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 Marka Danışmanlığı 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 Marka Danışmanlığı 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 Marka Danışmanlığı 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 Marka Danışmanlığı üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

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