Mordy Oberstein

In branding there's no substitute to having your finger on the pulse of things. This means you need to keep your eyes open. What new approaches to content are you seeing? What are seeing people complain about on social or at your kid's little league game, etc.? It's why reading about marketing news and keeping up with others in the industry is so important. But it's mainly why being able to be honest and not arrogant is so important. Thinking you know how your branding will be interpreted and not taking an honest look at the latent signals you're sending out is an invitation for disaster. You can't pull a fast one or the wool over anyone's eyes - people will catch on so fast. Taking a hard honest look is the key to everything.

The AI isn't saying anything untrue here. But I think it goes much further than empathy, etc. What I think a brand is trying to do is to create a shared experience. Something both the brand & the audience can share in and participate in. That can be a storyline or an emerging narrative that the user base can get behind. You see this with brands like Nike trying to create a shared experience around women in sports or kids in sports, etc. and the storylines that come with it. The problem with Nike is that it's too overt - anyone with half a brain sees through it and knows they don't genuinely care - they care only vis-a-vis the power it creates to impact perception and create a narrative.

You have to be careful here because what resonates via the data may not be your target audience. If I find that talking about how bad the Yankees are is popular in the data I'm looking at - that might now fly well if my actual audience who would buy my product are Yankee fans. Traffic or engagement or whatever metric you're looking at needs to be qualified to ensure it's your actual target audience who is responding.

It's all about knowing your USPs and how they plan into the user's lives - you have to really know them - feel them in your bones - the rest is details.

I generally find the comms gap comes from looking for quick wins with the comms and not appreciating the nuance that actually resonates with an audience. So many times the brand comms are all about "hyper-creative" campaigns that marketing teams use to pat themselves on the back. Instead, focus on value-driven campaigns. But the devil is in the details here - you can come off as very top-level and even "fluffy" all too easily. Get into some nuance with something original that has your own self bound up within it.

Can I challenge this notion altogether? Why is the default brand positioning AWLAYS to be a thought leader as if there's no other persona you want to exemplify? If you're a community-oriented brand I'd much rather be seen as grassroots or organic than a "thought leader" -