Principle 1: Brand Experience is the New Glue
It’s a market of copycat brands, products, and endless price wars. A well-crafted brand experience is glue that bonds your brand to your customers. But you must think beyond features and functions. What emotions do you want to evoke? How do you create a lasting connection that turns the experience into long-term customer relationships?

Research Spotlight:A study by McKinsey highlights that brands prioritizing superior customer experience see revenue gains up to 10-15% higher than the competition.

Principle 2: Every Touchpoint Is Your Stage
Experience isn’t just about your mobile app or chat bot, it’s about every single interaction you have with a customer. From a seamless website experience, to exceptional customer service, to the moment your product is unboxed. You need to map your customer journey and identify opportunities to surprise, delight, and add meaningful value.

Research Spotlight: A Gartner study found that brands that deliver consistently positive experiences across all channels retain significantly more customers than those that do not.

Principle 3: Personalization is Key, But Don’t Be Creepy
Consumers want to be seen and understood. Use data responsibly to personalize experiences, but don’t cross the line into feeling intrusive. Helpful and respectful interactions create a sense of connection. Interactions that feel invasive are a quick way to lose customers for life.

Research Spotlight: A PWC survey found that 82% of people are willing to share personal information for a better customer experience. This underscores the importance of using consumer data to enhance and personalize the customer journey.

Principle 4: Sensory Branding is Powerful
Don’t just appeal to sight and sound. Engaging smell, touch, and even taste leave a lasting impression on your customers. Think about textures, scents, and even the satisfying “click” of a well-designed button. Adding sensory details to your brand experience can be an extraordinary way to add a deeper dimension to the way you connect your brand with your customers.

Research Spotlight: A study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology found that engaging multiple senses (sight, sound, smell) creates stronger emotional responses, better recall, and increased brand preference compared to single-sensory experiences.

Principle 5: Empower Employees as Brand Experience Ambassadors
Your team is your most important brand touchpoint. Invest in training and a culture that empowers employees to create exceptional experiences for your customers. Enthusiasm and genuine care are contagious. Make every interaction matter, especially the human ones. 

Research Spotlight: A Harvard Business Review study found that engaged employees create better customer experiences, leading to improved business outcomes such as increased revenue growth and profitability.

It’s a market of copycat brands, products, and endless price wars. A well-crafted brand experience is glue that bonds your brand to your customers.

The Brand Experience Opportunity
In the Experience Economy, your brand is the sum total of every interaction a customer has with your company. This means that you are no longer simply responsible for crafting messages but for orchestrating a symphony of touchpoints that create a cohesive and memorable brand experience. Every element, from your website’s user interface to the tone of your customer service interactions, plays a role in shaping how customers perceive your brand.

The opportunity goes far beyond simply satisfying customers. It’s a world of choices. A well-crafted brand experience is your tool for creating lasting loyalty, generating enthusiastic word-of-mouth, and commanding premium prices. It transforms transactions into relationships. It fosters a community of passionate advocates who choose your brand not just for what you sell but for how you make them feel.

The Experience Economy is a call to action for marketers to step beyond traditional metrics and become architects of emotion, curators of connection, and masters of moments. By investing in customer experience, you invest in the future of your brand.

Principle 1: Remember, AI is Your Tool, Not Your Mastermind
AI can churn out a gazillion names, taglines, logo variations, and analyze data faster than you can say “market segmentation.” But don’t mistake efficiency for brilliance. The spark that ignites a viral campaign, the tagline that sticks in people’s hearts, the bold move that sets you apart – those come from human minds fueled by empathy and an uncanny understanding of your customers. AI is your powerful sidekick, not your creative replacement.

Research Spotlight: A McKinsey study found that the most successful marketing teams combine data-driven insights with human judgment and creative ingenuity.

Principle 2: Data is Fuel, But Purpose is Your Engine
AI spits out insights like nobody’s business, but without knowing your brand’s North Star, it’s just digital noise. Ask yourself: What problem are you solving? What emotions do you want to evoke? Use AI to dive deeper into understanding your audience, but keep your brand’s ‘why’ front and center.

Research Spotlight: A study by Harvard Business Review emphasizes the importance of data-driven decision-making for growth but cautions against losing sight of your strategic vision.

Principle 3: Consistency is Your Shield Against the AI Identity Crisis
AI helps you tailor content for 1000 different platforms, but make damn sure you still sound like YOU. A consistent voice and visual identity are your armor against becoming a digital chameleon. Feed your AI clear brand guidelines, learn how to talk with it, experiment with concepts, get your tone right, and then use it to create adaptive variations that maintain your distinctiveness.

Research Spotlight: A study by Marq confirms that consistent brand presentation increases revenue by an average of 23%.

Principle 4: Don’t Be a Creep – Stay Ahead of AI Ethics
The data you feed AI shapes its outputs. Be vigilant about unconscious bias, or your shiny new AI tool will start mirroring the worst of the internet. Champion inclusivity and transparency in your branding – it’s not just the right thing to do; it’s essential for maintaining consumer trust in the age of algorithms.

