The new millennium brought a major shift to the world of brand building. Brands, especially prestige or luxury brands – ‘Ueber-Brands’ – are no longer just marketing instruments for attracting customers; they are embraced as guiding the enterprise overall, inspiring and engaging internal and external stakeholders. Two big drivers that pushed this shift – technology and people. Technology: Digitisation has brought transparency and accessibility. The first forces brands and companies to practice what they preach; the second empowers and commands direct brand-consumer interaction. Together they have made brands as a purely external ‘image’ or ‘label’ impossible: it must be lived. People: We have all been overmarketed to. ‘Hidden persuaders’ are now pretty obvious to almost everyone, and we have become more critical of crude commercialism, expecting reflection and responsibility, even as we still run for the sale. We want to shop ourselves a better world. There has also been a general trend towards independent ‘company brands’, following the tradition of highend designer labels in fashion, the ‘grandes maisons’, where the brand is the sign over the door and sales are done directly to consumers: My name. My work. My reputation. This led us in 2015 to revisit the way Ueber-Brands are built, brands that appear above and beyond their competition, peerless and priceless. Our latest work translates the theory into action, with our Ueber-Brand Program™ presenting four things you need to understand if you want to build a modern prestige brand. START WITH YOURSELF This is nothing less than turning the traditional brand strategy model on its head: Don’t start with market or consumer research, start with your ideas and ideals. Of course, customer and business realities still matter, but only once you are clear about what you want to dedicate your brand to and why. Then you will use them to validate your concept, adjust, find the right target, ensure profitability etc. If you start out by looking for market gaps, you will never be anything but opportunistic, rather than leading with a sense of mission. You must inspire what could be, not be defined by what is. Brands today are, first and foremost, agents of change. Their job is not to make overblown promises, but to give us hope for a slightly brighter, better tomorrow, to help us become who we want to be. There are many good examples, including Airbnb, who not only revolutionised the hospitality industry but gave us a way to feel we ‘Belong Anywhere’. DON’T LET DATA DRIVE YOUR DREAM, BUT SHARE IT Marc Pritchard, CMO of P&G, was one of the first to kick-off a more mature and balanced assessment of our shiny new digital world when he declared that the days of all-digital are numbered in 2017. This attitude is gaining ground, with adidas one of the latest to announce a shifting in focus from performance marketing back to including more traditional brand building communication. The Burning Man festival does not spend a penny on social media campaigns. Their magic lies in keeping all ‘shut’, disabling live posts and feeds, for example, and instead creating thousands of personal experiences that participants share organically and personally. None of these big players are rejecting the possibilities of online communication, data mining, re-targeting, individualised interaction etc, but they are recognising and utilising these possibilities while being aware of their limitations. There is a difference between tactical communication and strategic brand building. Quantity and quality are often opposing goals; efficiency is not the same as effectiveness. Individual marketing fulfils other functions than public campaigns, thus, it can never be either or, it must always be “as well as”. The big data party is not over, but it seems we are coming back to our senses. Data and performance marketing can be helpful in connecting with targets, but they should not take over. ELEVATE THE TANGIBLE BY REACHING FOR THE INTANGIBLE “The mystery and the protocol, it’s not there to keep us apart; it’s there to keep us alive,” says Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown. The same holds true for Ueber-Brands. 42 | If you start out by looking for market gaps, you will never be anything but opportunistic, rather than leading with a sense of mission. You must inspire what could be, not be defined by what is. ʻʻ ʼʼ
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