Brand Loyalty is Vanishing or Is It?

Today's web-savvy consumers are savvy deal finders. They are quick to seize on the brand or the store that offers the best deal. Hence, in an effort to increase the essence of brands; companies are on a massive crusade to bombard clients and prospects with constant messages and tooling techniques. The hope here is to reign in the distracted and disloyal customer. Unfortunately, the blitz of this downpour of marketing messages isn't empowering. It is overwhelming. "Rather than pulling customers into the fold, marketers are pushing them away with relentless and ill-conceived efforts to engage."

So what are the attributes of a sticky brand? In other words what makes consumers stick to your brand? You guessed it right. Keep it simple stupid.
Simplicity is the DNA of your Brand Longevity. (Apple had it right all this time.)

In a research conducted by CEB Global, over 7000 consumers vouched that single biggest driver of stickiness, by far, was “decision simplicity”—the ease with which they can gather trustworthy information about a product and confidently and efficiently weigh their purchase options.

Help your customers by helping them to streamline their decision making. What does it take to acquire sticky consumers?

CEB study found that the best tool for measuring consumer-engagement efforts is the “decision simplicity index,” a gauge of how easy it is for consumers to gather and understand (or navigate) information about a brand, how much they can trust the information they find, and how readily they can weigh their options. The easier a brand makes the purchase-decision journey, the higher its decision-simplicity score.

Marketers from all mediums (including trade shows) have to orient themselves in helping consumers to simplify their decisions. It requires new strategies. It requires crafting cooler communications. Levi’s® Curve ID comes to my mind as a revolutionary way to shop for jeans. They have narrowed down four distinct fits that addresses a range of body shapes. Read their customer reviews. Not all of them is going ga-ga over the quality of the jeans but they are euphoric about the fit. After all, jeans are about the perfect fit, isn't it.

Does quality matter? Yes it does. Does price matter? Yes it does. All the stuff they teach you at "B" schools does matter. But what matters most to your customers is that you are helping them help themselves. You are simplifying their decision making process and contributing to the memorability aspect of their purchase journey.

Today, in our dizzy digital age, creativity is the most sought after key word, — that will be my creative and educated guess.
We admire creative, thought provoking leaders. We look towards innovative creativity to solve our fossil fuel dependency. We applaud inventive creativity in the form of re-conceptualization of existing governments. The Green Revolution has launched a potent creative skill that I.A. Tayor  (1959- The nature of the creative process) calls emergenative creativity.  It is a new creation opening an entirely a new paradigm. Good or bad; think about hybrid seeds, cloned corns, plastic from plants and of course the phenomenal creativity of financial engineering that paved way for the financial crisis of 2008. Well, whatever that may be, to be creative and to stay creative is the name of the game. We are all looking for ways to activate our creativity at the snap of our fingers.

The irony is we expect ingenuity to be at our beck and call, yet we starve ourselves of the right environment that feeds it. Ask an artist, a musician or an athlete about the out of the world place they call “the zone.” They all acknowledge a sense of immersion and effortless ease. It is called being in the Flow.

To encounter creativity as a regular phenomenon, James Webb Young in his classic book, "A Technique for Producing Ideas" provdes some simple steps to harness creative ideas.

1. Gather tons of Information on Your Subject Matter. Research, Research and Research.
2. Understand the Information. Be expansive with the creative technique. Question conventions and assumptions. Employ Lateral Thinking: It is about finding a solution to problems through an indirect approach. Be constrained in your technique. Force associations between the subject matter and a random word from a dictionary.
3. Consciously disconnect from the project. Let your subconscious take it from here.
4. Give Life to your Idea. Make it real!

Needless to say, the creative process unleashes the Flow State as popularised by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He spent decades studying a wide variety of professionals, actors, artists, scholars and athletes who regularly cultivate that zone-like state of effortlessness he calls Flow. He concluded most of the people he studied experience their deepest flow-states while engaged in extremely challenging physical or mental work.

Find expression in something that nourishes a "strong sense of effortless flow to inspire the deliberate practice/work" that will propel you to the pinnacle of your profession.

“There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.”  — Martha Graham

We are living and breathing in an Age of Integration.
Every action that we now undertake is or can be integrated with the larger system. The only limiting factors being our own imagination and if it is realizable computationally.

Being an informed citizen of this age "requires the ability to apply computational ways of thinking to design, to writing, to experimentation, to artistic expression, and to problem solving – to the very core of human intellectual activity. In this age, our ideas are no longer constrained solely by what is physically realizable, but by what is computationally realizable. {Hence the popularity of de-constructivism in modern architecture} ........An artist is now able to create an artwork that only exists when someone interacts with it – specifying a framework within which each visitor can create a work of art. A chemist is now able to search more effectively for new compounds by modeling them before ever going into the lab. Nearly every discipline is changing, not just because of new tools but because of new computational ideas and paradigms." Source: Congressional testimony of Dr. Rita Colwell, Director National Science Foundation.

In a trade show display design when we go twenty feet high with inset back-lit marquee picture cube performing as way finders, consolidated presentation areas as enthralling engaging elements, towering messaging collaborating with brand performance we can proudly attest to the fact that we have achieved efficiency in economics, engineering in scale and artistry in form. It is in the intelligent integration of form, function and fiscal competence that this booth design as shown above comes alive in a 20'x 20' island space.

Okay, now what? Now that you have an integrated brand architecture dominating your space, how do you leverage your stance and integrate your prospects into clients and your clients into loyal brand ambassadors. Here are 2 directives that usually always works. One, know your audience. This is the key. We are at cross-roads of integrated cross generational and cross-cultural phenomena. Learn cross-generational marketing. Two, know marketing trends impacting events along with the integrating factor of attendee quality trends and exhibit performance trends. Download the white paper Evolving Exhibition Trends and their Impact on the Value of Exhibiting.

Armed with the integrated dynamics of trends and targets you are now set for success at your next captivating trade show event. Good Luck!