Research Spotlight: A recent report by the World Economic Forum emphasizes that building ethical AI is critical to maintaining consumer trust in the digital age.

Principle 5: The Human Touch is Your Secret Weapon
AI can personalize at scale, but it can’t replace genuine human connection. In a world saturated with tech, the brands that build communities, not just customer bases, will win. Balance the power of AI with human-powered brand storytelling and experiences that forge real emotional bonds.

Research Spotlight: A 2021 study by PwC found that 75% of consumers want “more human” interactions with brands, even as technology plays a larger role.

AI isn’t just a trend, it’s the future of marketing. It’s your secret weapon for building a brand that’s not only agile but adaptable in the face of relentless change.

The AI Opportunity
AI isn’t just a trend, it’s the future of marketing. It’s your secret weapon for building a brand that’s not only agile but adaptable in the face of relentless change. Branders and Marketers who embrace AI as a strategic partner, not just a tool, will gain a significant competitive edge. Think about it – you can unlock new creative possibilities with the speed and scale that AI provides, empowering your team to experiment, iterate, and push boundaries they never thought possible.

But it doesn’t stop there. Dive beyond the surface-level data you already collect, using AI to understand the underlying motivations and desires that drive customer behavior. This newfound understanding opens the door to personalized experiences at a scale you never thought possible, allowing you to reach the right people with the right message at the right time.

And that’s not all. AI can also streamline your operations, freeing up your team’s energy and time to focus on high-level strategy and creative ideation. Automate those mundane tasks, optimize your campaigns, and watch your efficiency soar.

But here’s the kicker: By embracing AI in an ethical and responsible way, you set a new standard for innovation and leadership in your industry. You’ll build a brand that’s not only technologically advanced but also trustworthy, inclusive, and customer-centric. The opportunity is here. It’s time to rewrite the rules of brand building, unlock your full creative potential, and deliver experiences that leave your competitors scrambling to catch up.

Principle 1: Your Customers Are Evolving. Are You?
Think you know your ideal customer? 2024 demands that we re-examine our assumptions. Economic shifts, social movements, and a dizzying array of choices are rewriting the rulebook on buyer behavior. Ditch the tired demographics and dig in. What fears keep your customers awake at night? What fuels their excitement? And most importantly, what are their pain points that you need to solve and solve better than your competitors? CMOs who truly understand their evolving customers are the ones who’ll win.

Research Spotlight: A recent Harvard Business Review study underscores the importance of deep customer insight, finding that companies that invest in continuous customer research significantly outperform their competitors.

Principle 2: Brand is Your Superpower
It’s a world of copycats and endless price wars. Your brand is what sets you apart. This is your moment to be bold. Communicate your company’s unique promise, the problem you solve, and the emotional connection you offer. Let your brand personality shine through in every interaction, and you’ll build the kind of loyalty that keeps your customers coming back for more.

Research Spotlight: A Nielsen study titled “Global Trust in Advertising” found that consumers are more likely to trust and support brands that have clearly articulated values and purpose.

Those rigid marketing plans of old? Get rid of them. 2024 calls for fluidity, for embracing the excitement of calculated risks and quick pivots.

Principle 3: Agility is Your Secret Weapon
Those rigid marketing plans of old? Get rid of them. 2024 calls for fluidity, for embracing the excitement of calculated risks and quick pivots. Empower your teams to be opportunistic. Test new channels. Experiment without fear. Analyze data. Respond quickly to market shifts. The ability to adapt is the difference between sinking and flying.

Research Spotlight: A report by Bain & Company found that agile businesses adapt up to twice as fast to changing market conditions and have a 30% higher chance of long-term success.

Principle 4: Creativity Ignites Growth
Performance marketing has its place, but it’s drained the soul out of too many brands. It’s time to unleash your imagination. Invest in bold campaigns that tell unforgettable stories, evoke real emotions, and make people stop and pay attention. Creativity isn’t an artistic indulgence, it’s the rocket fuel that separates your brand from the pack of sameness.

Research Spotlight: The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity consistently demonstrates a strong correlation between award-winning creative campaigns and tangible business results. It proves that creative risks most often yield big payoffs.

Performance marketing has its place, but it’s drained the soul out of too many brands. It’s time to unleash your imagination.

Principle 5: The Human Touch Wins Hearts
Tech is cool, but it doesn’t replace connection. It’s a world that can often feel cold and impersonal. Customers are hungry for brands that feel real. Show empathy, be radically transparent, and champion causes that make a difference. Build a community, not just a customer base. That’s how you forge the kind of loyalty that transcends the roller coaster of the marketplace.

Research Spotlight: Edelman’s “Trust Barometer” regularly highlights the importance of trust, and that consumers put more faith in brands that exhibit social responsibility and take a stand on issues.

The CMO Opportunity
2024 is full of challenges, but the CMOs who see them as opportunities will leave the competition in the dust. These principles aren’t a checklist, they’re a mindset. Embrace them, run wild with them, and build a brand with the power to cut through the noise and compete hard.

