Brace Yourself For Marketing’s Perfect Storm

This year, marketers will see the convergence of three realities that have been building in strength for the last decade. Get ready for the boat to rock, because the 2008 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index shows this could mean a perfect branding storm.

Albert Einstein noted that we all dance to a “mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.” This year, the “piper” is going to make himself conspicuous in three big ways.

First, there is the bionic consumer, with more connectivity and control than ever before. Second is a media environment that has become more complex than any marketer could have imagined a mere 10 years ago. And third is a landscape littered with brands that are undifferentiated in the mind’s eye of even their own customers.

For the first time in 11 years, all but two of the 57 categories tracked in the annual Brand Keys Loyalty Engagement Index (that’s 97% for those of you sans calculator) have shown a shift in the drivers of consumer loyalty and engagement.

You know the part of the movie where the scientists are drinking coffee in the lab and suddenly a machine that never beeps starts to beep, because somewhere the floor of the ocean has cracked open or there’s a massive rip in the time-space continuum? Smart marketers had better start listening for the beep.

It’s not that marketers haven’t noticed the consumer is really in control. Or that brands are more difficult to differentiate from the competition. Or planning for any kind of meaningful media strategy is so complex as to make tabletop cold fusion seem like a middle-school science project.

No, it’s that we sit at that moment in time when these things have come together in enough strength to cause tsunami-like changes to virtually every product and service category.

The undeniable fact that consumers have greater control over the brand messages that even enter their personal touch point zone—let alone engage them—is entirely changing the world of media and brands. No longer reliant on crafted messages through traditional channels, consumer can readily access “real” information about a product from other consumers through the Internet 24/7.

Add to that a sea of brands where it’s hard to tell one from the other, and you see what we’re seeing now: A climactic shift in the drivers that define how consumers view categories, compare brands and, ultimately, buy.

Category drivers—and the attributes, benefits, and values they consist of—are critically important to understanding brand engagement and getting it right when dealing with today’s “bionic” consumers. The reason becomes clear when you realize that these are not measures created by researchers, but are in fact consumer-created. The consumer decides what matters, how important is it, and how much it contributes to the purchase decision.

This year there are more ‘ties’ in terms of loyalty brand rankings than ever before. That’s a sign of category standardization, but more likely the curtain has finally been pulled back from brands, exposing products and services that are simply turning into category placeholders. They know your name, but you’re not known for anything in particular. That’s not a good place to be for any brand.

For this year’s survey, 26,000 consumers, 18 to 65 years of age and drawn from the nine U.S. Census Regions, self-selected the categories in which they are consumers, and the brands for whom they are customers. They were interviewed by phone and face-to-face, to account for today’s 15% of the population who are cell phone-only consumers.

When all these things hit at once, you’re going to see marketing’s “perfect storm.” It may not hit all categories at once, but it will come to your category soon. These new loyalty and engagement measures are exceptionally revealing. At a time when most brands are struggling to differentiate themselves and remain profitable, these assessments serve as both an opportunity and warning.

Another scientist, Louis Pasture, noted, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” It will be the brands that are prepared to answer this warning with a truly consumer-centric view of their category that stand to gain the most, and establish themselves as 21st century brands and not commodities.

Robert Passikoff, Ph.D. is founder and president of Brand Keys.