5 Hot tips to secure your brand’s future.
Blogger.
Yinka olaito in Lagos Nigeria.
Many brands dream of the future they will not feature in. It is not because these brands have no potential to be there. Neither is it because the space available in the future cannot accommodate all. The sad stuff is that the future is in most times impatient with lily- liver brands.
Dreaming and wishing alone are not enough to guarantee any brand the luxury of relevance when the future arrives. The future starts from today. What a brand does with today will determine whether a brand has chances of walking through the roll calls of fame tomorrow. So here are my thoughts today.
The future belongs to the rebellious: A fundamental factor to securing a brand future is to be rebellious. Be rebellious against status qou. Real progress is often made by hungry, angry and rebellious brands. A forward looking brand must keep searching for ways to rebel against what the world says is final.
Everything is still in formative stage: to secure the future, a brand needs to have the mindset that everything that exists today is still in its formative stage. No object today is in its final stage. Those brands will not rest on its oars. It will keep striving for a better way of making life cheaper and easier to live. Using and owning cars today might have been difficult if one man did not see the possibilities. The first stage of creating more value today and tomorrow is to see issue in this way. When that happens, the brand cannot but be relevant in the future.
Dynamic nature of the world does not permit stagnancy: Does your brand believe it has to wait until the future happens before it defines a well-crafted route it will take? Does your brand believe it must spend a lot of time on celebration of recent successes at the expense of searching for new cheese? While it is good to celebrate new achievement, wasting too much time on this without recognizing that new success should open up new challenges and opportunities is a dangerous trap. The brand may discover it is standing still while the future is being shaped by wise and forward looking brands.
Have a good romance with the younger generation/kids: Our culture and tradition especially in Africa gave us a wrong notion about the kids. We are told that when adults are talking, kids should shut up as they know next to nothing. We all know this does not hold water again. The kids of today see the future more clearly than most adults. Some ideas may not look great today but that may the bomb tomorrow. Any brand that will matter tomorrow must learn from any potential ideas even when it looks stupid. Come to think of it, who will dominate constitute the majority of consumers in the future. If your brand ignores the wisdom of the kids today, it will lose the patriotism of the same in the future.
Never seek to be popular but strive to leave a legacy: brands that kiss-ass never destroy the status qou. They often strive to be popular, conform and play along. On the other hand, a ‘kick ass’ brand is not perturbed for not being popular at the initial stage. They gun for the legacy that is visible to their inner eyes. Nobody has ever made a great stride in leaving strong legacy behind just by seeking popular opinion, wanting to be in the good book of everyone. Seeking to be popular may guarantee a meal for today but that does not help the brand in taking a firm root in the future.
What is your opinion? Let us feel your pulse.
Yinka olaito is the CCO of Michael sage consulting, Lagos Nigeria. Brand development, social media, people management, policy/strategy development, marketing communications.
This article was originally posted on Nigeria Business Communities
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