Ready to get started? Let us know if you’d like to explore other ways to future-proof your marketing.

With consumer spending cooling down, luxury brands depend disproportionately on high-net-worth customers who are impervious to inflationary slings and arrows. Competing for the world’s most discriminating customers compels luxury brands and creative agencies to find the right brand strategy and execute it flawlessly.

The Heart of Luxury Hotel Branding
In late 2021, the century-old luxury hotel brand Fairmont launched ‘Experience the Grandest of Feelings,’ a brand campaign with Susan Sarandon as a global brand ambassador. “People today want to make a meaningful choice about how they spend their time in a way that connects with their values, like exploration and evoking a sense of wonder,” said Mansi Vagt, Fairmont’s global brand leader and vice president. We couldn’t agree more, but as a call to action, the campaign message could pertain to almost any high-end luxury hotel.

How Luxury Hotels Lean into Emotion
‘Experience the Grandest of Feelings’ reads like a prestige message disguised as emotional, which isn’t entirely believable. In contrast, One&Only Resorts’ tagline, ‘Exceptional One-offs,’ quickens the pulse a bit more. To stoke desire among consumers starved for authentic travel experiences, ‘Exceptional One-offs’ promises that each property reflects the true essence of your destination. The novel wording feels resolutely modern compared to ‘The Grandest of Feelings,’ which doesn’t evoke a modern resort brand with properties in Santa Monica, Telluride, and Rio.

Making a Luxury Resort Stay Feel Like ‘Travel’
One&Only de-positions its field of competitors by solving an emotional pain point for the luxury resort traveler: their fear of getting a watered-down experience. Some people don’t even consider it traveling if you stay at a resort. One&Only gives luxury travelers what they need, which is gated-community-level control, and fulfills an unmet emotional desire: the brand helps them access a sense of p[ace that makes them feel like valid travelers.

Emotional Luxury Branding: How Goop Gets it Right
What you feel about Goop is like a personality test – it may say more about you than it does about Gwyneth Paltrow’s $250 million side hustle. Goop’s understated, self-help-inflected luxury business gets roasted for being ditzy and out of touch, mainly due to its history of promoting fringy fads like crystal eggs intended for bodily insertion. That’s what makes headlines, but the real story is what people are getting out of Goop.

As Amanda Mull wrote for The Atlantic, “The act of shopping itself is the salve… and that feeling is carefully cultivated. When the hook is ‘Your problem matters,’ whatever package of vitamins or tube of lotion gets thrown in the bag is almost beside the point. Buying from a business that makes you feel cared for and understood can seem like a course of treatment in and of itself.”

From a strategic branding perspective, Goop is a coherent, consistently expressed luxury brand that solves a pain point for customers by validating their feelings and making them feel like anything is possible. Goop does everything right, including the company’s refusal to dilute its brand in the face of ridicule. With our lives 99% digitized, authenticity is the password – Goop has held its own in a competitive marketplace by staying true to what it stands for – that’s always the key to emotional relevance.

Luxury Brands Are Getting Intentional
As mindfulness catches on with consumers, luxury brands need to position themselves intentionally, too. Luxury purchases are highly personal, solidifying the bond between the lives we want and the brands we choose. Today’s Millennial and Gen Z luxury shoppers see brands as a way to express their personalities and flex their freedom, but also to help them visualize how things should be and bring them closer to their vision. Sometimes, the intended vibe is more emotional; sometimes, it’s more cerebral. But we call this lifestyle-driven approach “Intentional Luxury” because today’s customers want luxury brands that dig deeper for meaning.

Sustainability and the Role of Resale, Repair, and Rental
Under increasing pressure to commit to sustainable practices, brands are exploring new business models such as verified resale, rental, repair, and remaking. One of the most vocal proponents of luxury resale is Fabienne Lupo, former CEO of Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie and founder of ReLuxury, “Buying second-hand is actually being responsible and a smarter solution for businesses,” Lupo told Luxury Society in an interview. “As an industry that expresses intrinsic values of timelessness, repairability, quality, it really should be a leader in this field,” she added.

Can Luxury Resale Preserve the Prestige?
Online and offline, peer-to-peer luxury resale is booming, and advocates for sustainability and circular fashion see it as a step in the right direction. With its acquisition of Tradesy in March 2022, Vestiaire Collective joined RealReal, Farfetch, and other online marketplaces for buying and selling new and pre-loved designer and luxury fashion. Vestiarie’s platform boasts a user base of over 23 million members, attracted by a thorough authentication process that aims to offer some protection for buyers and the brands being sold.

As with any third-party resale platform, it’s never entirely risk-free – buyers and sellers have mixed reviews about the platforms’ pain points, which point to missing packages, fraud, and nonexistent customer service. For bigger-ticket luxury purchases, a platform like Farfetch, which partners with brands and designers, may be a safer bet for shoppers.

