Trends in Branding and Marketing for 2021 — Using Brand & Marketing Tech in a Purpose-Driven way

6/8 — Purpose-driven use of Marketing Technology

This is the sixth of a series of articles in which we discuss trends impacting the world of business, viewed from the lens of branding and marketing, interpreting desk research specifically for 2021. In this article, we discuss the use of marketing and branding tech for creating and building Purpose-driven Brands in 2021.

Welcome back!

In this series of articles, we offer advice for anyone with a strategic responsibility for marketing, branding, design, or marketing technology — to navigate the playing field and have an impact on the world around you after 2020.

Read the introduction to this series of articles here:

In the second article, we discussed uncertainty and current prevailing philosophies or ‘the ideas lying around’. Read article 2 here.

Article three, about the third category of macro trends; the most important technology impacting marketing and branding in 2021 and beyond, can be found here:

In the fourth article, we started tying it all together. What do these three macro trends mean for branding and marketing strategy in 2021? Well, it means we need a better story, and that story begins with Purpose:

In the fifth article we dived into what that means for your marketing strategy, and found out that it has to do with building Employee Advocacy and Brand Ambassadorship, from the inside out.

A Purpose-driven brand is the culmination of every individual employee’s personal Why, aligned with the Brand Purpose or organization mission.

Great. But… how do we do it? In this article we’ll dive into the way to 10X these kinds of Purpose-driven branding efforts and strategies with marketing tech.

Use marketing/brand management tech starting from humanity and purpose

So businesses, brands and marketers need to be more purpose-driven, more authentic, and more human to make an impact and be successful from here on out.

What does that mean? Well, to be blunt and brief:

Make your brand personal, focus on customer experience, use chatbots and other tech to help you do that; and tell a story. Make your brand human and trustworthy; be socially responsible; and don’t just connect online but make it a point to also be in your audience’s physical world.

In order to do all this, we need to use the right mix of tech to strengthen and expand our effectiveness and our messaging.

But to use tech is not mainly about using the right type of technology or the right exact brand of software. It starts with setting up the way you work and the way you use your assets and your data in such a way that they strengthen your organization, such that it can live up to its purpose.

Step 1 to using Technology for Marketing: How to work together in Purpose-driven marketing- and branding teams

This means that first of all, you want your brand-, design- and marketing people themselves to work in a way that is human-centered, purpose-driven, and authentic. This means a lot for your management, HR, and the culture in your organization.

It’s also useful and wise to think about expanding the concept of “people who work in marketing or branding in your organization” to everyone — from sales, to customer service, to HR and the Board — who can be a representative of your brand.

This means setting up ways of working that are more agile, more cross-company, cross-department and cross-ecosystem than most of us have ever been used to.

Having your Digital Asset Management setup properly might help a lot in this respect; but make sure technology follows strategy and culture — and don’t try to force it the other way around.

What technological capabilities are a must-have for marketing in 2021?

Now, without getting too technical, there are four broad categories of marketing tech that will be crucial for entrepreneurs and marketing/branding teams to be able to do their work as effectively as possible and to create the most value for their stakeholders:

1. Marketing Analytics. If you haven’t already by now, please get your analytics together as soon as possible. No, marketing attribution is no science but rather mathematical estimation — but it’s so important to have a general sense if things are headed in the right direction in terms of high-over KPIs like (brand) awareness, engagement, and conversion; and also to measure the direct effectivity of smaller experiments from an Agile standpoint.
2. Immersive and frictionless UI/UX. Always Be talking to your Customers and Always Be Testing (Thanks, Raul Tiru). Your user/website visitor/customer is going to consciously or subconsciously check the experience they’re having with you against their last experience with a competitor. Consumers have come to expect a lot in the department of User Experience and design. And what worked today might not still work tomorrow. Should you now jump ahead and invest in the latest, state-of-the-art technology such as AI, IoT, or AR? No, not if that doesn’t make sense from the standpoint of what your brand is about, what strategy you have chosen, what budget you have and what you can reasonably certainly say makes your audience/customers tick. One last tip: if you haven’t embedded it into your web properties yet, use chatbot technology which can now be implemented relatively cheaply and easily, and makes the customer’s online experience that much more frictionless that it increases your conversion rates significantly.
3. Ethical use of data*. Be clear about what you’re collecting, storing and analyzing and for what purpose. The GDPR was only the start; your audience is starting to wise up about the value, usage, influencing and value associated with their data. Be ahead of the curve, to lead with good sense, practicality and responsibility instead of having to respond after the next big wave of discontentment around the use of tech by (big) companies. Also, research the emerging decentralized technologies governing trust, cookies, and personal data — be ready for the future which might be here sooner than you think.
4. Maximizing ROI and scalability of asset creation. Creating enough high-value content is still top of the list when it comes to the priorities of CMOs and brand managers worldwide in 2020. Even with the internet creating a massive amount of content each day — the challenge remains to find the right stories to connect to our audience and be helpful to them. To maximize the scalability and Return on Investment of digital assets, you want to be able to maximize the effectiveness of anyone on your marketing/branding/design teams on the one hand; and engage all employees to be brand advocates by creating their own branded content on the other hand. A Digital Asset Management system (DAM) can be of great help to do both, making it possible among other things to create templates for assets and content which can be used by anybody, but controlled and managed by people in marketing positions.

• Deloitte in 2019 conducted a Consumer Pulsing Survey in the United States, United Kingdom, China, and Brazil on the ethical use of data to gauge how profiting from the direct sale of data impacts customer trust. Of the respondents 53% agreed with the following statement: “I will never use a company’s products that sells my data”; while 40% agreed with: “A company should make 0 percent of profit from selling my data”.

Using Tech to Stimulate and Facilitate Employee Advocacy and Brand Ambassadorship

Getting your employees super-enthusiastic about helping to build your brand online doesn’t start with technology. But technology can definitely make the process more fun, much more easy and easier to manage.

Specifically, DAM systems like Lytho or Brandfolder (or platforms like Canva, if you’re on a tight budget), make it possible for your brand, marketing and design experts to create templates. These templates can be distributed to colleagues from other departments, and used with restrictions that enforce Brand Identity and Brand Identity Guidelines.

Read the last article in this series to find out more about how to set-up a Brand Ambassadorship/Employee Advocacy program in your company:

In the next article, we’ll briefly take a look at design trends to be expected to make a difference in online marketing and branding in 2021. Stay tuned!

This series of articles was created by SparQle CBS, as a research-based explanation of our vision for marketing and branding success in the years to come. Businesses, Marketing and Brands will need to be much more human-centered and Purpose-driven to connect with stakeholders and have a significant positive impact in 2021 and beyond.

Apart from using technology as a multiplier for humanity and an authenthic, human connection, we view the alignment of Corporate Brand with Personal Brand — and thus the alignment of Organization’s missions with indivivual stakeholders’ personal ‘Why’s’ and Values — in other words; Brand Advocacy or Brand Ambassadorship — as paramount to your brand’s success in 2021 and beyond.

SparQle: Shine, Connect, and Grow

SparQle is an online Brand Identity Agency. We help people and organizations find their unique, authentic self — and make it SparQle. To tell their story from that unique identity and to connect online. To help you Shine, Connect, and Grow.

Would you like to know more about our services or what we can do for you?

Check out our website or go ahead and connect with us right away.