How can new products or brands break through in 2021?

5 mins read

How can new products or brands break through in 2021? This was one of the questions we asked the contributors of our eBook. What caught our eye was that each one of our contributors has a slightly different approach in their answers.

If you want to read more of their answers, make sure you grab a copy of our eBook Chartered Marketers Perspective on building a resilient marketing strategy for 2021.

We had the approach of analytics, data and research from Helen Christopher, Jamie Chen, Michael Hughes, Eliza Dirnu, Samantha Brizzi and Oltea Belciuganu. The other approach was more focused on boldness, courage and sincerity from Jess Robson and Sue Isles.

So, to answer the question of how new products or brands can break through in 2021 we will present all our contributors’ answers.

Helen: “Value propositions, proof points, metrics”

Jamie: “They must be user and customer-centric. I think that whether it is the experience of using the product/service or the experience of encountering the brand online or offline, marketers need to spend more time listening and collecting customer feedback”.

Michael: “Identify a needs gap in the radically changed landscape and develop something that fills it before someone else does.”

Eliza: “I think the ability to respond quickly to changing customer needs, to reimagine business models and to care for employees are the key factors that allowed many companies to confront the challenges of this pandemic and make the most of the opportunities of the new working world”.

Brand activism has progressed and evolved from CSR to a value driven belief and with a passion for fairness, justice and with strong views about the well-being of our society and planet Earth

Samantha Brizzi

Samantha: Market analysis is fundamental, on a macro, micro and competitive level in order to conquer market gaps. Strategy is about being different, thus having a competitive advantage and choosing specific and different set of activities to deliver differentiation. The latest world economic, environmental and political developments, the disastrous impacts and consequences on our ecosystem as well as the explosion of a world spread pandemic, have changed our values. The grandfather of modern marketing Peter Drucker, already foresaw in 1946 that companies are ‘at odds with basic needs and values of society and community’. The urgent and multiple critical moments the world had to face in 2019 and 2020 have brought a shift from Corporate Social Responsibility to Brand Activism.

The steady decline in governments’ trust has been decisive for many companies that chose to stand firm for their principles internally and externally and against their respective institutional environments. Companies that took initiatives got rewarded: since Nike signed as their ‘Just Do It’ face for their 30th anniversary the brave San Francisco quarterback Colin Koepernick, who proudly refused in 2016 to stand for the American anthem to protest against Africans-American police violence, the company’s net worth has increased by $26.2 bn”.

Oltea: “In the run for figures, optimization, digitalization many forget that we are addressing to humans. I heard of major investments in automatization of some processes without analyzing if automatization is actually necessary in that case.”

[...] humanizing technology could make a difference. Digitalization is not the utmost objective but simply a means to making people’s lives safer, easier, better, nicer, etc.”

Oltea Belciuganu

Sue: “What a time to start a business – and thankfully we have seen many entrepreneurs diversify.A basic knowledge, a belief in yourself and the courage to try new ideas. Thinking out of the box has always been the best way to achieve success”.

Jess: “Be genuine and tell a story. No one wants to hear any more about “these unprecedented times” or the “new normal”. Ads that have stood out to me recently are the ones that tell the story of an individual living the world we are in. We are craving happiness and connection, brands that deliver emotion will be memorable”.

A new era of marketing requires a new outlook on a more holistically and authentically approach when implementing a marketing strategy. The organizations that do it right can elevate marketing’s standing within the organization and have a resilient strategy in place.