Meaning Powers A New Era Of Brand Strategy

This piece was published in Branding Strategy Insider.

We live in a world where the symbol has become the new product. This is why meaning needs to become the new strategy. Staying symbolically relevant to people and culture is the new number one task brands need to master today to create future relevance.

The world has changed.

But unless we adapt, it’ll be a change for the worse.

Due to the sheer scope of complexity in our lives, we are becoming paralysed.

So are brands, which are increasingly out of sync with reality.

Despite the last 50 years of progress in technology, the actual way we manage brands has advanced very little. Brands are still managed in silos. This results in a range of issues: brands today are innately fragmented, symbolically irrelevant, unable to mirror society and people’s needs, are often insensitive to cultural nuances and incapable of adapting to change in a real profound sense.

We have plenty of data.

We have plenty of technology.

What we don’t have is meaning.

We need to find a way to make brands meaningful again and bring them closer to people. Not driven by technology but rather enabled by it. Brands need to be…