Incorporating Insights in Your Branding Campaigns

Ever wonder why certain brands seem to stick in your mind long after you’ve seen an ad or visited their website? It’s not just catchy slogans or flashy visuals – it’s the power of insights.

These aren’t just fleeting observations; they’re deep understandings that unlock the true potential of your brand.

In this article, branding expert Chris Kocek, Founder and CEO of Gallant Branding, shares the power of insights in driving business innovation and the seven techniques to uncover insights that can revolutionize your branding approach. 

Check out Chris Kocek and Jason Barnard’s episode of Kalicube Tuesdays!

What Insight Is Not

Insight, as Chris elaborates, is not simply a data point, trend, human truth, or personal observation, but a constellation of all these elements coming together to solve a problem, inspire new product designs, or innovative marketing campaigns that can provide a long-term advantage for a brand.

Insights play a crucial role in branded search optimization by informing content creation, keyword selection, and audience targeting strategies. 

While there are insights that are interesting to explore, in a business context, actionable insights that are useful and can be implemented quickly are more valuable. Branding campaigns should aim to make a brand synonymous with a category, helping a brand become the first thing that comes to mind in its niche.

 Elevating Your Brand with Insight

To really make your branding campaign hit the mark, you want your brand to become the go-to name in its category. Think about how when people hear “vacation homes,” they immediately think of Airbnb, or when they think of smartphones, Apple’s iPhone comes to mind first.

As a business owner, it’s crucial to understand the power of using insights to boost your brand, especially when you’re launching something new that people might not be familiar with yet. Take iFetch, for example. They make automatic ball launchers for dogs, but not everyone knows about this product. By focusing on building brand recognition and creating specific search terms associated with their brand, they successfully introduced their product to the market.

Techniques for Uncovering Insights

There are seven techniques for uncovering insights that can revolutionize your branding approach.

1. Keep Asking Why– Keep asking “WHY?” When you look at how somebody’s doing something today, or the way that your business is doing something today, you have to ask, “Why are we doing it this way?”

And that’s what makes it so challenging in boardrooms, because if you are supposed to be the expert on the brand or you’re supposed to be the expert on the category and someone is asking you these questions, it threatens your identity as the expert. So you have to have a culture of trust to be able to keep asking why. 

2. Create Conflict- What conflict does is it gets to the emotional heart of the matter. So if you create two polarities just using the word, “Do you like this or this? Which one’s best? Which is worse?”, you’re going to get heated. Ideas. There’s no shortage of opinions on the Internet and in social media, so creating conflict can be a great way to unveil an insight, or again, a breadcrumb trail that leads you to an insight. 

Again, these are techniques that are meant to get you closer to an insight, but you still have to connect the dots and articulate them. But by creating conflict in a focus group setting or among your customers to kind of see what they feel about something, you’re going to get some very interesting answers that are not guarded, that are not even rational or thinking. They’re going to be emotional answers. And emotion is where advertising usually wants to go.

3. Reframe the Question-  A lot of times we ask a question a certain way, and maybe if we just reframed it a little bit, just a slight shift in the way we ask the question, people will open up in a totally different way and give you brand new ideas. 

4. Look at the Periphery-  A lot of times with problems, it’s like if you look directly at it, you’re not going to be able to solve it. But when you look to the side, to the left or to the right, there are clues on the left or the right that you may have been myopic about before. And now you see the thing that’s really influencing what’s going on. You have to solve problems through a different angle. 

5. Interrogate Language-  Analyze language usage and semantics to uncover underlying meanings and motivations. Pay attention to how people describe their experiences. “Frustrated” might indicate deeper dissatisfaction, while “comfortable” could hint at a desire for excitement.   

6. Find the Contradiction- Identify contradictions within society or consumer behavior to reveal underlying tensions ripe for exploration. People contradict themselves all the time, or society sends mixed messages to us all the time. 

So the easy campaign there is the Dove’s campaign for real beauty. On the one hand, you have people saying, “hey, it’s what’s inside that counts, your personality, who you are, that’s what matters most”. And on the other hand, you’ve got many societal messages saying, “no, you’ve got to curl and powder and nip and tuck and do all these different things to look a certain way”. Beauty is only skin deep. Between those contradictions, the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty was born, challenging the culture’s previously held definitions of beauty and sparking conversations about real beauty.

7. Ask “What If. ..?”– When you ask “what if?,” what you’re doing is you’re opening up your imagination toward innovation.You stimulate creativity and innovation by exploring alternative scenarios and possibilities.  And “what if?” is the imagination. It is where we could be. 

Connecting Insights with Branded Search

When we connect insights with branded search, it’s like linking the dots between what people are looking for and what businesses offer. By understanding what consumers are searching for and why, companies can make sure their online presence hits the mark. It’s all about speaking the same language as our audience and showing up where they’re actively looking. This not only boosts our visibility but also helps us build genuine connections and grow our brand in a way that feels natural and meaningful.

By leveraging insights to understand search intent, businesses optimize their branded search strategies to align with consumer needs and preferences. By addressing consumer queries and pain points directly, businesses enhance their visibility and relevance in search engine results pages (SERPs), driving organic traffic and brand awareness.

How can Kalicube help incorporate insights in branding campaigns? 

Kalicube can help incorporate insights into branding campaigns by:

1. Providing a prioritized list of sites where a brand’s information is already available, allowing for targeted updates and corrections to ensure accuracy across the web.
2. Tracking the brand’s presence in Google’s Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Panel to monitor changes in the confidence score as updates are made, guiding strategy effectiveness.
3. Monitoring the growth of the Knowledge Panel and identifying which sources it cites, offering insights into how Google perceives a brand’s authority and relevance.
4. Advising against relying on Wikipedia as the primary source for a brand’s message, thus encouraging brands to create an Entity Home that they control directly.

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