By M. Isi Eromosele

Brands are fundamental to competitive business advantage in the marketplace.

Businesses who leverage brands most effectively are better positioned to drive choice, create loyalty, and command a premium. It is imperative that companies use digital strategy as part of brand strategy, thus maximizing the value to the business and ROI from digital engagement.

The second decade of the 21st century promises to be even faster, more interconnected and more transparent than the first. Today, digital strategy is part of many company’s arsenal, pretty much ubiquitous. However, just because a company has a digital strategy does not mean they’re getting good ROI.

The best way to close that gap and reap the full rewards is to think beyond digital. When it comes to brand strength, we are no longer in a digital era because digital is now integrated into our daily lives.

Today, customers are living in a seamless hybrid world where online and offline experiences are entwined and a continuum of devices interacts both with each other and with users’ “offline” daily world. Because this is the experience your audiences are having with your brand, this is the starting point for how to think about digital.

Defining The Challenge

To underline the vast room for improvement, 56 percent of digitally active companies do not have a social media policy. This is significant.

39 percent of companies involved with social media are operating without a social media policy. It’s akin to discovering that a statistically significant proportion of the driving population has never learned to drive and is going on instinct.

Brand Strength

In this post digital age, there are 10 components of Internal and External brand strength that fosters full ROI returns.

Internal

Clarity

Clarity internally about what the brand stands for in terms of its values, positioning and proposition. Clarity about target audiences, customer insights and drivers.

Commitment

Internal commitment to the brand and a belief in the importance of the brand. The extent to which the brand receives support in terms of time, influence and investment.

Protection

How secure the brand is across a number of dimensions: legal protection, proprietary ingredients or design, scale or geographical spread.

Responsiveness

The ability to respond to market changes, challenges and opportunities. The brand should have a sense of leadership internally and a desire and ability to constantly evolve and

renew itself.

External

Authenticity

The brand is soundly based on an internal truth and capability. It has a defined heritage and a well grounded value set. It can deliver against the high expectations that customers have of it.

Relevance

The fit with customer needs, desires, and decision criteria across all relevant demographics and geographies and shared across the organization.

Differentiation

The degree to which customers perceive the brand to have a differentiated positioning distinctive from the competition.

Consistency

The degree to which a brand is experienced without fail across all touch-points or formats.

Presence

The degree to which a brand feels omnipresent and is talked about positively by consumers, customers and opinion formers in both traditional and social media.

Understanding

The brand is not only recognized by customers, but there is also an in-depth knowledge and understanding of its distinctive qualities and characteristics.

Focusing On Fundamentals

The most critical measurement of a brand is its value, and that can be gauged by measuring its Brand Strength.

Strong brands start with four internal success factors, and that strength is reflected in the six external brand strength factors. Taken together, they help tell us if an organization is primed for success.

The following are the four critical success factors.

Commitment

Many companies are falling short in how well they are committed to applying social and digital media to their global strategy. Despite a high rate of social media activity, essentially half of companies do not have a dedicated social media group.

As for internal brand engagement, a full 36 percent of companies are not adequately investing in employee education on their digital strategy, perhaps the most troubling lack of commitment of all in that it speaks to a failure to imbue their personnel with what they need to be effective brand representatives of their organization.

Differentiation

Differentiation is one of the most powerful attributes a brand can possess in the fight for consumer attention and loyalty. According to a recent survey, only 13 percent of companies audit their competitors continuously.

It is difficult to imagine how a brand would be able to assess its distinctiveness when so little time is invested in studying its competition.

Relevance

On relevance, too, opportunities are being missed. More than a quarter of those surveyed are not soliciting customer feedback to inform their thinking on appropriate digital experiences. And even more, 46 percent are not mining publicly available data for these purposes.

Consistency

It would help if there seemed to be more consistency and forethought in framing digital endeavors as part of a coherent business strategy. But a patchwork approach still rules the day for many.

A large percentage of digitally active companies have their digital strategy decisions made in a fragmented or decentralized environment, with each touch-point or product’s digital strategy being managed separately.

This silo effect hampers efficiency and curtails alignment with overarching business strategies. Clearly more harmonization is needed.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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