Right now, a large part of society is focused on nothing more than getting through the day. Marketing professionals sometimes forget just how many people are living paycheck to paycheck—millions on or near the minimum wage, for whom “making it to the end of the month” is a genuine struggle rather than a figure of speech.

This financial and emotional erosion leads people to see their simple daily routines—habits once taken for granted—almost as luxuries. Holding on to a routine, once merely a list of “things to do,” has become a real source of gratitude. Seen through a psychological lens, the uncertainty, loss of control, and fear people feel make their “safe” moments more precious. The small, ordinary things done every day have turned into a modest psychological defense—an expression of the search for safety and relief. Think of a prisoner catching a moment of daylight, a new mother going to the mall on her own, or a night-shift worker finally sitting down with a coffee on their one free evening.

A Prolonged Crisis Breeds a Sense of Worthlessness

As this period drags on, however, a sense of worthlessness has begun to spread quickly through society. This inner loss leads people to question their own value. As individuals struggle to make sense of their presence and contribution in the outside world, that deficit deepens the emptiness within. Defined in psychology as “languishing,” this void leaves a person neither clinically depressed nor genuinely well—living an “in-between,” joyless kind of life. Its symptoms show up as stagnation, a lack of motivation, a feeling of aimlessness, and a flattening of emotion. As a consequence of shared societal shocks, this void gives rise to a “collective trauma” that affects not only the individual but the whole of society. The widespread anxiety, uncertainty, and sense of worthlessness push people away from one another, toward loneliness and ever-deeper isolation. And it is far harder to climb out of collective trauma alone. Brands, too, sometimes become part of the problem—papering over the situation with entertainment and turning into what we call Palliative Brands. Instead, a brand should remind people: You’re not alone; I’m in this with you. We all share the same uncertainty, the same anxiety, the same sense of worthlessness.

At this point, society needs to seek not a savior, but a shared effort to make meaning together. Looking for a savior figure can, when the search comes up empty, leave society even lonelier and feeling an even deeper void. Instead, holding on to one another, offering support, and strengthening our social bonds may be the most important steps toward getting through this period.

So how do we climb out of this mood?

The first step must be helping people feel valuable again. This is possible through simple but meaningful acts: knowing ourselves, recognizing our strengths, helping others. Filling those inner voids is not just an individual effort but a collective movement. Creating safe spaces that ease anxiety and uncertainty can bring people together. Filling this emotional void together, and rebuilding hope, may be the key to emerging from this state of mind.

How can brands contribute?

People are searching for new meaning and reassurance to lift themselves out of the mood they are in. In this period, brands can develop meaningful communication that genuinely adds value. When a brand builds campaigns that support social solidarity, inspire trust, and carry positive messages, it can help people feel they are not alone. Brands that are supportive, empathetic, and understanding can form stronger bonds with their audiences during this time. Speaking not only to people’s material needs but to their emotional ones will make brands more valuable through this period of social transformation. Brands cannot be “saviors,” but by touching the mood of society they can play an important role. As people wrestle with inner voids and uncertainty, brands can act as a kind of “guide”—strengthening social bonds by offering meaningful communication and services that reassure, support, and make people feel valued. Thoughtful campaigns, social-responsibility projects, and an empathetic approach can turn brands into a genuine source of encouragement. In the end, by fostering social solidarity, brands can soften the harsher effects of this era and help people feel that they are not alone.

What Society’s Mood Is Telling Brands yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

So how do these negative emotions differ from one another?

Fear is the most powerful of them all—if you can genuinely frighten people—because it is the most primal. When a person is afraid, every other emotion, and even biological needs like hunger and sleep, is suspended for a while. To create fear, the threat has to be identifiable, shown clearly, and paired with the belief that it can be removed. (That last part isn’t always necessary; a person may act simply because they’re afraid and want to avoid harm.)

Interestingly, one of the best marketers of fear is Volvo. And yet we think of Volvo as a “safety” brand, don’t we? That’s because Volvo does it so well that most of its advertising runs on a positive theme. The turning point in the story is what sends fear through the roof. By the end, the thing you remember most is that terrifying possibility.

Look at the photo here. There’s no explicit danger in it, yet the parents among us have already registered that the child is running toward the road—because they’ve lived it many times and carry a vivid memory of that fear. Even though the man is smiling, the woman’s posture and the blurred figure of the child in front create an extraordinary emotional equation. A genuine work of art.

The catch with fear is that it’s a more momentary emotion. A person doesn’t stay afraid for weeks—often not even for a full day. So the brand either has to sit inside a situational fear-and-safety equation, or keep pumping the fear continuously.