FarFetch’s ‘Circular Fashion’ Collaboration
One particular brand is driving FarFetch’s success: the mega-influential Off-White, a fashion-forward lifestyle brand based on the ideas and values of visionary designer Virgil Abloh. With Off-White, Abloh’s cerebral, arresting design sense helped us see streetwear with fresh eyes, and he pointedly reminded us to question everything. FarFetch’s 2019 acquisition of 100% of Off-White’s parent company, New Guards Group, was a brilliant and unexpected move that paid off beautifully.

Farfetch’s regulatory filings indicated that Off-White accounted for “a majority of our brand platform” gross merchandise volume last year. It seems like a mutually beneficial relationship, with Off-White boosting FarFetch now and FarFetch keeping Abloh’s legend alive. We believe that Abloh would have appreciated the partnership, which marries Abloh’s ideas about inclusivity and sustainability with his rarified design sense to do what he described, poetically, as using personal vocabulary to ”generate a multidisciplinary tornado.” Talk about setting intentions for a brand.

The Science of Luxury: How Novelty Slows Down Time
Studies show that repetitive stimuli reduce our perceived duration of time, whereas novel stimuli create the perception that time is slowing down. The memories made from fresh and exciting experiences are so dense and vivid that they expand our experience of time. This makes experiences the real fountain of youth and the foundation of luxury.

When we’re enjoying ourselves, time feels like it moves faster, but in the rearview mirror, we create memories and a sense of time passing through noticing. In Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, Claudia Hammond calls it ‘The Holiday Paradox,’ explaining that when we’re enjoying ourselves, time feels like it moves faster, “but when we look back at a vacation, our assessment of time is based not on how many hours we actually spent on vacation, but on the individual new memories we created during that period.” The popularity of seasonal drops and designer collabs is a testament to this – timeless luxury sells, but only the outliers are memorable.

We know novel experiences drive brand preference for the wealthiest few shoppers, but what about novelty for the rest of us? ‘Aspirational’ describes consumers who limit their spending to the lower end of luxury, while ‘true-luxury’ consumers can afford to pay at the top. But what are brands selling to cost-conscious consumers, and why does it matter?

Luxury Brands Bridge Accessibility With Novelty
There’s a trend where high-end brands offer lower-priced novelties for fans who want to get closer but don’t have the budgets they’d need to be VICs. So instead of YETI tumblers in everyone’s hand, think Hermès Tissue Boxes, Burberry teddy bears, and Saint Laurent padlocks. The strategic advantage is that novelty is, by definition, special. This keeps accessible luxury situated where it can’t harm the brand’s cache: gifts and knickknacks. It retains the high-end products as the hero products, which is a must for a brand that identifies as ‘luxury.’ Aspirational customers have an opportunity to have and hold a piece of the brand while keeping the feeling well out of the ordinary – the polar opposite of seeing entry-priced YETI tumblers everywhere, which makes the brand feel more pedestrian, no matter how high its quality is.

Exclusivity Makes Way For Expression
While a Burberry bear buyer isn’t winning any prizes for originality, novelty is not just relevant to entry-level shoppers. The wealthiest shoppers love classics but hate basics. Novelty, eccentricity, self-expression: no matter how you characterize it since digitization has ‘democratized’ luxury brands, privileged trendsetters increasingly use novelty to assert their freedom from constraints. At High Snobriety, a website purpose-built for luxury brand expression, a rundown of novelty bags touted a Balenciaga clutch disguised as a Lays potato chip bag, a Chanel shopping cart, and a Moschino toilet paper roll, to name a few. Then we have the Big Red Boots, a social-media-driven trend Inspired by the classic Japanese TV and video game character, “Astro Boy,” the artist MSCHF’s cartoon boots sold out immediately despite their impracticality and $350 price tag.

Ludicrous Luxury, Made for Instagram
The showy shoes appeared on many stars and influences, including Lil Wayne, Doja Cat, Lil Nas X, Diplo, and Janelle Monae. Wearing enormous red cartoon boots is the same flavor of flex as naming your kid Apple or Riot – not having to be professional or sensible with your choices is a luxury in itself. Similar to A-listers repping Crocs through the pandemic, the Big Red Boots are part of a broader trend for cartoony shoes at a premium price, like Loewe’s Minnie Mouse pumps and JW Anderson’s frog slides, made in partnership with children’s rubber boot brand, Wellipets.

Novel Ways to Flex: Pearls for Men
The last brand in our luxury roundup is Mikimoto, whose “Love Letter to the Sea” campaign positions pearls as a natural, sustainable gemstone from the sea whose culture benefits the environment. The most novel thing was Mikimoto’s male-dominated ads, which showed famous men wearing pearls. One pearl-clad Mikimoto model, designer Marc Jacobs, called his ever-present strand of white pearls his good luck charm.

“In the United States and Europe, male celebrities are picking up pearls,” said Yugo Tsukikawa, Mikimoto’s marketing and product strategy director. He added, “If you walk around Tokyo, you’ll see men wearing strands of pearls every day.” Part of a movement toward gender-neutral design that transcends the luxury segment, this type of shift is commonplace in fashion, says consumer psychologist Chris Gray. “Our founding fathers wore wigs and tights,” Gray joked. ”These social constructs, especially with masculinity and feminity, are always shifting.”

