A new era for brand strategy and planning

In new research released last week, Omnisend revealed more than half of Brits (55%) are using AI chatbots like ChatGPT to help them with online shopping. AI is already, officially, mainstream.

This isn't just a shift in search behaviour. It's the ushering in of a new era for brand strategy and planning. Or, at least, it should be.

Brand has always been about the associations and perceptions people have in their heads about an organisation and its overall offer. The practice of 'branding' has been about seeking to inform, manage, and enhance these.

But most organisations put silos around the things that enable them to truly do this. Look at the way separate brand and customer experience measurement is commissioned and operationalised.

From our vantage point of conducting these things, it is often quite impossible to create a truly integrated approach. The brand team won't allow brand measures onto the CX tracker, and vice versa. That would be stepping on toes, something that has seemed more important to business management than truly focusing on customers (you know, where the money comes from).

The rub for business leaders going forward is that they will have no control over how their structure translates into, and is echoed back from, the minds of customers.

As search moves from a largely SEO-influenced structure to an AI and ChatGPT-driven one, there will literally be nowhere for a brand to hide its customer delivery fails or dirty laundry.

Future 'search' is all-encompassing and provides a more fully integrated picture than today's organisational structures can easily appreciate or assimilate.

While they'll be around for a while yet, the days of separated brand and CX measurement will be increasingly connected to historical thinking, along with old ways of seeking to carve up the human mind into organisational bite-sized chunks.

No, the new era for brand strategy and planning requires a different, integrated, but simple approach to measurement.

And, given how critical it will be for brands to deliver brilliantly across all fronts, it requires measurement that stems from what matters to customers rather than what matters to organisational structure.

This is mirrored in how platforms like ChatGPT work. It's less interested in 'reach' (i.e. how many people say something) and more focused on 'resonance', meaning that one customer's commanding perspective or passionate contribution (positive or negative) can now be much more powerful and present.

To navigate this new terrain, brands need to

• Shine wherever automated discovery happens.
• Guide AI tools in representing the brand narrative effectively by being clear, specific, and consistent everywhere.
• Be authentic and ensure that all actions and the overall approach are properly guided by and reflective of brand intention.
• Use technology to personalise, achieve resonance, and win preference in ways that matter to and are ethically and behaviourally acceptable to customers.
• Create captivating and enduring 'voices' to represent the brand through a wide range of media that humanises, espouses, authenticates, and lands 'why your brand?' and what sets you apart.

As we at Quadrangle have witnessed this all unfold, we've been working on a measurement system that helps brands see an integrated picture from the customer's perspective, both in terms of what matters to and is of resonant value to them.

Its central framework and bespoke underpinnings help established brands hold onto and maximise effort put in to date to drive customer preference, as well as enable newer market entrants to see where best to break in and, crucially, how to endure.