We’ve seen a clear example of fear failing to land in the realm of disaster preparedness. In earthquake-prone regions, almost everyone “knows” a major quake is coming, yet very few retrofit their homes or keep an emergency kit ready. The fear is genuinely enormous—and on paper, the remedy exists. But without a recent tremor to reactivate it, and with the “fix” feeling impossibly large (who tears down and rebuilds their house on a hunch?), that fear rarely converts into action. When removing the fear would require something monumental, people simply don’t believe it can be “conveniently” removed—and so they don’t move.

Anti-limescale tablets for washing machines, on the other hand, have to keep reminding you they exist. That’s been their whole game for years: “Skip us and your machine dies.” (Think of the classic Calgon promise.) So what emotion are these brands leaning on now? Why did they trade fear for disgust? We’ll make that clear as we work through the other negative emotions.

Why is anxiety the most useful emotion for brands? Insurance companies, baby products, cleaning products, anything in the health space, and lately the food category are all, in one way or another, born into a state of anxiety.

While fear has a clear object and a more immediate effect, anxiety draws its power from the ambiguity of its object and lasts far longer. Unlike fear, new information in a state of anxiety can make people more anxious rather than calmer (and usually does). Brands are already experienced at manufacturing fears and anxieties that don’t exist. Anxiety is the most useful emotion because the person has to make an effort to remove its source—and, crucially, that removal feels possible. In short: just by choosing the right brand, you can put your anxieties to rest.

The most useful type here is what I’d call “indirect anxiety.” This is when a brand, while saying something positive, quietly evokes a negative one. Think of the Vegan or Gluten-Free products lining the shelves. They send a positive message, yet they plant an anxiety about the whole category.

But sometimes this backfires for the category’s own future. That’s the single reason Coca-Cola deliberately let its Zero line grow: as long as that black can exists, the red one is framed as the sugary, fattening, unhealthy option.

One recent ad that handles anxiety beautifully comes from the diaper category—Pampers-style campaigns that tie the fit of a diaper to how freely a baby learns to move and walk, building on a deeply felt, long-running parental anxiety about the child’s development.

Disgust is largely physical at its root—tied to food and hygiene. Its most basic job is to keep us from eating spoiled food, to protect our bodily balance, and to keep us alive. It still holds an important place in our lives. We smell food to tell whether it’s gone off; when we catch a bad odor, our face scrunches up and we want to get away from—or get rid of—the source. Disgust also keeps us away from things that threaten our personal hygiene.

Over time, this function took on a sociological dimension. Moral values and social norms entered the picture, and we began to feel disgust toward things that aren’t physically “dirty” at all. When someone cuts in line ahead of us, our anger is often laced with disgust. A cheating spouse, a relative caught in a lie, a breach of etiquette, a broken taboo—depending on the society and the moral code we’ve absorbed, any of these can provoke it. The key point is that much of what we call “disgusting” here is learned, not innate: it is a product of social conditioning, and it shifts from culture to culture and era to era.

One of the sharpest examples of using disgust in its social dimension is PETA’s long-running campaign to make wearing fur socially shameful—turning what was once a status symbol into a moral taboo, and making the wearer, not just the product, the object of disgust.

Beyond that, Domestos—a name often filed under “fear marketing”—used disgust for years by depicting germs. But in recent years the brand recognized the risk of tying itself to the very things people find revolting, and as of 2024 it swapped its central visual from germs to a dragon. To my mind, this is one of those cases that ought to be taught in universities for both its causes and its consequences.

Shame, unlike the others, has no biological basis. It is believed to have emerged much later in our evolution. We used to see it in detergent and bleach ads. Should a yellowed shirt or a stain that wouldn’t come out really shame us? Do the things that shamed us in the past still shame us now? That, I suspect, depends on a society’s moral fabric and the specific situation. Nakedness can be shameful—yet the nakedness of someone in a hospital bed carries no such feeling.

In light of all this, it is fair to argue that negative emotions matter enormously to brands because of their power to prompt a counter-action. Even so, I am genuinely unsure whether an insurer does better work by showing the crash and associating itself with catastrophe, or by showing the positive outcomes it protects. Some insurers’ recent ads feel like exactly what they shouldn’t be—and when you factor in shrinking purchasing power, the staged drama can come across, to put it mildly, as “cartoonish.”

A User’s Guide to Fear Marketing yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

1. The Advantages of Brand Extension

When it’s carried out successfully, brand extension brings a host of advantages. The most fundamental, of course, is that it unlocks the existing brand’s hidden potential in many ways and grows the brand, increasing its value. Beyond that, it has plenty of concrete upsides.

Reaching new audiences: Brand extension can put your brand on the radar of new target audiences, which usually grows your overall customer base and lifts sales. When Dove reached a male audience with its Dove Men+Care sub-brand, when Starbucks began selling ready-to-drink coffee in supermarkets, or when Mini Cooper launched an SUV, each reached a different audience.