Breaking Down Barriers in Luxury
Harry Styles, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, Elton John, the Jonas Brothers, Timothée Chalamet, and Tyler the Creator have been sporting the strands, and Garrett Wilson shook up the 2022 NFL draft when he was recruited by the NY Jets sporting a three-tiered pearl necklace. “Men wearing pearls isn’t a fad; it’s an example of how the jewelry world is finally opening up to genderless style,” wrote Highsnobiety’s culture editor, Lia McGarrigle. “In a few years, pearl necklaces are about to be as commonplace as chains are for men,” she added.

In Conclusion
Emotional, novel, and intentional luxury are trending. Quality and exclusivity are not enough – this era in luxury is all about “valuing uniqueness over status,” as Bain & Company’s EMEA Luxury Goods and Fashion leader Federica Levato put it. As the luxury landscape evolves, the burden is on brands to embrace innovation, offer novel experiences that extend beyond the transactional to foster emotional connections.

I launched my first agency amid the fallout from the dotcom crash, and we needed to communicate why clients should choose an upstart like us over an established agency. We researched and ranked client pain points, analyzed what we could do better than competitors, and de-positioned our more-established competitors by making them look antiquated.

Leaders needed to spend more strategically in a competitive landscape shaped by dotcom-era market corrections. But they also required an expansive brand vision to help them adapt to whatever came next in the burgeoning digital marketing environment.

Aligning with the times, we positioned our boutique agency as ‘young and vicious,’ which de-positioned big agencies on their reputation for excess and rigidity. Reframing our boutique startup status as competitive, agile, and ambitious resonated with our clients’ entrepreneurial objectives and made bigger agencies look even more grandiose and out-of-touch by comparison.

By empathizing with their pain points, we created a brand clients believed was worth a try.

We solved many client pain points spanning efficiency, quality, creativity, client experience, and pricing, but a brand must stand for a singular idea in customers’ minds. My first agency didn’t have much to choose from – we needed to overcome the perceived risks of working with an unknown boutique agency.

Our only feasible option was positioning our weakness as a strength to highlight the risks of not hiring us. De-positioning establishment agencies on old-school bloat and complacency, we instilled doubt about which was more dangerous: embracing change or sticking with the status quo. Nikon and the Coca-Cola Company were among the brands that took a chance on a young, spirited agency that de-positioned more powerful agencies.

High-impact brands extrapolate a foundational positioning idea from a ‘hero pain point’, which is the gap you fill between your customers’ gratification and your competitors’ capabilities. De-positioning isn’t negative campaigning. If anything, it makes brands more strategic and elevates the customer experience across the category. Apple, the undisputed master of de-positioning, demonstrates this ‘rising tide’ effect because every move Apple makes recasts the whole category in the company’s own image.

Starting with the Macintosh, Steve Jobs originated Apple’s go-to strategy of being second-to-market and elevating the customer experience. Apple didn’t have to invent personal computers – it made them usable. Unsurprisingly, the term ‘user experience’ was first coined at Apple in 1993 by cognitive psychologist/designer Don Norman.

Unveiling it in a shareholder meeting, Jobs pulled the Macintosh out of a bag and turned it on. The machine quipped, “It’s good to get out of that bag” and “NEVER TRUST A COMPUTER YOU CAN’T LIFT!” Humanizing technology and disarming us with brand experiences continues to work for Apple four decades later.

When customers know what you stand for and believe it, stratospheric growth is possible.

That said, de-positioning strategy is often the only recourse available to a challenger brand outclassed on size, strength, or resources. The mission-driven Dutch brand Tony’s Chocolonely promises ‘100% exploitation free’ products and promotes its mission of ‘making ethical chocolate the norm.’ Their brand shines a light on slavery in cocoa production, which de-positions corporations like Mondelez and Nestle that look the other way in search of profit.

Another emerging brand punching above its weight is Ithaca Hummus, funded by Chobani Food Incubator. The company’s founder described its disruptive difference as “mind-blowing flavor,” which is moving the needle in a billion-dollar industry that epitomizes culinary mediocrity. Ithaca Hummus de-positioned ‘big hummus’ by tasting better and became the fastest-growing premium hummus brand in the country.

Another de-positioning success story is the polarizing footwear, Crocs. After pivoting from boat shoes to workwear, Crocs gained traction as an athleisure brand. Eventually, jokes and memes proliferated, and the company found itself on the brink of bankruptcy. Featured in a TIME magazine list of “50 Worst Inventions,” Crocs needed a comeback.

Crocs understood that Gen Z doesn’t want to be part of a brand tribe, and their outlook influences everyone around them. They knew that personalization and authenticity were highly sought-after by this influential segment. They leveraged the fact that Gen Z views brand consumption as a mode of creative self-expression instead of buying brands to fit in.

Competing with mass-market brands like Nike, Adidas, and New Balance was a heavy lift. Still, Crocs muscled its way into this ultra competitive segment by playing athletic brands’ tribal connotations against them. Gen Z is about manifesting individual identity, so Crocs stole a slice of share from big sneaker brands by letting its freak flag fly.

