What is digital branding?

Consumer behavior is not a passing trend. In fact, now is a perfect time to create a competitive edge through understanding consumer behavior and implementing research findings in your digital strategy to get ahead of competitors. Recent research by McKinsey & Company revealed that companies recognize the importance of understanding consumer behavior, but few are acting on it.

This creates an opportunity for agile businesses to realize the importance of digital branding. Companies that take action now to use psychology and consumer behavior research to guide their marketing strategy are poised to be the innovators that lead their industries and position themselves at the forefront.

The American Marketing Association defines a Brand as “A name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.“ But as our world becomes more technologically advanced and complex, classic differentiation will become increasingly difficult. Essentially, all modern products and services are great in terms of functionality and quality. The only difference is our personal, subjective, experience.

Modern branding is the strategic management of our customers’ experience with our company. It promises what awaits the customer if they buy that particular product, service, or experience. Digital Branding is simply creating our business personality and managing these experiences online.33% PSYCHOLOGY 33% STRATEGY 33% ADVERTISING

Nearly 4 billion, 46% of the world population have an internet connection today, and the number growing by the minute. Our lives are digital. We use the internet to stay in touch with family and friends, consume news, share photos and videos, make purchases, get directions, and even find Pokémon. New trends in wearables and other always-on, always-connected devices are making our lives even more dependent and reliant on the digital ecosystem than ever before. If you have ever lost or broken your smartphone for a day, you realize how much we take our digital life for granted and how intrinsic it actually is.

We live everywhere and nowhere, we are real people with digital identities, our lives fragmented and distracted. Naturally, many marketers believe that brands have to disrupt, find a way to rise above the noise, break through the clutter, to catch consumers’ elusive attention. Consumers must become consciously aware of our message or our brands will become obsolete. According to Dr. Robert Heath, there is another way.

Dr. Heath has found in 2001 that we learn about brands by subconsciously processing the overall feel, tone, and visual cues of a brand and storing that information into our memory in a form of associations. This process is known in behavioral studies as low-involvement processing or implicit learning. We do not pay conscious attention to advertising messages but form unconscious emotions that are learned and encoded by overall brand experience and meta-communications. For this reason, you have to understand your target audience’s psychology if you aim to create cohesive digital experiences. Big brands like Apple, Disney, Starbucks, and Virgin America have teams of digital marketing strategists. Brands like Amazon, Pandora, and Facebook would not exist without digital branding.

We’ll tell your brand story consistently through all aspects of your digital presence by understanding how your audience behaves and thinks. We believe in a holistic approach to an online presence that is based on a granular understanding of multi-channel consumer behavior, to help you create actionable plans that include the missing piece of successful Digital Strategy: the psychology of digital behavior.

Studying and analyzing the online behavior of your consumers will help position your marketing and branding strategies to serve their needs. And what is business today if not understanding and serving the needs of your customers? As Gartner Vice President Tiffani Bova recently explained, “Customer experience is the last source of sustainable differentiation and the new competitive battleground.” 

We can help you focus on psychological principles that guide the way consumers think, feel, reason, and select between you and your competitors. By uncovering the latest advancements in digital branding research, we can help you influence your customers’ decisions and create effective digital strategies that can turn your company into a digital brand.

We can help you understand your target audience’s behavior, segment their profiles, and research the psychology behind why they act the way they do; then, implement and test strategic initiatives to elicit exponential improvement in the results. By understanding your consumers’ underlying motivations and frustrations, we can work together to facilitate a customer experience that will delight users, increase conversions, reduce churn, and create loyal brand evangelists.

Nice to meet you

Helen Evenchen

---

Digital marketing strategist, wanderer, insighter, foodie, a mom. I’m also the marketing psychology geek behind Insightout Digital.
I have an MBA in consumer behavior and have been helping businesses big and small and teaching MBA students since 2004. I love helping entrepreneurs and eComm businesses just like you grow exponentially using systematic methods rooted in real human psychology and behavioral economics research.