Cost efficiency: Alongside new opportunities to earn more, brands want to save on marketing spend and brand management. In a brand extension, because customers already know and recognize the brand (and here, how well and in what way they know it—the brand core—matters), less budget is needed to build awareness. That frees the company to spend its budget and energy on introducing the new product itself, its difference, and its benefit.

Greater brand trust: Thanks to the familiarity effect, a consumer is more likely to try a new product from a brand they already know and trust. If it’s an area that benefits from existing penetration, reach will be very fast, too. Extending the brand’s current strength—in a way that stays meaningful within its existing strategy—to include new products can increase the company’s power in customers’ eyes. The brand thereby widens its sphere of influence and dominance. And because people are exposed to the brand across more channels, it contributes to overall awareness and trust. The packaged products from a coffeehouse chain like Costa Coffee that you see on the supermarket shelf offer a real benefit to the parent brand.

Sharpening brand strategy and image: From time to time, brands feel the need to refresh their image. There can be many reasons: market dynamics may have shifted due to external factors, or an aggressive competitor may have entered and changed the whole game. In that case, a brand may choose to enter new product areas to develop its image. Depending on its nature, a new product area can help the brand reach different audiences, adapt to critical trends shaping the market, and stay current.

Reviving the brand: Sometimes brands need renewal. This may come from a brand having sat too long without relevance, or from market dynamics accelerating and changing. Launching a new product or service can breathe new life into the business.

Leaving no room for competitors: In some cases, beyond the financial or image returns of the new area, brand extension benefits the brand simply by protecting its place on the shelf. Otherwise, a competitor can grow its shelf share, visibility, and brand strength.

Locking customers into an ecosystem: One reason you can’t switch away from your Apple phone may well be that you use a MacBook. In some cases, brand extension makes it possible to create an ecosystem. Even if a customer isn’t thrilled with a product or particularly interested in it on its own, leaving the entire ecosystem creates a far greater emotional and financial pain.

2. The Disadvantages of Brand Extension

As tempting as the dream of extending a brand is, if it isn’t done right, extension can hurt the company and the brand. More than half of brand-extension cases end in failure. Here are the likely effects when they do.

Loss of credibility: If the new products and value propositions aren’t connected to the existing brand core and strategy—or don’t perform as well as them—brand extension can damage the brand’s reputation. A failed extension signals a failed business strategy, which can be read as a management weakness.

A negative effect on brand image: If a brand launches a product or service that underperforms relative to its value proposition and the quality of what it already offers, the parent brand’s image can suffer. And if a brand extends into an area sharply at odds with its brand core and strategy, it can lose standing even for its existing product—because for some brands, the brand core is their personality and values. Offering products or services that violate those values amounts to betraying the core audience. (Mercedes producing more affordable cars—its A-Class segment—is a case worth studying here.)

The drag of brand heritage: In some cases, a brand’s negative heritage is so strong that it becomes a serious ball and chain. Even a new product area may not transform that negative legacy. Here, carrying out the extension with a different brand can be a less costly path with a higher chance of success. The solution lies in structuring the brand architecture model correctly.

Catching a competitor’s eye: Sometimes extending your brand into a strong competitor’s territory can draw its attention and disturb the comfort you enjoy in your own core area. A brand focused on freezers and coolers extending into other home appliances can seriously irritate a few dominant players in that market—who may then, even at the cost of losing money, pressure you in your core area.

Diluting energy and focus: Many kinds of extension beyond adding to a product line—especially when you enter a different category or change the sales channel—can cause a serious loss of energy and focus, and may even require reorganizing the company. In that case, a company can pour excessive effort into extending when it might have grown its brand in other ways. Some furniture brands, for example, spent enormous effort and time trying to extend into carpets, and none succeeded. Those resources could have gone into developing collections, design, and experience—or even into deepening penetration.

The advantages of brand extension are, of course, many. But even when it’s driven by optimism and big dreams, if it isn’t done carefully and correctly, the brand can end up worse for it.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Brand Extension yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

8 Effective Methods for Brand Extension yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

Brand Extension: Why Do Some Succeed While Others Fail? yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

Such social disasters are of great importance to brands. Because some brands, good or bad, stand out. Memory records important events along with their sense. When those feelings match that brand, nothing will ever be the same again. We evaluate this process we are in terms of the Kübler-Ross change curve and “Psychology of Mourning” with examples:

1. Shock

When people encounter a shock, they try to grasp the reality and extent of the situation.

It should be: What is important in this moment of shock is to share up-to-date and true information with everyone immediately. It is necessary to share current and true information by constantly updating it.

