Insights: Permanency through change
The Transform Awards MENA celebrated the best in rebranding and brand development across the region. Tonic International was an award winner this year
The way we perceive brands has changed, so therefore the way we approach branding should too.
Competition is now at an all-time high. Technology is changing the way we interact with brands. The demands are getting higher and some brands just simply can’t keep up.
Let’s face it, our job is getting harder.
The action of branding has been around for some time, but just recently the industry has taken off. Brands understand that building on branding – and sometimes completely rebranding from scratch – is decisive for their development and makes them stand out from their competition.
We live in a time when immediacy controls our impulses, and our choices are delegated to the brands or corporations we believe in. Generations are becoming more demanding and consumers are offering less attention in a time of rapid transformation. It is no longer about competitively, it’s about survival.
This generation is craving for experience. And people remember more what they feel rather than what they see. What they’ve gone through rather than what they’ve been told. They are looking to take part in interesting conversations and avoid being lectured.
And with the level of interaction that can be achieved with today’s technology – social media, online and digital, etc. – it is a perfect setting for brands and branding agencies to be more experiential. For the first time, technology is used in a human way, and humans control the way they experience brands. Brands that are humanised are the ones called to be successful.
This allows brand identities to be more human too. To move, speak, to show emotions, to laugh, cry, shout, dance, sing; in other words: transform.
It allows people to play with brand logos, to be entertained by them, to be triggered emotionally. To show them off and share them. To discover the different layers of a brand and create an emotional bond that makes a brand memorable.
To put it in other words, the permanency of a brand relies on its ability to change, to be flexible and adapt to the changing scenarios. Only then can brands have a chance at being relevant.
The new generation of younger, bolder brands are disruptive not because of their will to change the rules, but because of their ability to adapt to the changing environment of social media, digital, and other platforms. They were actually born to change.
And this strategy scares off many other brands. And it’s fine, some brands choose to be discrete and their branding is the result of their ambitions – strangely enough, it’s their strategy.
Knowing this, however, it’s worrying to see the stubborn nature of some brands that want to make a difference, but are still reluctant to make the logical transition from conventional templates to disruptive strategies.
Let’s be honest, in this industry success means domination. Those brands that do it right are the brands that create connections and gain people’s trust. They are allowed into people’s lives, and have a space in people’s hearts. And those that don’t, have no other option but to disappear.
Giovanni Borde is the creative director at Tonic International
The full list of winners is here.