Borrowing its product strategy from within sneaker culture, Crocs ran with the idea of design collaboration and broke through big time when pandemic-chic broke free from conventional notions of good taste.

With its Jibbitz shoe charms and far-out design collaborations, Crocs re-positioned itself as a canvas for creators, which de-positioned athletic shoes by reducing their fandom to mere followers. The number-one seller and advertiser in the category, Nike collaborates with athletes and tells you, ‘Just do it.’ Challenger Crocs collaborates with artists and lets you just be you. In this light, it makes sense when you see Nicki Minaj’s iconic pandemic portrait, posing in pink Crocs with iced-out Jibbitz.

Under quarantine conditions, creativity was unconstrained, ease was trending, and Crocs’ bulbous form and garish colors read particularly well on-screen. Fashion-forward celebrities leaned into the clogs’ cartoonish appeal in droves, flexing the fact that A-listers don’t have to play by the rules or try hard to be cool. Crocs’ audacious nonconformity and call to creative self-expression spelled success.

Croc’s gaudy moment in the sun had finally come.

Crocs solves an authentic hero pain point – shoppers feeling constrained – by breaking down expectations and barriers for entry. You don’t need to drop loads of money or wake up early to crush a workout. No matter why or how you wear them, you can kick it in Crocs free of judgment.

Instead of asking customers to conform to a cult of brand personality, Crocs transcended the category by letting its customers reimagine Crocs. Against the Spartan sporty ethos of Nike et al., Crocs displays an almost-human sense of plasticity, molding to our dreams and desires and continually being transformed by the journey.

Customers feel accepted and understood, not defined by the brand relationship.

In contrast, decades of straight-faced, gritty indoctrination have made athletic shoe brands feel as narrow and confining as the shoeboxes they’re packaged in. The bombastic presence of Crocs’ playful monstrosities provides a light-hearted, liberating, and impeccably-timed distraction from the permacrisis news cycle. Further, Crocs’ styles are gender-neutral, an inclusive gesture that invites customers to love Crocs their way.

So, how effective is Crocs’ de-positioning strategy? While premium contender Allbirds created a niche and achieved a billion-dollar valuation, Crocs generated more than three times that in 2022 alone, once again defying most expectations for the injection-molded foam footwear.

Of course, competitive advantages are rarely based on one deciding factor, and nothing that survives stays still. Markets are complex, goalposts move constantly, and customers and competitors continually evolve. Defining a hero pain point that you can solve for your customers isn’t a ‘one-and-done’ task; it’s an ongoing discipline that’s well worth the effort.

These de-positioning examples span business-to-business, consumer packaged goods, tech, and footwear segments, illustrating the strategy’s effectiveness across industries. Every business that competes benefits from analyzing the competitive landscape, zeroing in on a hero pain point, and (de-)positioning itself as the solution.

Just be yourself, remember hearing that growing up? But, what is a self? How do I find myself? How do I understand my talent and my potential? How do I find a reason for being? What is life? These are the same questions you should be asking when developing a brand personality. High performance brands understand who they are and how they speak. They’re able to communicate in a way that’s accessible, relevant, and compelling. It’s all about creating trust between you, the consumer, and them, the product.

So how does a brand go from unfocused to actualized? What are the basic building blocks of a personality? First, there’s the surface level. What’s the initial thing people notice about you? Next, there’s the substance. What’s under that surface-level perception? How does someone who knows you describe you? What drives your emotional reality? Finally, what is your motivation? Are you about spreading joy, enlightenment, saving the world?

Put it all together and a brand narrator emerges. When you know who your brand is, when it speaks, you’re able to give your customers a consistent experience they can trust. You can tell any story, a million ways. Figure out who is telling the story first.

Newsflash: information is everywhere. Attention spans are shorter than ever. Very few people are going to take the time to read your whole website. Shocking, right? In a world of endless options and companies trying to win your loyalty, it’s increasingly hard for a brand to make a connection. The modern consumer has been exposed to so many forms of visual and textual manipulation they’re extremely resistant to ad-speak and bullshit.

When someone takes the time to engage with your product, you only get one chance to make the first impression. From a brand storytelling standpoint, it’s your mission to convert everyone who gives you the chance to win them over. The clock is ticking. Messaging hierarchy is everything. You need to appeal to scanners, the dabblers, and the deep divers. Design your messaging so it clicks quickly. Then, back it up with easy to understand value offerings. And if people want more, make it easy to find. Don’t overwhelm with why you’re great. Find your one big idea and then create an information infrastructure to support it. Practice deep storytelling, for the win

As the tech landscape continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, it’s imperative that brands keep up or risk becoming obsolete. While traditional brand consulting has an important place, truly impactful brand strategies are those that go beyond superficial design and concise messaging. Let’s explore the critical components often overlooked by run-of-the-mill branding agencies and shed light on what it really takes to position a technology brand for lasting success.

Master Your Value Proposition: What makes your company different from the rest? What problems do you solve for your customers? Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, sums this up with, “Brand is not about being different. It’s about being better.”