What Happened But when people needed to learn more about other issues in the region, they quickly became aware of the extent of the disaster. Brands serving in the field of transportation and communication were insufficient in providing transparent information. For example, no mobile operator stated how many base stations were damaged, and how much of the region had communication problems in the first 24 hours. Airline companies should also provide information on the availability of airports in the region or the number of flights. If this is not expressed, it is inevitable to be declared responsible and guilty in the following processes.

2. Denial

It is the moment when people normally believe the news to be false, living in the preferred reality over the tangible reality. People do not want to accept their shock and refuse.

What happened: The denial phase was only applicable to people whose relatives were affected by this earthquake disaster. The scale and reality of the disaster were completely clear to others.

3. Frustration and Anger:

When they get to the stage of frustration and anger, people get over the shock and accept the reality of the event. Although what is felt is sadness, this is often brought to life by anger. When it is in healthy sizes, it has a healing effect. The person can direct his anger toward any person or institution around him. In the earthquake we experienced, this anger was sometimes directed towards malicious people, sometimes at politicians, sometimes at contractors, and sometimes to brands that could not take the right attitude in such an event.

It should be: Brands should empathize at this stage. They should tell how upset they are and how this disaster affected them. Empathy and empathy.

What Happened But brands made two basic mistakes at this stage. A group of brands was met with boycotts and protests on social media for not sharing their feelings. This is very unfortunate because memories are stored with emotions. Now these brands are engraved on these earthquake memories. Another group of brands immediately announced the help and privileges they applied to people, much earlier than their time. However, what people wanted to hear in this period was not benefits such as debt suspension. They needed to hear how upset the brand and even the person representing the brand were.

Starbucks and Netflix were the brands that were placed on the target board in this process. Netflix, which has 2.3 million followers on Twitter and has exemplary social media management, made its first statement three days after the earthquake. There was little to no sympathy in this statement. This explanation, in which the aid was given, went beyond making up for it, angered people even more, and was not found sincere and realistic. Likewise, Starbucks made a statement three days after the earthquake and on the reactions. Of course, the question is: Do brands have to make a statement? Social psychology is dynamic; it means it has and it means it will be in the future.

Likewise, Oxygen Newspaper’s sharing of photographs by adding literary texts became the focus of justifiable criticism, as it was “timeless”. Oxygen should have done this work not 3 days after the earthquake, but 13 or even 23 days after the earthquake. Unfortunately, in the same period, we even witnessed movie suggestions that reduced the pain… What was done in the 4th phase was done in the 2nd phase.

3. Depression:

The depression stage is an emotionally intense process where anger is relatively reduced and we struggle with the new reality. The length of the process varies from person to person, but it would not be wrong to say that most of us are at this stage right now. We will stay here for a while longer.

It should be: Brands should give the message that we stand by them with an emphasis on unity and togetherness, and leave a mark on the minds by distinguishing themselves with original and true stories. Getting out of the feeling of lack and loneliness together connects people to the brand with positive feelings. It’s time to talk about the community, not the person. The motto “Brand is responsible for people” should be acted upon and false and untimely statements should be avoided. Brands should know the needs and play a role in these needs without giving place to opportunism. It should show the message “I am with you, I am ready to help” with concrete evidence. It should use a language of communication that is beneficial to the society, realistic, valuing the society, meaningful and related to people.

Motivational discourses such as life goes on should be avoided, we are together, we are aware of our responsibilities, and we should develop discourses. It should be said that time is the time of brands that are always together, in good times in bad, and all the ups and downs in life. There is a need for a language of communication that contains not a message of superiority, but a message of protective solidarity.

In the current situation, people cannot live healthily even during the mourning period and the stages of mourning. Being a brand that avoids seeing the truth in such a period and giving the message that everything is okay or will be okay is not a healthy communication language. Messages such as we will return to those old times should not be used when society going through a depressive period is experiencing a great mental breakdown. Instead of using words like “it will get better”, and “it will pass” to the society that will progress with a missing life instead of the old life, focus should be placed on the messages that everyone goes through the same unhappiness process and we will heal the wounds together.

What Happened There has already been talking of new housing projects in the region. It’s too early for that. Or, the roles of brands in the reconstruction process of the region are discussed, but this is not the place and time. On the other hand, in this process, brands began to share their losses. We are witnessing brands that share them as a list of names. Each of them is your employee and each has a story.

4. Trial:

It is the phase in which people try to continue their lives almost from where they left off. For this, they need to take some actions in their own lives. For example, he wants to make sure that the house he lives in is safe. It aims to secure its situation against a possible similar disaster.

