Why digital is not enough

We live in an increasingly digital world, one where a brand’s digital presence is inseparable from the brand itself – where the two are so integrated that the lines between them blur into non-existence. Indeed, a healthy and robust brand will have digital in its DNA, but that doesn’t mean those digital strands will define what that brand is.

Digital is simply a collection of channels (i.e. strands). A brand can choose to optimize those channels to reach its full (i.e. genetic) potential, but those channels alone are not enough to produce engaging and meaningful brand interactions.

After all, digital channels can only amplify a brand’s messaging in each of their own unique ways, but that messaging has to come from somewhere, and without that messaging to guide digital efforts, those channels often wander aimlessly, without clear purpose. In other words, to start with digital before messaging is a lot like putting the cart before the horse: the horse might still be able to push the cart forward to some degree, but it won’t be able to see where it’s going, and is likely to trip up on its own reins.

The digital-first fallacy

There are two reasons so many brands often put the digital cart ahead of the marketing horse: attribution and opportunity.

On the tracking and attribution side of things, digital allows you to track your efforts, attribute results, and measure ROI better than any other channel. From cookies to analytics, targeting a user through any number of variables, tracking them through your site, and then retargeting them after they leave is next to child’s play.

Credit: Markus Gjengaar

In other words, the age-old adage that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” doesn’t necessarily apply to digital. But just as making decisions based solely on measurable data is its own type of fallacy, prioritizing digital just because you can measure efforts will not necessarily yield the results your business needs. Sure, X-amount of spend can produce X-number of sales/acquisitions/activations with X-amount of ROI, but those sales/acquisitions/activations do not necessarily come in the quality or quantity that your brand needs to build a business on.

On the opportunity side of things, there’s how the already fast-growing ecommerce space was accelerated to an  unprecedented rate by world events in recent years. For instance, “Digital Commerce 360 estimates [that] the pandemic contributed an extra $218.53 billion to ecommerce’s bottom line over the past two years.” However, the IMF found that while:

On average, the online share of total spending rose sharply from 10.3 percent in 2019 to 14.9 percent at the peak of the pandemic, but then fell to 12.2 percent in 2021. [But in] many advanced economies, the online shares are now either at or below the predicted pre-COVID trend levels.

So, while it might have made perfect economic (and logistical) sense for brands to focus their efforts on digital in recent years, it would seem that that fast-inflating ecommerce bubble is now contracting.

Source: IMG Blog

However, it also seems that before the bubble started contracting, it impacted consumer behaviour, and these new behaviours pose an enduring challenge for brands. Specifically, “consumer loyalty to their typical brands has fallen.” Indeed, eMarketer reported in 2021 that “more than 80% of consumers bought a different brand than their usual.” As McKinsey noted the same year:

The pandemic ushered in an unprecedented level of channel switching and brand loyalty disruption. A whopping 75 percent of consumers tried new shopping behaviors, with many of them citing convenience and value. Fully 39 percent of them, mainly Gen Z and millennials, deserted trusted brands for new ones. That restlessness is reflected in the fact that many younger consumers say that they are still searching for brands that reflect their values.

So not only are consumers choosing price-point (or availability) over loyalty, but the youngest of them are struggling to find brands worthy of their loyalty altogether, and digital channels alone seem insufficient to foster that loyalty.

The question then becomes: how should brands navigate these new waters? While ecommerce will continue to grow by double digits, that growth is slowing, so brands must find ways to capture disproportionately more of that growth year-over-year. And competing price-point and availability are not a sustainable growth strategy.

Back to basics, back to strategy

With consumer loyalty wavering, especially among younger consumers (i.e. the future of the economy), the only way for brands to achieve sustainable growth in the years to come, is if they capture a greater and greater share of their respective markets, year-over-year. But to win in any given market, a brand needs to understand more than that market’s supply and demand dynamics. It needs to understand the space it occupies both in the market and the minds of consumers, and then plot a trajectory to expand that stake.

Credit: Jukan Tateisi

This is where strategy comes in. And all strategy starts with asking (and answering) the right questions. Of course, there are good questions and there are bad questions – but the only dumb questions are the ones that we don’t ask. After all, in business, the questions we fail to ask often come with costs – and those costs could be either tangible (e.g. lost profits), speculative (e.g. missed market opportunities), or outright hidden (e.g. unforeseen operating costs).

In marketing, however, there are at least 9 critical areas in which brands must ask the right questions before choosing which channels to prioritize (and planning campaigns around them).

