Is your brand relevant enough?

What is a relevant brand? Why do some brands succeed while others disappear? What makes brands like Nike, Ikea, Google, Samsung or Coca-Cola be so meaningful? These are key questions that CEOs and brand managers often ask themselves.

According to the Meaningful Brands study from Havas Media (http://www.meaningful-brands.com/), a meaningful brand is a brand that brings a benefit to our lives in some of the following 12 areas related to the personal or collective well being (health, happiness, finance, relationships, community, etc):

• Physical condition
• Finance
• Organization
• Intellect
• Society
• Emotions
• Nature
• Economy
• Workplace
• Community
• Environment
• Government Ethics
• According to this study only 20% of the brands are seen to bring a positive impact on people's live. Even more surprising is that the majority of people interviewed worldwide would not care if 73% of the existing brands disappeared.

When companies want to push their brands further, they need to consider these important factors.

In today's world it is not just about selling products. The clients follow a certain map to acquire our products or services. The customer experience and the clients’ feelings during the sales process is as important as the product or service itself. Companies must be ready to share their values and proposals with clients. They must be ready to create communities of users to share ideas and suggestions. They must care about their employees and their communities. This way, they will be perceived by their clients not just as brands but as companies that have a positive impact on their lives.

This is obviously hard to achieve, but in today's competitive world this can make the difference between failure and success. The good news is that new technologies can make this process run more smoothly: it is easier to engage clients through social networks and mobile applications. The key factor is that brands must generate useful and relevant content for clients rather than just do advertising.

A good example of this engagement generation would be the NIKE + community and App. Nike created a useful application for runners that could be installed in the mobile phones and will give them useful information for training such as distance, time, altitude, among others. Through this App, NIKE was able to engage a great number of runners, create a community that grows every day and even organize challenges and events in different cities. Putting all that together NIKE has been able to be seen as a brand that strongly benefits a lot of runners, a lot of clients, and has been able to push the brand much further.

Are you ready to move your brand to the next step?