Must have: Brands should focus on two things in this process. He should describe the actions he took to overcome the current situation. These should be steps that will make it easier to adapt to the new order. Rebuilding what has been destroyed, restoring broken orders, restoring broken morale…

For example, providing training to all employees against emergencies, carrying out activities to raise awareness of earthquakes… Informing their employees and customers that brands owning venues/stores are located in safe buildings. The second action to be taken is to make responsibility projects that will protect their employees and what they leave behind. This is critical to employer branding.

Finally, decision and integration; are The processes in which people take action and reintegrate into their new life.

It should be: Brands have very little work in this process.

<strong>Grief Guide for Brands</strong> yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

Brand consulting companies are transforming. It is an understatement to say that anything today is in a state of transformation; a cliché. Maybe that’s why saying “brand consulting companies are transforming” isn’t very appealing. I guess the cliché “Pandemic will change everything” also affects this… But some things need to be talked about.

A person who had surgery for appendicitis became more credible than an internal medicine surgeon

As the need for knowledge and the source of knowledge change, sectors whose capital is knowledge are greatly affected. Technological progress does not treat everyone fairly. Doctors experience the greatest impact of this. In the past, doctors were people to whom people surrendered, but now they have been replaced by Google; Doctors are left with surgical interventions that browsers cannot do (there is information about him on the internet). The availability of information presented another problem; accessibility of all kinds of information. All kinds of information, whether qualified or wrong… The reliability of its source is also controversial. A person who has undergone appendicitis surgery has become more credible than an internal medicine surgeon.

The impact of the unpredictable becomes unacceptable. Today, a brand consultant is expected to be both a prophet, a scientist and a business person.

In terms of consultancy and brand consultancy, the effects of this are not surprising. In the past, the person referred to as the “Consultant” was seen as the absolute and absolute source of information, now the information is obvious. There are many marketing theories in the literature; In fact, new ones appear every day. Models, tools, kits… Therefore, consultants who in the past were ostentatious as an absolute source of information (this applies to all consultants) can now provide added value thanks to their ability to adapt to innovation and cultural richness. On the other hand, the measurability of almost everything in marketing requires business processes to be faster and more result-oriented. This makes the job very difficult. The amount of data that needs to be analyzed is increasing, but the patience of companies and managers is decreasing. The impact of the unpredictable becomes unacceptable. Today, a brand consultant is expected to be both a prophet, a scientist, and a business person.

Today, brand consultancy companies have no choice but to base their work on five basic pillars to strengthen the brand by creating a correct and effective strategy for the brand.

5 Indispensable Features of Brand Consulting Companies:
Holistic Market, Competition and Customer Analysis:
The purely market and competition-oriented strategies of the past (some of them are just tactics) have been replaced by complex and partially based on instantaneous data, fed by qualitative and quantitative research. For this reason, it is necessary to use very advanced research and analysis tools for consumer insight. Everyone sees everything visible about the consumer, and it is no longer possible for this to provide a separation. It has been a long time since the advertising and communication industry developed methods to penetrate people’s subconscious. The interesting thing is that the research industry has not adapted to this yet (And this topic will be an article on its own).

Brands should see what others cannot see, and the brand consultant should have glasses that show it naked.

Cultural Design:
The relationship between brand strategy and culture is not at the point Peter Drucker stated; culture no longer has to eat strategy for breakfast. Because what we call culture is not a static thing like it used to be. For this reason, with strategic culture design, it is necessary to identify the distinctive values within the brand/institution and to ensure that the brand strategy lives eternally by redesigning it. Today, a brand consultancy company cannot be only interested in the showcase of the brand it serves. Companies are transparent. The moment you express sensitivity towards women, someone may come out and reveal that you pay women 25% less. You cannot bring to the table what is not cooked in the kitchen. However, it is now possible to create a kitchen for what you need to bring to the table, which was not acceptable in the past.

This subject was examined in more detail in another article published in Marketing Turkey.

Brands should put the power of culture at the center, and brand consultants should stop dealing with the showcase; it should build the necessary culture for the strategy to be permanent and to live for many years.

Person-Brand and Person-Brand Relationship:
Another important issue here is the personal brand. People play a very important role in the formation and development of brands. However, in the past, it had mostly partial representation power for brands and institutions. Both the persons were limited and the power of representation. Now, each employee has turned into a medium and the brand face has its dynamic communication channels. Bill Gates told the newspaper in the past, that he now has 58 million followers on Twitter (Elon Musk’s 80 million).

With a single sentence, he can reduce the shares of IBM, which has 670,000 followers, by 20%. This power has never existed in Kuru Kahveci Mehmet Efendi’s life.

Brands should benefit from the power of individual brands, and brand consultants should have the intellectual background, models, and structures that can create strategies for them.

