When brands stop choosing

In today’s environment of increasing marketing fragmentation, brands are becoming omnipresent performers, yet struggling for mind space. Brands have never done more, and rarely meant less. To draw a parallel, fragmentation has done to brands what dating apps did to singles — ease of access and choice overload leading to reduced commitment and, consequently little impact.

The fear of missing out that once defined consumer behaviour now drives brand marketing strategy. Alas, presence is not a strategy.

Barring a few brands that have nailed the balance between visibility and meaningful impact, the rest are being herded by platforms, agencies, and specialists driving their own interests. Playbook-driven marketing has created blind spots. Brands are reacting instead of deciding, and not asking the right questions.

Is it all adding up?

We all know the marketing mantra – “Be where your consumer is.” And that effectively means being on every new platform the young consumers latch on to, for most brands. Additionally, each platform needs a different approach and serves a different purpose. YouTube’s long-form storytelling, X’s opinionated handle, and Instagram’s meme-y playfulness. There are brands that are everywhere, and even execute the platform-wise approach well.

But to what end? Does it all add up to a coherent identity or work towards the larger marketing goals?

Let us analyse the above using a few well established and rather novel marketing tactics.

The Pursuit of Personalisation

From creative customisation to personalisation at scale, layers of complexity are constantly being added to the task of relevance building. Dynamic creative and AI-driven personalisation are now standard. Personalisation morphs messaging to optimise for likelihood. And in trying to become relevant to everyone, many brands are losing the self. Brands are no longer staying true to who they are. They are chasing who the customer might be.

The Always-on Paradox

“The consumer journey does not follow campaign lifecycles. So why should brand presence be limited only to campaigns?” We have all said or heard this in our marketing meetings. This is true, but not relevant to every platform and tactic. This works well for ecommerce and D2C platforms, yet most brands are always on, instead, on social media platforms. Its genesis goes back to the early days of social media, when social engagement became the go-to metric. Today, with no organic traction for brands on social media, brands are still continuing with the legacy always-on social playbooks. And of course, no one questions. The agency gets the retainer and the brand marketer celebrates vanity metrics such as one million page likes.

The Contextualised Content

Smart topical posts, calendarised contextual content, perfect timing. There are brands that have been built on contextuality; they have owned it forever like a boss.  And then there is every other me-too brand who wants to do it in addition to everything else. Remember the 100^th Mother’s Day brand content video you saw on Facebook? Nope. No one does. The work feels like context without soul, without long-term recall. What marketers know but don’t want to admit is that consumers don’t want to engage with brands. They want to be entertained, informed, helped, or see themselves reflected. And most brands don’t do this well enough to earn attention.

The point here is not that personalisation, always-on presence, and contextualisation are meaningless. On the contrary these are extremely nuanced tactics, that build brands when implemented with the right intent, at the right place, in the right way. Having said that, are these relevant for every brand and context? Maybe not.

Today, fragmentation of consumer attention has challenged marketers and forced them to diversify their marketing efforts. That is a leap. But this leap needs to be backed by hard choices, clarity and conviction. In the absence of which, all this is just unnecessary noise, spreading marketing efforts too thin. Brands must choose. Choose to build a coherent identity, to have a clear voice, to chase meaningful metrics.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com.