All across the globe companies allocate enormous investment in their brand development starting with the establishment of the brand identity up to the brand awareness in the target consumer groups. But the question remains – what is the perception of your brand exactly? As soon as the brand is limited to the marketing purpose we lose the power of keeping it vivid and attractive to our consumers. More and more, the opinion of our customers becomes most influential in determining the brand perception. This is where sharing of information becomes most important for the life of the brand.

Speaking of the current trends, Harvard Business Review recently brought to attention two business trends: 1) growing interest in using social media to amplify brand marketing; 2) rising pressure on businesses to be more socially responsible – value creation as a long-term investment in society.

In this light, engagement of your fans using social media becomes one of the most intensive battlefields. Is it enough to build the number of your fans? Or followers who grow using various re-marketing techniques? This usually remains passive and irresponsive statistical counter on your page. So what could bring the vitality for your brand, increase organic shares and overall interest? People react to a message, a story which brand creates along its lifecycle. Mini movies, various situations in life where your brand is shown in socially attractive content triggers people to like it or hate it, but yet creates emotion around it. Social media already became a powerful tool that consumers use to influence business through brand perception and its various interpretations.

Standard approach of marketing is killing the brand nowadays. People are more sophisticated in terms of the search for a good match between the brand proposal and values they assign around it. Keeping a regular or even perfect product is no longer enough as long as the consumer is not emotionally engaged with it.

Best way to have a feeling for the brand is to see how it can be used and then find your own application. This is how people learn of new skills in life – first they watch, then repeat. With repetition they try to overcome what they saw and find their own perfect match. With the increased content sharing over the social networks, influencers, selected accounts who have their own followers, are brought upfront of brand development. Allow personalization and creativity, and emotion will be born. This approach has already became one of most essential elements in brand’s development and competes sharply with the regular agencies as the application of the brand is not just a nice picture on the billboard, but carries the emotion to a customer for product’s applicability in daily life and usefulness (Do you remember Dove video where regular women where applying creme instead of shiny models?). Finding the influencers, selecting big ones and converting them into brand ambassadors allows brand grow faster and find the integration pathway within the group of your consumers.

Brand Influence examples

1. L’Oréal Paris has a full team who tracks 23 influencers for True Match product and believe that influencers represent an important part of its creative process.
2. The world’s favorite camera’s GoPro favorite Instagram feeds over 6.2 million people, as their visual content is mesmerizing.
3. Maybelline’s blog captures well the feeling for the brand’s personalization. With social integration it generates well and it comes all natural way.