Brand Strategy:
Brand strategy is the core of the brand consulting profession (if it is a profession). It consists of a brand’s preferences and opt-outs. Although different theories have been put forward about a brand’s focus on a certain value proposition or audience lately, this is the case… No institution or brand has unlimited resources.

Fueled by deep consumer insights under the brand strategy; There are many sub-elements such as the brand’s value proposition, tone and tone, brand personality and values. They should answer what the brand does, how it does it, who it does it for, and why.

Customer Experience Design:
Finally, a brand consultant should have a good grasp of the experience in which the strategy he produces comes to life. On the other hand, he should know how a correct brand name, category-appropriate and distinctive brand identity, effective media preferences, the role of channels in social media, and walking routes in the store or experience areas in the office should be shaped within the framework of the brand strategy.

Brands should not hand over the design of customer experience and touchpoints to strategy-ignorant hands. The brand consultant, on the other hand, should establish absolute dominance in every area where the strategy will come to life.

We started with a cliché and we ended with a cliché. Like brands, brand consultants and brand consultancy companies can generate greater benefits only by transforming. Because wisdom is more important than knowledge, and in today’s world, this wisdom is fed by many sources such as intellectual capital, depth and versatility.

You can read our other article to learn how brand consultancy companies contribute to company growth.

Brand Consulting Companies and Transformation of the Industry yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

Both the concepts of “culture” and “strategy” are not new. What is new is that these two concepts are used together. Because we have always heard that culture eats strategy for breakfast[1]. In other words, when the two of them get into a duel, culture will always win. Maybe because we accept that culture expresses a status quo and therefore something that cannot be changed (or can hardly change), this thought seemed very reasonable and logical to us. However, there is no need to clash culture and strategy in a way that makes them hurt each other; both of these phenomena just need to be designed rationally. Today, it is necessary to realize the power of the multiplier effect that occurs when culture and strategy work in harmony with each other. This is possible with our Strategic Culture Design model.

When we accepted that companies such as countries, cities, towns and villages also have a culture, things started to reach a slightly different dimension. The interesting thing is that the concept of culture, which is much older than a brand strategy for companies and institutions, is included in the equation so late. When we consider Kuru Kahveci Mehmet Efendi, we are talking about a Mehmet Efendi who sells dry coffee and his business culture. In the periods when brands matched with people, people were also equated with culture and many elements (values, rituals, etc.) in it. Over time, marketing and advertising professionals have separated the brand from this equation. They defined marketing as at least shaping perception, if not lying, and convinced people that packaging matters more than content. Those who took things much further here claimed that somehow people’s subconscious can be dominated by hidden elements in the logo and advertisement. A concept called “subliminal” has entered our lives. Maybe this perspective would have continued like this for a while… Maybe companies would believe that keeping the showcase beautiful for a while, no matter what was inside, would bring results and they would manage their brands in this way. For example, he could hide the damage he has done to nature by painting his logos green (YN: Here the author is referring to the term “Green Wash”). However, just as Nassim Nicholas Taleb is based on in his book Black Swan, the impact of the seemingly improbable (COVID-19) enabled many things to transform rapidly. Unlike others, I like to say “I told you so”; I had stated in the expectations for the new year published in Marketing Turkey in 2018 that brands should become more sincere due to the strengthening and transparency of communication. The pandemic, on the other hand, has become a catalyst here, as in many other things.

At the point we have arrived at, first of all, we need to change our perspective on the brand. Brand; It is a multidisciplinary system consisting of culture, brand strategy and customer experience. This system, on the other hand, has to be designed from the inside out, not from the outside in. You cannot serve food that is not cooked in your kitchen in front of your customers.

The Rise of Cultural Design

Cultures, like brand strategy and many other strategies, can be retrofitted. The method is both simple and difficult. It’s simple because designing the sub-elements it has is enough to design the culture. It is difficult because the application is like performing a surgical operation without anesthesia. Everything has to happen in consciousness. For companies, culture is a living organism whose basic building block is human.

On the other hand, there are many limitations in practice. For example, it is very difficult for a company with a status quo culture to create a libertarian brand. An organization can’t have fun creating a strong and successful brand in an area that leaves no room for error. Just like Kuru Kahveci Mehmet Efendi, who does his job carelessly and sells stale coffee, cannot create a brand that lives for 150 years…

Culture has two “customers”, so to speak. One of them is the consumers who experience the interior culture as reflected in the products and services and are aware of it even if they do not experience it thanks to the developing communication tools. A culture that “prefers to lose money rather than lose people’s trust” does not and cannot make a bad dishwasher. No one can call the crazy ideas of Lego workers “nonsense”. The most important contribution of culture to the brand strategy is to make the value proposition, which is the reason for customer preference, credible. This is the reason for the recent social responsibility gluttony; corporations think they can shape their culture with ostensible confessions and make a living out of it. What a pity.

