
Brand essence seems to have gone out of fashion. It feels like it’s been replaced and even upstaged by the ever-popular brand purpose. But brand essence is a powerful brand asset that shouldn’t be overlooked. This post shows why brand essence has the potential to help you scale your brands in existing markets and beyond.

While we spend our days at Emirates NBD trying to make our customers’ lives easier, marketing is becoming anything but. Caught between revenues that are hard to find, elusive budgets and ever more demanding customer expectations, the rules of the game refuse to sit still. Furthermore, brands are competing harder than ever to be heard, understood and loved by their audiences.

Brands operate at a perceptive level. They create appeal, draw customers in, generate demand and plant expectations in customers’ minds that are largely driven through the promises made by the brand. The purpose of customer experience management is to make sure the organization can deliver on that promise.

To successfully integrate digital channels into the overall brand experience, marketers need to understand which channels and what type of content perform. According to a McKinsey (2014) report, 7 over the next five years, digital advertising will be the fastest-growing advertising segment, with projected compound annual increases to 2018 of 15.1 per cent, compared with 5 per cent for TV (including advertising, out-of-home advertising and cinema).

When the Chief Marketing Officer mentions brand values in the boardroom they can be treated with disdain. Eyes roll. Disparaging glances are passed. Brand marketing mumbo jumbo. Nothing could be further from the truth. Brand values are important. They are powerful brand assets. This post explains why.

A surprising number of brands have values that are about as useful as a chocolate fireguard. Seriously. They do. Unfortunately, this only becomes apparent when brands try to bring their values to life via the experiences they want to build. Things grind to a halt because their brand values simply don’t work. All is not lost. Executives that do a good job of creating great brand values articulate values that are unique, specific, active, deliberate and balanced. This post will show you how to do the same.

This post shares five ways you can get the c-suite on your side when selling the brand experience business case into them. Outlining how brand experiences drive performance, enhance happiness, facilitate differentiation, guide omnichannel strategy and help people connect are outlined ways of doing this.