Craft a Stellar Brand Identity: This includes your logo, tagline, color scheme, and overall visual aesthetic. Your brand identity should be consistent and memorable, Steve Jobs famously said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Amplify Your Presence: Your brand should be communicated across all your marketing channels, from your website to social media to advertising. Seth Godin likes to say, “The best brands are the ones that people talk about.”

Cultivate Authentic Relationships: Your brand is not just about what you say, it’s also about how you make your customers feel. Or, as Tim Cook rightfully stated, “Branding is about creating a promise to the customer and then delivering on that promise over and over again.”

This is all perfectly good branding advice and woefully incomplete. Simply put, the best practices listed above will jumpstart a conversation about branding, but they won’t really help form a proper brand strategy.

With so many fluffy branding agencies out there, we believe there should not be a discernible difference between branding and brand strategy. The two are inextricably linked, and the failure to round out the strategy is the actual reason that so few brands feel exceptional, lacking research, methodology, and, of course, a fully formed strategy.

Building a brand identity without doing the strategic work first ensures that the brand will fall short in the eyes of its prospective customers. This is especially true for tech brands.

What is missing from the list above? First and foremost, a story is an essential part of branding, a story that must be rooted in marketplace dynamics and customer research, it should speak directly to customer pain points, and ultimately, the best brands work to de-position their competitors. More on de-positioning in a moment.

Branding is not just about you, it’s mostly about them.

For many agencies and clients, especially when it comes to branding a tech company, it’s easy to get caught up in talking about yourself. You want to tell everyone about your amazing product, your innovative technology, and your world-changing vision. Believe it or not, that’s not really what branding is all about.

Branding based only on product, tech, and vision is going to fail at creating an emotional connection with your customers. Market research (especially competitive research) is essential because it focuses on understanding customer needs and desires and then finding a way to meet those criteria in a way that feels compelling on its own as well as in relation to the competition. De-positioning takes this concept even further.

So how do you start doing all that? We start by asking the right questions:

Start with them. Who are your ideal customers? What do they care about? What are their hopes and dreams? Pain points? Once that’s been established, you can create a brand that speaks directly to them.

Substantive market research. We are not in the business of guessing. What are the most pressing marketplace dynamics? What are competitor brands saying? What are they offering?

Be authentic. People can spot a fake from a mile away. Brands must have a fully realized point of view that’s honest about what the brand is and what it stands for. What’s your POV? Does it resonate in an authentic way?

Tell stories. People love stories, they help us process complexity, and they’re memorable. Deep storytelling, authentic and rooted in research, will drive home essential messaging and help your brand break through the noisiest marketplaces.

Be consistent. Branding and messaging must be consistent across all touchpoints, from your website to your marketing materials to your customer service line. Do your marketing and communications teams have the materials they need to stay consistent across channels?

Be patient. Branding takes time. We might very well build a strong brand in a matter of weeks, but it will still take time to shift perception in the market. Brands must consistently create great products and services and keep telling their story. Change can feel slow, but what is the alternative?

De-positioning

Ultimately, we are all selling against our competition. Of course, not all tech companies are direct competitors. Part of what makes tech so fascinating from a branding perspective is that most tech products are, by nature, very niche. There are big niches like cloud computing, CRM, and ride sharing, and then smaller niches like an all-in-one podcasting solution or social media analytics tools for marketers. The principles of de-positioning are largely the same in B2C, B2B and B2B2C businesses.

The core premise for de-positioning is to highlight the deficiencies in your competitors’ offerings and match those deficiencies to customer pain points. We don’t need to ‘go negative’ if the competition has already left a gap that is easy to highlight. For instance, when Apple launched the new Vision Pro, they didn’t say, our headset is better than Meta’s. They positioned the unit as a whole new type of computing: spatial computing.

Apple didn’t mention their competitor’s slower refresh rates or visual shortcomings at the edges of the lens. They didn’t even mention AR or VR really, or that so many of Meta’s (and to some extent Google’s) products have fallen flat. It’s simply implied by saying this is something new and fully evolved. And you don’t have to be Apple to do this. One could argue this is part of what made Apple products so successful over the last two decades.

Even for the biggest industry players with sub-brands that have to feel native to a smaller niche (say WatsonX) and still level up to the promise and positioning of the parent brand (IBM), addressing hyper-specific pain points is key. In some cases, the big brand is a boon, delivering instant recognition and credibility. In other instances, the big brand might detract from the sub-brand, making a cutting-edge offer feel less innovative than it might actually be. This is especially true in the B2B and B2B2C spaces.

Top Technology Branding Sectors

Here is a short list of the most compelling niches in tech branding today, a short list that will come to represent so much growth and value creation in the years ahead.

Software as a Solution (SaaS)

While the big B2B enterprise solutions – Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft Azure, etc. – continue to grow by acquiring more innovative startups and bolting on new offerings that integrate more innovative solutions in order to grow the scope of existing accounts, too many brands in the SaaS space have come to feel interchangeable because they feel ubiquitous.

