brand concept and big creative idea in a way that truly connect with today’s consumers, who demand that brands share their passion and engage with them. This happens despite the fact that budgets spent on brand activation - by far - make up the largest part of the marketing and campaign investment
Disconnect between overarching brand concepts and activation: Brand and activation teams (if such exists) work in silos and lack the necessary collaboration model, process, tools and clear roles and responsibilities to close the gap between them and empower integrated marketing and campaign efforts with a shared business brief, and set of objectives and measurable KPIs
Very short window for brand activation planning: Most of the development time for a given marketing or campaign effort is spent on the creation of an overarching brand concept and big creative idea. This leaves little time for careful brand activation planning and implementation, and involvement of any external stakeholders and local market teams, leading to compromised results
Lack of brand activation-centric consumer insight: Little to no focus is put into ensuring that the consumer insight the brand concept and big creative idea are built upon has the depth and cultural relevance to not only create awareness for the marketing or campaign effort, but also provide a platform that encourages and stimulates ongoing consumer interaction and experiences, and ensures true impact
Photo: Unsplash
Core ingredients to grow a brand activation-centric mindset
To gear-shift your marketing team and address the above pitfalls by injecting a brand activation-centric mindset, we believe you need the following things in place:
Seed and establish the need for a brand activation strategy: Ensure the necessary internal discussions take place to create alignment behind the need to activate today’s critical and fickle consumers, and support the argument with relevant consumer insight studies and brand activation case studies
Break team silos and create a collaborative planning process: Define a shared brief and set of objectives and KPIs across the overarching brand concept and activation concept, which creates a guiding star for strategic and creative development and enables and empowers the brand activation concept to be developed in parallel with the brand concept to increase consumer engagement. To do so successfully, it is vital that a collaborative cross-discipline team is established and ensures frequent integration updates and workshops to ensure the two teams can act in concert with each other
Ensure relevant consumer insight is at the root of brand activation: Define insight that can connect the marketing or campaign effort with the consumers in a relevant and engaging manner and conduct additional consumer analysis if the foundational consumer insight is deemed insufficient to truly activate consumers emotionally. Keep in mind that connecting with consumers’ passions has the potential for a much stronger and lasting emotional connection than asking consumers to connect with a brand’s passion…
Define a brand activation strategy framework: Define a tried and tested brand activation strategy framework if brand activation is an ongoing part of marketing or campaign efforts as this provides a consistent and familiar methodology to build stakeholder alignment and confidence and accelerate collaboration and development time. Such a framework can include templates for a definition of the collaborative cross-discipline team, an integrated brief, core brand activation principles, phasing, roadmaps, consumer journey etc.
Integrate brand and activation channel usage: Activate and connect multiple activation channels across both traditional brand communication channels and brand activation channels, because integrated marketing or campaign efforts using multiple communications channels at the same time are 57% more effective than non-integrated communications (Kantar) and improve consumers’ purchase intent by 90% (IAB)
Review brand activation relevance during go-to-market planning phase: Revisit identified consumer insights and review the brand activation strategy again and again during the go-to-market planning phase to avoid compromise and dilution of impact when it comes to channel selection, messaging, and usage, as well as any specific requirements for local market-fit. Too often insight and strategy are forgotten or disregarded when a marketing or campaign initiative reaches the go-to-market planning phase
Measure brand activation impact and share success: Make sure to measure the state of relevant brand measurements before and after any brand activation to create the necessary foundation to identify its impact over time, no matter the type of brand activation and defined objective. Once the incremental value is clear and obvious, turn it into a case study for internal recognition and continued support
By establishing a brand activation-centric mindset, activation strategy becomes a much needed and vital ingredient in your marketing and campaign playbook. Unfortunately, many brands claim to have a brand strategy, a creative strategy, a communication strategy, but rarely a brand activation strategy. Consequently, brand ambitions may be clearly defined, but the strategy of how you activate your brand to meet those ambitions is disregarded and becomes an afterthought - and may even be the responsibility of an entirely different team.
Contact us to learn how Mano can help you to approach your brand activations with the right mindset!
About the author.
Thomas Sonberg is the COO of Mano. Finding his passion for brand activation at a global brand activation agency in Copenhagen, Thomas has worked with brand activation throughout his career and led integrated multi-discipline campaign development processes around the world for some of the most recognized global brands such as Adidas, Coca-Cola, Heineken, McDonald’s, Nokia, and Volkswagen.
