Eudaimonia: Why Health Care Brands Must Go Beyond Treatment to Build Real Trust
What is best for human beings? Aristotle spent a lifetime working toward an answer. He found that most of what we pursue, friends, health, and security, is desirable not in isolation but because it points toward something more fundamental. A deeper form of happiness. A life well lived. He called it eudaimonia, derived from the […]
Nudge Theory for Brands: Three Ways Behavioral Science Can Improve Customer Experience
It started in a men’s restroom. Not a laboratory. Not a boardroom. A men’s restroom in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. More specifically inside the urinals. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, the fathers of nudge theory, have seen their ideas applied elegantly across business, health care, and government. But one of their favorite illustrations involves a simple […]
5 Common Mistakes in Building Brand Trust
In July 2016, Wells Fargo was the envy of many financial institutions. Relatively untarnished by the post-recession ire directed at many of its peers, the company’s stock had surged 26% since the depths of the economic crisis. Only 15 percent of consumers felt negative sentiments toward the brand, while 60 percent viewed it positively. Two months […]
The Rise of the Social Brand: What Instagram Reveals About Connecting with Customers
The baby-blue bears were first sighted in 2016. They appeared in Instagram posts from no fewer than three Kardashian sisters. Soon, Vanessa Hudgens, Emily Ratajkowski, and other celebrities supplied their Instagram endorsements. In the following months, SugarBear Hair vitamins would become the “bestselling hair vitamin online,” – a distinction the brand still claims today. In […]
Your Brand Storytelling Checklist: Everything You Need to Craft Your Brand’s Story
On the first day of her high school journalism class, Nora Ephron’s teacher gave the class an assignment. The students were to write the lede of a news story, adapted from the following information: Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire school faculty will travel to Sacramento […]
Dust on the Plants and the Evolution of Brand Health Tracking
Brand health metrics are stuck in the past. Traditional measures like usage, awareness and Net Promoter Score (NPS) barely scratch the surface of a brand’s true essence. CMOs need a more nuanced approach to gauge brand performance as markets evolve at breakneck speed. Living in the Past But while it is a great attention-grabbing title, […]
4 Ways Consumer Psychology Can Improve Your Marketing
One of the seminal psychological insights of the 21st century began with a jar of jam—or rather, 24 of them—a total that would soon prove problematic. Psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a display table in a gourmet grocery store featuring two dozen jam varieties. If shoppers sampled their wares, they received a […]
The Appreciation Evolution: Moving From Your Organization’s Problems to its Potential
Declining profits and product quality. Failed cost reduction efforts. Strained relationships among employees and increasing pressure from competitors. Gina Hinrichs, an internal process consultant at John Deere, recognized plenty of problems in the company’s combine harvester manufacturing department. Partnering with Jim Ludema, a professor at Benedictine University, Hinrichs organized a five-day summit for the entire […]
You Break It, You Buy It: Why Trust Matters Most When It Comes to Consumer Data
A $60 billion plunge in market value in less than 48 hours. A $6 billion drop in Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth. Massive user disengagement and a surge in app deletions. In the aftermath of 2018’s Cambridge Analytica data breach, Facebook had ample evidence that it was facing a major crisis. Yet, perhaps the most telling figure related to the […]
Connecting Systems 1 and 2 Thinking: Helping Customers Forge Intuitive Connections with Your Brand
The moment she laid eyes on the kouros, Evelyn Harrison knew something was wrong. Harrison, one of the world’s foremost experts in ancient Grecian art, stood in the basement of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Museum officials had brought her here to admire their latest major acquisition: a statue of a nude boy dating […]
5 Errors to Avoid in Activating Brand Strategy
In April 2017, Pepsi released an extended advertisement. The video, which lasted two and a half minutes in its entirety, featured a fictional protest march in the streets of an unspecified city. In the ad’s closing moments, Kendall Jenner emerged from among the protesters to present a Pepsi to a police officer. The ad succeeded […]
Your Brand is More Than Your Logo
In 2010, psychologists T. Bettina Cornwall and Anna McAlister published research entitled “Children’s Brand Symbolism Understanding” in the journal Psychology and Marketing. In the months that followed, public outcry would obscure many of their study’s most interesting outcomes. The experiment assessed 38 Australian children between the ages of 3 and 5, asking them if they […]
