By Suresh Dinakaran Brands are like people. Social, Emotional, Foolish and Smart. With a compelling need for appreciation, attention, being prone to tiredness, fatigue, despondency, disillusionment, aging, lethargy, lack of motivation, energy, the parallel to human traits is incredible. So can the treatment and the way we look after brands be any different? Can we give brand marketing a human touch? IDEAS.STRATEGY.DESIGN Global (ISD Global) has created a methodology what they call is BEST for brands. The acronym BEST expands to Brand Energy Stimulation Treatment. Often times what we have noticed is that being in the rat race to be omnipresent, dominant and profitable, brands tend to ignore the finer nuances of continuing to evolve and stay up to to speed of audience preferences. Look around and you will see a number of them having missed the wood for the trees. Sony, Microsoft, Nokia are some classic examples- though they do retain their iconic status to a reasonable level, they seem to have taken customers for granted not that the likes of Google, Samsung, LG etc are complaining. In an eco system where one needs to sprinting to be standing at the same place, looking back and masquerading in past glory was certainly not the route to take.But, alas, it was not to be! So what is BEST actually? BEST is like a Spa treatment for brands. Its oxygenating brands, either in the form of a comprehensive cleanse up act or subtle tweaks to the brand personality to bring it back fresh and rejuvenated in front of customers. Make it feel wanted, more desirable. Call it Its sending out a signal both internally and externally that 'we care for our customers as much as we care for ourselves'. Its drawing upon universal scientifically proven energy stimulation methodologies and applying that to the brand domain. So a lot of what we speak about for BEST will also have to do with brand colours, identity shapes, position of sign ages, materials used for communication etc. Why the need for BEST? We are in an environment that ironically straddles both deficit and surplus- deficit of trust, deficit of time, deficit of buying power and a surplus of products, surplus of expectations, a surplus of irrational exuberance, a surplus of disloyalty. Given such a scenario, brands need to remain on a state of high alert and give customers the love and respect it expects. Looking inward, introspecting is â€sine qua non†in Latin which means (Absolutely essential or indispensable) for brands, a need of the times. In a 4G dominant, always on, always connected era, what is relevant in the morning seem to be obsolete by the same evening- the vagaries and the power of the social media system makes the transfer of power from the brands to the consumers, all pervasive, all encompassing, inescapable. Brands are watched, talked about, consumed, revered or trashed, every moment of the day and a live feed is available in real time all across for those who care.There are learning and there are leanings, there are feelings and there are failings and the cloak of opaqueness has vanished into thin air. So all those who come on board the isotonic brandwagon and stay energised, connected and wanted, we say Welcome Aboard. And to the rest, all the BEST.
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