When rapid and disruptive change occurs, marketers are handed an extraordinary moment to align themselves with percolating consumer needs when the openness to engagement is fresh. This relevance breakthrough is happening right now — and is unleashed when brands work to fill the fractures in consumer confidence with empathetic support.
Underscoring this opportunity is one of the most significant universal marketing insights we have about consumer behavior. There is an all-encompassing human desire for certainty that helps manage a predominant desire to avoid risk. Due to accelerating cultural upheaval, what’s largely gone missing? Certainty. People have experienced far too much existential disruption over a short period of time to effectively process it all.
This article is part of Branding Strategy Insider’s newsletter. You can sign up here to get thought pieces like this sent to your inbox.
Consequently, we’re seeing a smoldering insecurity over career prospects, economic well-being, relationship integrity/purpose, the impacts of public dysphoria on societal shifts, and uncomfortable questioning of long-held values and belief systems. Your business is operating in a truly transformative moment.
- In sum, people are feeling unmoored and unanchored, having lost a tether to what they thought they had always known, understood, and believed about the world around them. The result is a growing unease that can’t help but impact consumer attitudes and decision-making.
What consumers want: empowerment over the constant churn and challenges to their beliefs and rampant uncertainty about what’s coming next. Restoration of control. Power over chaos. Importantly, these developments may challenge your current outreach strategies due to changes in customer preferences, values, priorities, and their sense of self.
What your customer hungers for —
Restoration of perceived control over their lives and wellbeing.
What your brand can do —
Help them acquire a sense of confidence and certainty.
More specifically, we’re forecasting a hockey stick surge in consumer longing for truth, trust, stability, authenticity, and emotional wellbeing. Consumers want to renew their sense of authorship in their lives. Can your brand step up to help them?
Or will AI become a default option to fill the vacuum?
The historical network and ‘village’ of human relationships that have traditionally guided people have loosened and diminished amid an intensified search for credible advice. In a nutshell, consumers seek counsel, guidance, and coaching as they search for reliable direction and coherent opinions. AI overreach could potentially assume the role of a readily accessible oracle that isn’t human, yet remarkably sounds like it. Even though this is undeniably a machine, AI is imbued with an uncanny, calibrated ability to appear empathetic to our needs, even though we also understand it periodically hallucinates by dispensing false information in a confident voice.
Meanwhile, AI crawlers are scanning your brand content, stories, opinions of others, and relevant conversations.
Unlike traditional search, the emergence of AI-curated brand information is noteworthy in that it serves up answers, recommendations, and narratives, not just links. Your question: what has it learned and what will it say? Who is in charge here? That means brands need to monitor LLM bots and seed the web with consistent facts and brand citations across multiple sites, to help ensure AI search engines “learn” from your designated narrative.
Who is telling the story?
The currency of truth and authenticity could not be higher. Example: Credible, independent journalism isn’t just good ethics; it’s becoming a market advantage. When AI starts to sound like looped brochureware while the consumer seeks truth, the premium accelerates for outside credible third-party evaluation of what brands would like people to believe.
Yes, there’s a significant amount of infotainment masquerading as reporting. But real journalism hasn’t disappeared. The fractionalized media environment requires a strategic approach and audience segmentation to design the right plan to reach the true gatekeepers who can convey a credible, well-researched story. It’s incumbent on us to provide the verifiable research and trusted sources that verify the assertions brands make.
- Our validation marketing model may have been ahead of the curve when we first created it. Now it appears to be nearly prophetic in an environment where credibility and certainty start to merge. Credible, expert third-party voices can help validate your story.
Your brand naturally aspires to own some real estate in the consumers’ brains. To secure that special position, a relevant and trusted connection is necessary.
This changes the importance of –
- Trivial vs. deep communication
- Informing vs. convincing
- Awareness vs. real connection
At a moment of consumer need when certainty has evaporated, you are faced with an opportunity to inspire and guide them. In doing so, you enhance your brand’s emotional equity and value as an unselfish and valued resource. People sense when their welfare is the priority, more so than the expected self-interest of a sales and profit imperative.
The four constructs of effective brand communication should be prioritized in your communications game plan to meet the consumer where they are in this complex moment.
Inspiration – creative, spiritual, emotional
Education – learning, growth, new skills
Information – news, research, reports, guides
Connection – tribal conversations, sharing, community
Control panels designed to serve up, well, control…
Are you building dashboards that provide the consumer with choices and customization to curate their learning? This is as much psychological as it is tangible. I’m seeing a proliferation of control panels in parenting, health, dating, pet care, and emotional welfare for the very reason people want to exercise choice and more command over meaningful parts of their lives.
The good news – you have their attention. No need to chase them to gain their eyes and ears. There’s a real need here. It matters. You can help them and earn a valued role in their lives while doing it. It’s not every day that the world turns in such a way that it opens these kinds of engagement doors.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.
At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth, and Brand Education
FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers
Post Views: 0