What influences people’s decisions to buy from a brand in 2024, how much has our trust shifted, become more circumspect? I ask this as AI’s ubiquitous influence is felt by us all.
That adage about not being complacent? Be so at your peril.
Every industry event (tech) I attended last year addressed AI in various conversations. Attitudes towards it vary, mainly in the positive in my experience but we must be serious about safety and ethics and being responsible. How can we trust if we don’t feel safe, or if we’re not included in conversations that inform the data that is used to influence decision making.
If we don’t know what people think of our brand, we are disadvantaged.
You can have the best product in the world but, if no one knows about it, you have nothing.
Arnold Schwarzenegger from his book ‘Be Useful’.
We buy from brand names we know and trust and through the recommendations and referrals made by people we know and trust. The more we know about a company, or individual, the clearer the mental image we develop of it. If it resonates or is relatable, we are more inclined to buy the company’s products and services.
Today I read that there are 11,492 active managed service providers in the UK and the sector employs an estimated 294,340 full-time employees. It made me think that these MSPs will need to be smart with managing their brands’ reputations to stand out in this crowded space.
If you’re not being cited on certain topics, it’s all a bit pointless …
Finola Sloyan
Brands used to be bought for three main reasons:
- Functional benefits (because it will do the job).
- Psychic value (because it says something about the kind of person I am).
- Investment value (it must be a good investment).
Some brands are successful because people love them and can’t get enough of them. Other brands fail because people simply don’t want them. They mean nothing to anybody.
There are still brands around, even very big ones, where function dominates. Visa, unusually for a brand these days, is more about function than symbolism
Visa is so impalpable that it’s a kind of wraith. It seems to have no provenance: it’s quite as much at home in Turkey as in Thailand. It takes on the protective coloring of those financial service organizations with which it’s associated. It is one of those comparatively rare brands that has virtually no personality and no socio-economic implications. And yet Visa, colorless though it is, is also one of those few brands that is now indispensable: we couldn’t manage life with it.
Why Brands Are Important to Customers – Wally Olins
Like many brands, Visa has global reach. National boundaries mean nothing to such brands: they turn up in the strangest places, where they sometimes have curious solical and sociological implications. Rich people in East Africa who drive Mercedes cars are called WaBenzi – members of the Mercedes Benz tribe.
Personal choices and emotional connections
Brands that are winning are building empathy and trust with consumers and stakeholders; creating conversations that are relevant; speaking honestly about the issues of the day; being able to see the world as our audience sees it. Increasingly these campaigns have PR at their heart.
I have an emotional connection to brands that embrace purpose and sustainability. I choose to buy from a company using sustainable packaging and my preference is to buy clothes made locally, where I can be sure about labor laws and ethical standards. I am drawn to people that beat the drum for women being “at the table” when organizations are designing, developing and testing AI – how else can we hope for the data to be accurate?
AI will require new leadership that combines change management, empathy and technology in an incredibly interesting way.
Sandy Carter
Disappointment at a celeb I’d once admired
When George Clooney, the face of the Nespresso brand and on its sustainability team, was linked to child labour farms in Guatemala, he claimed he was “surprised and saddened”. Why didn’t he check the farms the coffee was being grown on, why? It changed my opinion of him.
Opinions towards your brand need to be monitored and Frank Jefkins believed there were four main attitudes:
Hostility: it’s the PR job to try to inform as much as possible so that they gain an understanding of what happened, how the company dealt with the situation and how it implemented changes which would prevent the same thing from every happening again. Objective: Sympathy.
Prejudice, so difficult to overcome because very few people understand why they are prejudiced against a person or a company or a brand. If, by giving people the information they need, you can convert their predudice to acceptance, you have gone a long way down the road. Objective: Acceptance in you, your brand
Brand apathy – this is the hardest attitude to deal with because people have no interest in a subject they see as unrelated or irrelevant to them. People’s mindsets change when change is embraced. The value of hearing someone with something to say to his\her community is not only good for personal brand, it boosts the reputation of a company because we are hearing the voices of our people. And that is powerful. Objective: Interest in your brand.
Brand ignorance – When people don’t know anything about a company, maybe because of a poor or neglected online presence, they can’t form an opinion and will be very reluctant to buy anything. Converting that ignorance into knowledge places the person in a better position to make a buying decision and to consider our company ahead of the competitor’s. Objective: Knowledge via awareness of brand.
Dealing with images in my dealings with companies.
One is the Mirror Image. Self-delusion. It’s not uncommon and needs to be nipped in the bud!
The Mirror Image is what companies or individuals believe to be true of themselves and it may or may not be true. It’s not that anyone is deliberately trying to mislead, it’s more so that we are deluding ourselves because, perhaps, we are too close to the company’s day-to-day and fall into the trap of believing our own hype.
Being clear about who we are as a brand, and why we do what we do, will help to accurately craft and communicate the right messages, which in turn will help to build brand awareness and trust with those that matter to us and to our bottom line.
Finola Sloyan: Since setting up Sloyan PR in 2015, I am thankful to be working in an industry that plays a crucial role in our work and personal lives, technology. I work with brands to communicate their identity and purpose, and explore how best to become known for their specialisms, highlighting what makes a brand different from its competition.