1. Defining your brand’s value-proposition

You know your product or service offering, and you know why consumers need it, but is your brand communicating that value proposition to the marketplace? And more importantly, are you communicating that to the right target audience?

Whenever approaching any marketing initiative, it’s important to ask: “How is this communicating our value-prop?”

2. Refining your brand’s USP

Beyond your value-prop (i.e. what it has to offer consumers), but do you know what sets your brand aside from the competition (who offer similar value-props)? In other words, what’s your unique selling proposition (USP)?

A clear and tangible value-prop is only part of your brand’s messaging picture. It’s also important to communicate what it is about your products/services are unique, and why they are the best option for your target audience.

3. Determining your brand’s values

Your brand is more than its products/services, value-props, or USP. It’s an entity and identity in and of itself. And that entity has its own values.

What is it about your brand that inspires consumers to identify with it? What makes consumers want to buy from it? Is it the lowest possible price, the greatest value at its current price-point, quality over quantity, or function over form? Is it looking to dominate the market or disrupt it? And how do your products/services reflect these values?

Determining what your brand’s values are will help it refine its USP, better define its target market, and establish the tone and messaging it needs to engage those consumers. In other words, once your brand knows what it stands for, it can not only find its voice, but start speaking its own truth.

4. Manifesting your brand’s vision

Beyond your brand’s value-prop, USP, and values, what is its vision for taking those to market? For being the change that it wants to see in the world (or marketplace)?

If your brand offers the lowest prices, how will it achieve the cost structures and supply chain to do so? If it’s going to dominate the market, how is it going to overtake the competition? And if it’s going to disrupt the market entirely, how are your products/services going to challenge the status quo? In other words, how does your brand intend to actually walk its talk?

A vision is essentially a roadmap. It’s a plan for completing its journey and each of your products or services should represent a step toward the fulfillment of that vision – and that vision should be clear to consumers.

Credit: Maarten van den Heuvel

5. Identifying your target market

Two products can have similar value-props and price-points, but still be meant for very different markets – whether those markets are distinguished by geography, age, or some other demographics.

This is why your brand’s USP, values, and vision are so important. Your product might be completely interchangeable with those of the competition, but some consumers will identify more with your brand’s values and visions than those of your competitors.

So once your brand fully understands its identity, it’s important to consider which market segments of the market share its values, and will readily identify with both your brand and what it has to offer.

6. Understanding your audience(s) personas

Identifying with its target market(s) is only part of the picture. Your target market must also identify with your brand. And that requires understanding who those consumers are as human beings – i.e. what their interests, values, and personalities are.

In other words, you have to appreciate the different psychologies that drive different segments of your target market and inspire them to take action. What kind of personalities make up your target market? What are their priorities? What inspires them? How does that demographic break down into actual humanized segments? And how is your brand going to engage and resonate with those human beings?

7. Determining those personas’ values

Just as your brand has its own values, and those values should resonate with your target market segments on some level, the consumers who comprise your audience have a whole range of values that have nothing to do with what your brand stands for or has to offer them.

So, the question is: Where is the overlap between your brand’s visions and values, and those of the personas that make up your target market? Essentially, it’s not enough for your brand to reflect its consumer’s values; it also has to align with all their other values that pertain to your value-prop and/or USP.

8. Aligning your messaging to reflect all of this

Simply because you build it, that doesn’t mean that they will come. Beyond your brand understanding its value-prop, USP, value, vision, target market, and audience, it needs to communicate all that to consumers in a way that engages and resonates with them.

How does your brand’s messaging communicate all of this? How are its values reflected in its value-prop and USP? How does that messaging articulate your brand’s vision? How does any of this speak to your audience’s own needs and values? And how does the tone of that messaging resonate to the human personas that comprise that audience?

9. Identifying where your audience channels

Finally, messaging only goes so far if it falls on deaf ears. In fact, it’s critical that your messaging reaches its target audience where they are, when they’re engaged, and in a way that is going to resonate with it.

In other words, part of understanding your audience is understanding the channels they rely on. From television and podcasts to search results and social networks, understanding where your audience is engaged makes all the difference between ‘spray-and-pray’, and targeting your audience with the right message, in the right place, at the right time.

Strategy before channels

For many brands, digital marketing has been a saving grace. While it’s helped so many retailers survive the pandemic, it’s been at the very heart of so many startups that have become household names.

At the end of the day, though, digital is more of a collection of channels, and is no replacement for a robust, targeted strategy. Indeed, to put channels ahead of strategy is much like putting the horse before the cart. So before investing in digital (or any of its channels), your brand should be asking itself what is its go-to-market strategy, and how (if at all) those channels support that strategy.