Keeping up with continuously changing consumer preferences while aligning brand strategies with evolving marketing trends can feel like a never-ending game of Tetris. Adapting to these shifts is essential to maintaining brand relevancy and adhering to ongoing successful business operations. As a trusted small business partner, Everest Business Funding is here to help with this article that breaks down how to sustain brand relevancy in progressive markets and the ever-changing partiality of consumers.
1. Understand Evolving Consumer Preferences
The wonderful tool of technology has allowed small business owners, brand strategists, and marketing teams to get a better grasp on who their target audience is and what their customers want. Social media, online reviews, and the purchasing decisions consumers make help businesses gain the insight needed to see the rolling evolution of what consumers prefer for products, services, customer service, and brand interaction experience. Leveraging such an understanding of consumer behavior can lead to smarter decision-making when planning brand strategies and marketing plans.
If a brand lacks an online presence, gathering consumer behavior data and marketing research can be tricky, making aligning brand strategy tough. Both global trends and the shift in consumer behavior can be identified on social media, while website tracking data can grant insight into customer purchase tendencies.
2. Ask and Listen
One of the best ways for a business to understand what a consumer wants is to simply ask. Not only will this move provide straightforward answers, but it also allows for a brand to build authenticity while maintaining value.
Markets adapt and fluctuate based on consumer needs, so inquiring with returning customers or new target markets on how to meet those needs will allow a brand to meet the consumer where they are at and remain relevant. Brands that practice active listening to consumers will supply a product or service to meet a communicated customer need. The action of asking, listening, responding, and meeting also opens the door for a brand to establish open communication with customers and enhances and authenticates consumer interactions and experiences with the brand.
3. Keep Up with Current Events and Align Values
Every brand should establish itself with pillars of core values that target markets can relate to and appreciate. For a brand to stay relevant in market trends, an effective brand strategy is to align core values with current events. Utilizing productive messaging, such as storytelling through platforms like social media, can successfully connect a brand’s core values to a current event and further reside with customers and what is going on in the world.
4. Open-mindedness
Evolving customer preferences and market trends result in continuous changes and progressive development for business’ brand survival. “Movement is life,” said Gerry Lane in the 2013 movie World War Z, which also sums up the scope of brand relevancy: openness to change and adapt quickly is the best way for a brand to stay relevant.
The popular makeup brand CoverGirl is a prime example of practicing such open-mindedness when its famous slogan, “Easy, Breezy, Beautiful,” did not fully align anymore with buying customers. The brand realized its makeup was used by more consumers as a tool for self-expression and shifted the brand slogan to: “I am what I make up.” The reinvention was considered a progressive milestone for the brand, including more of its target market and new consumers into the brand’s presence.
About Everest Business Funding
Everest Business Funding provides alternative finance options and revenue-based funding to small business owners. They serve a diverse pool of businesses, from healthcare to retail, to help them obtain working capital to grow, buy inventory, launch marketing campaigns, or hire staff. Everest Business Funding’s clients are treated with respect and receive high-quality guidance and service from its professionals.
