Mean people sucking was my attempt to convey that empathy is more vital than we realize. It should be more than just a tool or an asset.
Empathy can improve our relationships with others and help us to understand them better. Compassion can inspire others to connect with you.
This is crucial to understand how to work in a customer-centric environment. It’s a two-way road. In many ways, brands reflect the consumer what they have given.
This is more apparent in marketing than in the phenomenon of meaningful brands. People respond positively to brands that operate from a place of meaning and communicate a purpose-driven message.
My book is a discussion of the most recent research on meaningful brands and what it means for one to be one. These brands are more successful than others by more than 200 percent. Your brand can be more than just a profit-making machine. It can also help you hold a valuable place in society by coming from a place where empathy is crucial. This is why brands such as Nike, Patagonia, and Dove are so popular and successful.
What does it take for a brand to be meaningful? What difference does it make to be influential?
What are Meaningful Brands?
Meaningful brands strive to build a deeper connection with their customers. You can do this by providing value-driven content.
Through initiatives that help society or for supporting a cause. It doesn’t matter if the organization has a meaningful purpose. This purpose is communicated to the consumer via messaging and actions.
It is essential to place the customer at the center of everything you do. Customers-centric brands are more likely to trust their customers, innovate their products and services in ways that offer real value to people, and foster stronger customer relationships.
We can take power empathy beyond a tool for relating to customers and employees to understanding how a brand is related to the society in which it lives. This makes us meaningful brands that are customer-focused.
The Havas Group, who helped invent the term “meaningful brands” with its annual Meaningful Brands Study, says that meaningful brands “inspire meaningful relationships between people and brands to produce business results.
Is it essential to be meaningful?
Companies that prioritize meaningful relationships are more successful. This holds across industries and year after year.
The most meaningful brands have a 24-point lead over the least relevant brands in purchase intent, a 41-point advantage on repurchase intention, and a 39 percent advantage regarding customer advocacy.
These brands are more appealing to consumers because they can charge premium prices.
Only 18% of the less meaningful brands successfully use premium pricing, while forty percent of those who are meaningful use it.
This purpose-driven approach drives sales and makes it possible to replace your brand. It’s like this: If a brand has a great product, but no story, no values, and no reason to engage with content, what will it make if you purchase a product from brand A, Z, or vice versa?
Look at Nike, which offers training apps and a digital community that supports sports at the local level and creates some of the most inspiring content on the planet. Without Nike, the world would be different.
Would anyone notice if your company went out of business and its effects were wiped off the surface of the earth?
Similar research on meaningful brands found that 77% of consumers would not care if we used the same products regularly.
Disappeared. This speaks volumes about the customer-brand relationship. It also shows how important it is for brands to build a natural bond with customers. Your brand cannot empathize with a cause, customer, or the entire world. If that happens, customers won’t form those bonds, and your company is meaningless.
What can brands do to mean something?
An organization can take many steps to make its brand more memorable. Asking the right questions is critical to making your organization a more meaningful brand.
As I explain in Mean People Suck, if your goal is to make an impression rather than making a sale, you need to figure out the following:
How can we build a stronger connection with our customers through branding?
How can we connect to our values and reach new audiences better?
What does it take to create a memorable brand experience for customers?
The third question is the most important. It would help if you thought about your customer’s priorities. It’s possible to start a project for your pet or a program of social responsibility to demonstrate your company’s values. Still, it won’t make much difference if your target audience doesn’t connect with it.
Continue to research your current audience and new markets. Find out what is essential to your customers and prospects. Then, talk to them. Using social media and customer support channels, you can keep up with what is necessary for your customers and prospects.
Finally, remember your brand values and create experiences that reflect them. This consistency will build customer loyalty.