Brands are built on promises. Brands are expectations. Brands are like relationships. Brands evoke emotions. You can’t really grasp them. It’s what we call the intangibles.
“Up to 87 percent of the market value of companies in the S&P 500 comes from the intangible assets. This is why brand and reputation management becomes increasingly important.” - Benjamin Vick
Social media has been overlooked for the last 15 years. Although, how brands communicate on social media has not really changed. In the pre-social media era, the message shaped the brand (mostly). Today, why, how and what you do is shaping the brand.
“65% of companies report that reputation is a high priority for CEO and Board of Directors? 78% agree that we are competing in a Reputation Economy, one where perception is a driver of business success. But only 16% say they are ready to take advantage of the Reputation Economy.” - Reputation Institute
Brands struggle to make the shift to audience-driven brand development because the people who design and create products/services/experiences don’t have access to the data they need. Surely Facebook (among others) provides a lot of data but the meaning of each KPI is not often clear across marketers, social media managers, company executives, etc. As a result, most brands today are rich in data, but poor in insights.
“Brand brought to social a mindset from old media, where the goal was to maximize “reach,” which is simply the number of people exposed to a brand message. The corollary online, it seemed, was to maximize one’s follower count — and companies employed a variety of inducements like coupons and free swag, not to mention sponsored posts, to amass followers.” - Harikesh S. Nair, Stanford
If you want your company to make the shift to building a message shaped by audience behavior and brand purpose (including the why, vision, values and reason for being), people at your company, not just data scientists, needs access to more qualitative data to make better decisions and ultimately build a brand people will love.
You can’t just use vanity metrics (number of followers and likes) to get meaningful insights from audience data. Otherwise, you will make a decision by either guessing or using your gut. You will be either lucky or wrong.
Everyone should have the ability to explore, learn from, and make decisions informed by audience data. That's the only way to create the best brand possible, one that’s informed and shaped by your brand’s Why and its audience. Your Brand team will be explorers and educators, not report-builders.
Unleash the potential of intangibles. It’s why we are building Gatekeepr. Gatekeepr wants to help companies building sustainable brands with purpose. We are the gatekeepers of their DNA, visions, values and reasons for being. From being the first believers of brands to carrying them through the gates of PR.
Our focus is to increase your readiness, in order to become a future proof organization in a world where stakeholders owns your license to operate, where disruption is around the corner, where a hero becomes a zero in a few years and where lucky zeroes becomes heroes when grasping opportunities of the Reputation Economy.
We’ve put together more than 35 years experience helping brands and Artificial Intelligence to build Gatekeepr. While most softwares using AI focus on what the customer says on social media, Gatekeepr focuses on how brands tell stories on and how people react to them.