Indistinguishable brands don’t grow much over time, even when they are propped up by exceptional sales and product functions.

ChartMogul’s most recent SaaS Growth Report delivers exceptional insight into what it looks like to grow a SaaS company in today’s market. More specifically, how SaaS businesses grow from zero to $30M ARR and beyond. In addition to analyzing retention, growth through new business versus expansion of existing clients, and providing some key benchmarks (below), it should go without saying that adding AI capabilities will be top of mind for the foreseeable.

Here are some topline revenue benchmarks specific to this sector:

• Top-tier SaaS startups reach $1M ARR within 9 months.
• The median startup takes approximately 2 years and 9 months to reach $1M ARR.
• On average, SaaS startups reach $10M ARR in slightly over 5 years.
• Even after 10 years in business, only 13% of SaaS startups reach $10M ARR.

From a strategic perspective, in addition to integrating AI capabilities, most of today’s SaaS standouts are also focused on enabling a distributed workforce.

Canva is a great example on both fronts. They have successfully integrated topflight AI/ML through a partnership with OpenAI while offering a dedicated Teams plan that has quickly garnered 4.4 million subscribers (+270% growth year-over-year).

Canva has successfully and quickly adjusted to marketplace dynamics by offering new services while maintaining its core branding, “Empowering the world to design.” They are a great example of how brand, product, and strategy are linked.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is certainly the buzzword of the year and very likely the buzzword of the decade. Enhancing a brand with AI offerings is already starting to feel like table stakes among technology companies. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Intel – all jumping in with both feet.

For startups, especially companies that have been lying in wait for this moment, expecting an AI/ML boom, the brand map is wide open for business. Lots of available real estate to claim.

AI is certainly the buzzword of the year and very likely the buzzword of the decade. Enhancing a brand with AI offerings is already starting to feel like table stakes among technology companies.

There will be a handful of niche AI winners who ultimately come to own big territories that are uniquely associated with AI. Very simply, there will be a number of upstarts that grow to become big, self-sustaining tech firms during this era of AI growth.

OpenAI is one of the obvious leaders in the space. They made a big name for themselves last year when they released the Dall-E 2 image generator. And then again in November, when they released ChatGPT, the leading brand name in AI today.

Outside of some dedicated AI firms, the opportunities are limitless right now to become the AI leader in almost any niche – to win the AI customer service chatbot race, the AI fraud detection race, or the AI medical imaging analysis race.

On the flipside of that coin, many large tech players in the space are already growing because they’ve successfully started the process of rebranding within the context of AI. The shining example this year is Nvidia, already a dominant force in graphic processing, chips, and other technical software and specialty hardware components that are highly transferable to the AI landscape. But they weren’t a household name two years ago.

Nvidia stock just skyrocketed based on Q2 earnings of $13.51 billion in revenue. On a year-over-year basis, Nvidia earnings jumped 429% while sales soared by 101%. With the right brand strategy, Nvidia could realize what Intel nearly, but never quite, accomplished two decades ago as the purveyor of computing brains, guts, and vital organs – the insides, so to speak.

Customer Experience (CX)

If AI represents the next frontier for technology companies, customer experience is the final punctuation mark on the web2/2.5 era, especially among companies that have either been slow to innovate or so highly regulated they could hardly keep up with their counterparts in other industries. Some of the companies that surprisingly fall into this category are banks, many of which have been on hiring and acquisition sprees of late in the CX department.

In the incredible race to capture the attention of younger generations and play an integral and profitable role in The Great Wealth Transfer, large financial institutions are now being forced to build sleeker, more usable products that satisfy the most discerning and digitally native generations – Xennials and Gen Z in particular. The banks will catch up quickly, but which brands will come to own which aspects of the available space?

It will depend as much on brand strategy as their ability to build innovative new products. The legacy players will continue to buy the best upstarts, and the upstarts will continue to advance for so many reasons. Strong CX plus a well-crafted brand will be a winning formula at the close of this era in tech.

Healthtech and Medtech

One thing that most tech companies have in common, whether they are competing in the same sector or not: They feel modern.

A tech company cannot look and feel dated. There’s not a lot of nostalgia going around in tech branding. Strong brands don’t need to chase every trend, but a well-figured brand will cover a great many trends by default. This would not define most healthtech and medtech offerings of the past. We can expect this to change very quickly as these sectors stand to adopt a decade or more of the best practices from established SaaS companies, AI players, and CX professionals in what will feel like a matter of months.

With very few exceptions in the consumer sector, like Whoop and Oura, no single healthcare brand has broken through in a way that rivals its counterparts in the broader world of tech brands. Physicians are unhappy, big pharma is struggling to connect, insurance companies feel bogged down at best, and pharmacy retailers have yet to truly modernize even as Amazon and others enter the field.

There will be branding wins that translate into soaring market share positions and big boosts to market cap in the next few years. It’s finally happening – finance is increasingly going fintech, and healthcare will increasingly move toward healthtech.

The recent surges in AI are going to play an outsized role in each of these spaces, and the big winners will lead to superior technology, product, and branding.