The second customer of culture is insiders, employees whose search for meaning is increasing day by day (and peaking in this period). This increases the importance of employer branding.

The Rise of the Employer Brand

In our research on the Changing World of Meaning of the White Collar[2], which we conducted at the beginning of the pandemic, a father said: “We have been at home for a while. The pandemic has had a huge impact on me and my family. Recently, my mind stopped when my daughter came and said, “Dad, you are a very good person”. It turns out we missed a lot of things.” This example may sound so unrealistic to you, I know; hard to believe but true. A little more, a little more, we all found time to stop and think about what we missed.

We are now living in what Microsoft describes and envisions as the “Great wave of resignations[3]” (research from March 2021 indicates that more than 40% of current employees will change jobs within a year). The pandemic has changed business conditions and methods; needs redefined. Because of all this, the role of HR rose rapidly and came to a strategic point. In the past, HR was an operational rather than a strategic part of the business. He was even a “payroll” in some of them. On the other hand, this transformation had to be experienced to increase the importance of the employer brand. As the number of HR people on the boards of directors increases, practices regarding employer brand and culture will also increase.

This extraordinary experience we have had for more than a year has had a significant impact on the lives of our employees. On the other hand, the rapid increase in the importance of the subject paved the way for symbolic and ostensible practices devoid of infrastructure. Do not worry; Just because you wrote “We are a family” on the walls, your employee does not see you as his father. Just because you have organized a training once a month, people do not feel in a learning and developing organization.

At this point, corporate communication and HR will need to do much more together. HR professionals will have to learn brand and communication, corporate communicators will have to learn talent management. Employer brand strategy will be one of the most important issues of the new period.

[1] “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” by Peter Drucker

[2] The White Collar’s Changing World of Meaning, Goodjob Human Insight & Brand Strategy, August 2020

[3] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/hybrid-work and https://www.marketingturkiye.com.tr/haberler/buyuk-istifa-hareketi/

Culture Doesn’t Have to Conflict With Brand Strategy yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

Marketing may not be a science in its own right, but it draws on many scientific disciplines. That is why there are scientific, technical, and proven ways to build strong, successful brands. The habit of attributing something mysterious and miraculous to brand building — or to brand naming — is, as with all creative work, steadily fading. Yet because a human being sits at the heart of the work, it cannot be treated as a purely engineering problem. The pandemic, after all, showed us that people had been living under the illusion that they could master everything in the universe and in life. In reality, much of what is human is chaotic. If there is an order to it, discovering that order fully is either impossible or extremely difficult — and I say this despite my belief in, and experience with, subconscious research. The single most important function of all the mathematics we bring to bear is to reduce risk.

So what path should you follow to build a strong, successful brand? Here are the seven core principles:

1. Understanding customer needs correctly:

The foundation of the brand-building process — the first priority — is being able to correctly analyze the needs of existing and potential customers. These needs are not always physical needs or category expectations. When building a brand name, you must take into account people’s emotional world, the truths lying in their subconscious, cultural values, rituals, and even mistaken beliefs. In a fiercely competitive market, the only way to stand apart from rivals is to reach far deeper insights than they do. According to Harvard’s Gerald Zaltman, we make more than 90% of our everyday decisions subconsciously. This means that asking people directly what they want — while not wrong — yields only mediocre, ordinary data that will never be enough to win strength and success.

2. Treating marketing and innovation as core functions:

Peter Drucker said that a business has two fundamental functions that generate money: one is business development, the other is marketing. Whatever field a company operates in, it must keep these two functions front and center throughout the brand-building process. Innovation allows products and services to adapt to changing customer needs and market conditions — and even gives them the power to shape those conditions — while marketing brings the brand’s products and services to wide audiences, delivering growth and profitability.

3. Setting an effective business strategy:

One of the two pillars that feed brand strategy is business strategy. Without a grounded business strategy, without a goal or a vision, expecting a brand concept created at a desk and looking good on paper to succeed is wishful thinking. A company can have very different brand personalities and business strategies. Some prioritize profitability; others prioritize keeping their stakeholders happy. In the automotive category, Ferrari’s strategy differs from Fiat’s. Ferrari limits production; Fiat expands capacity. Their brand strategies are built accordingly.

4. Building on brand culture:

Alongside business strategy, the other element that feeds brand strategy is brand culture. Companies with a restrictive, status-quo culture cannot create liberating brands. In the same way, playful organizations cannot succeed with brands in categories that prioritize minimizing risk. If there is a gap between the desired culture and the current one, transforming the culture must come first. For brands yet to be built, the culture and values of the key founders are an important determinant.

