Remember the days when branding your product or service involved a cowboy, sitting on a horse, wearing a 10-gallon hat and holding a cigarette? Seems like forever ago. Today's savvy consumers demand stimulation through every sense imaginable. Sound, touch, feel and engagement are not only popular concepts for brand management, but necessary ones as well.
It's all about the experience – and today's marketers know it. Successful brand engagement means you are tapping into your consumers' emotions. The concept of audience participation has morphed into a paramount step toward reaching – and keeping – your customers. Simply put, brand engagement is the forming of a bond or a loyalty between a consumer and a brand. And while it's a part of the brand management pie, you can make the case that it's the most important one.
Gabor says a brand exists in a 360-degree space. Consumers should to want to eat, drink, live, smell and further experience a brand in every environment. That one-on-one engagement gives customers the option to interact with a brand and feel it is specific to them.
Kristin Marquet describes brand engagement as the consumer's emotional attachment to a brand, and she says continuous brand engagement is important in developing and maintaining a loyal client base. It requires the use of multiple touchpoints with consumers.
"It's important to have multiple touchpoints that are consistent, because it allows the customer to experience the same messaging and same level of service, from the first encounter to the last," says Marquet, founder and creative director of Creative Development Media.
Look around and you'll see that consumers are getting smarter when it comes to organic, authentic content. More often, audiences are able to discern true content from "fake news." Gabor says the idea is to make your content seem as authentic as possible, and not too overtly salesey.
The role of content marketing in the brand engagement equation is huge. It's about educating and entertaining your customer through compelling content, which strengthens the brand and results in greater customer loyalty.
Assessing the success of audience participation means measuring outtakes versus outcomes. Measuring clicks, views, time spent online, etc. – these are outtakes.
Companies really have to understand what they're trying to measure and what behaviors they're trying to change, assuring the right metrics are in place to match their purpose. "Audience participation is rarely about selling stuff," Gabor says.
Companies often choose the strategy of associating their brands with people who already bond with their target audience. While this tactic can be wildly successful, it also can be a slippery slope.
Sometimes, the person with whom you align your company can be perfectly fine, but the wrong fit for your message. Who doesn't remember Pepsi's 2017 ad, aimed at the "Join the Conversation" movement, with Kendall Jenner as the spokesperson? The company took a lot of immediate criticism as a result of casting Jenner, leaving Pepsi ad execs looking out of touch and tone deaf to the country's racial and gender-related issues.
In the end, you must assure the brand risk is worth the brand engagement reward.