Brand awareness, if you work in business or marketing, you know how important it is. While your brand helps to define you, brand awareness tactics help to ensure people know you’re there. However, while you may be ploughing plenty of work and money into brand awareness, there’s a step you may not have considered that’s just as important.
Brand authenticity.
While you may be wondering what this is, you may be shocked to learn that if you don’t get this right, your brand awareness tactics may not work to the fullest extent.
Below, we take a look at everything you need to know about brand authenticity.
What is brand authenticity?
So, what is it? Simply put, it’s all about being genuine and real, showing the customer that you’re an authentic business with a genuine mission and values. While making money is at the core of all businesses, you need to show consumers that you care about them and not just the bottom line.
If you’re wondering how you can tell if you’re being authentic enough, The Authentic Brand Index measures global brands’ authenticity through the seven following characteristics:
- Originality: do you bring something new and different to the market?
- Personal Utility: do you deliver something to consumers they believe they can’t live without?
- Declared Beliefs: this is the extent to which your brand stands for more than just making money
- Sincerity: this looks at how hard your brand tries hard not to let people down
- Familiarity: how well known is your brand?
- Momentum: this looks at how quickly your brand is becoming more popular
- Heritage: do you have a relevant and engaging story?
Why is brand important?
The importance of brand authenticity can’t be understated – 91% of consumers around the world say that “communicating honestly about products and services” is the number one factor when it comes to spending with a company.
It’s particularly important for the current generations of major consumers – millennials and Gen Z.
Considered the most ‘educated and productive’ generations, these consumers have seen expenses increase drastically over the last few decades, despite wages not budging. This has made them cynical of brands and the day-to-day marketing spiel to get them to spend their hard-earned money.
Therefore, they look to spend with brands they consider trustworthy and loyal as they want to make the world a better place.
However, authenticity is just as important for Baby Boomers and Generation X too. Overall:
– 81% believe businesses need to be transparent on social media
– 90% say authenticity is important when choosing the brands they like and support
– 51% define feeling connected to a brand when the brand demonstrates empathy
How to build your brand authenticity
So, as important as it is, how do you build up your brand authenticity? Through the following steps.
- Define your brand
Take a step back and look at what makes you unique and what you stand for as a business. Knowing this will help you to incorporate this into your brand story and messaging, helping to strengthen your marketing output to reach the consumers that’ll feel connected with you.
- Developed chemistry with your consumers
Your consumers are more important than you may think. Therefore, you have to work with them on a grand scale and not just rely on them spending money with you. Start by creating content that they want, alongside an initiative that’ll work for them and not just the business. You can do this by listening to what they’re telling you via social media, forums, and feedback forms. This will help you to show that you want to make everything better for them.
- Look forward
Your consumer will change with the world, which is why you should never get too comfortable. Always look at what’s interesting to your consumer outside of your brand and do your best to incorporate this by acting on trends, disruptions, and social discourse. But don’t make it feel forced, as this could do more damage than good.
- Your promise
More important than anything else, always keep your brand promise. By ensuring your product or service is always outstanding, alongside the customer journey, you can’t go very wrong. Just like with friends and family, keeping your promise will help to keep the bonds between you and the customer strong.
If you’re wondering how you can improve your brand awareness, and think a re-brand or injecting more brand authenticity into what you do could help, get in touch with the team at Relative today to see how we can help.