5. Boldly asserting the brand’s difference:

The intangible value we call a brand was born to set things apart from one another. That is precisely why a brand’s core function is to create differentiation and distinction. It is possible both to meet the category’s requirements and to chart your own course. Doing so requires an original brand strategy and brand identity.

6. Keeping pace with change:

Agility. Business strategies now often have to change shortly after they are planned. Consumer expectations can shift quickly; a category can be disrupted by a competitor — or by a brand that had never been a competitor before — or by a Covid. By closely following changes in the market and the moves of competitors, you must respond when necessary. Otherwise you cannot give your business strategy the right direction, and as a result you cannot keep your brand current.

7. Making brand assets effective and enduring:

You must create distinctive, powerful elements for your brand. These can be standard components such as a name and a logo, or original assets unique to you. To keep pace with changing conditions and to build lasting brand value, these elements need to remain constant for a good length of time.

“That’s it. Your strong, successful brand is ready.” To be able to say that, let us add the final and most important piece of the puzzle: the qualified human talent to do and manage all of this.

Creating a Successful Brand yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

I ask myself the question in the title from time to time. The reason for this is that in addition to the information that will be very useful for us in people’s subconscious, we also encounter very private and personal information. But we have no other choice. In traditional research, when we ask people directly what they want, what they think, they are either not very aware of it or (worse still) they lie.

Kahneman and Tversky’s nearly revolutionary Thinking Fast and Slow, he states that two systems are effective in our decisions. He puts forward a hypothesis that we make most of our decisions (90%) with System 1, which we describe as subconscious. I don’t think this is an argument anyone can easily argue against. That’s good to know, a lot of experts in marketing activities care about it. The question is, how are we going to do this when our research is still mostly pulling data from System 2? The expectation of influencing people’s subconscious with the data you obtain at the conscious level is limited to feelings, luck and individual abilities. However, like everything else, there is a math to it.

Use of Traditional Research

What can you hear about shampoo usage habits from a focus group study today? As a chocolate brand, what do you encounter that your competitors are not aware of? What kind of insight will help you customize your product beyond competitors and even develop new product ideas?

Many of the methods we use for qualitative research provide us with very superficial data. Moreover, the effect of the situation created specifically for the research from time to time is controversial. How can you pretend to be yourself when you have someone watching over you? Or, how openly do you express how you feel and what you think when you are in a studio, in a room with mirrors, with 5-6 people you do not know next to you?

We all know the answer to these questions. I’m not condescending to focus group research. I do not find it technically wrong, as some claim. When it comes to the manipulation of data, sometimes it even makes sense if we are aware of it. None of us live alone in nature.

Traditional research is still very practical in areas we have little or no knowledge of. Moreover, it is risk-free as an economic and quality standard. However, it is insufficient when it comes to innovation and differentiation.

How Do We Reach the Subconscious?

In the presentation of a research we conducted, a senior executive made the following sentence: “We have been doing this research for years, we have never heard of such a thing about the X brand (the largest and dominant brand in the market).” So I replied, “Because you haven’t gotten this deep before.”

It was very instructive research for us. Now, let me give some examples of subliminal data we have obtained in some research and strategic decisions based on it.

1. One of the participants’ sentences summed up the information we found about a brand in the mother-baby market very well. “If the brand X was a person, it would be my mother-in-law; maybe she’s saying very true things but I don’t like the way she says it”. This was related to the feeling of inadequacy we observed subconsciously about mothers. The competitor brand was unwittingly making mothers feel more inadequate with what they did and said. The perfect mother image and high pricing power caused this.< /li>

For this reason, we have developed a strategy for the brand that keeps the communication tone equal to the mother, unlike its competitors.

2. In a study we conducted in the restaurant–cafe industry, we discovered that older waiters have a negative impact on male guests. The old waiters were having a secret conflict with the men who came to the place with their lover. It was damaging the dominance that men wanted to establish.

For this reason, we have brought an age limit to the waiters. We started to recruit employees who would accept the dominance of the guest.

3. We broke taboos again in our research for a school brand. We observed results that overturned the “everyone thinks their child is perfect” memory. Parents do not see their children as perfect. He just believed, wanted to believe, that there was one thing perfect inside of them. However, they were crushed under the guilt and responsibility of not being able to reveal it. The only issue was someone to share it with.

In the communication strategy that I developed for the brand, we chose an individual-oriented tone. We created a strategy to discover personal competencies and turn them into success.

How is it possible to reach data at this depth?

Where Did Subliminal Research Come From? yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

]]> https://goodjob.com.tr/en/where-did-subliminal-research-come-from/feed/ 0