As an old ad from the past would say, “The Future Has Begun!”. We are living today the great changes that will define the scenario of corporate communication tomorrow. It is now only a matter of time.
Advertising monoculture has long been unable to handle the message. It is unrealistic to limit oneself to filling the media with self-referential and empty messages. The reason? Interconnected phenomena: banalization and saturation of commercial appeals; aversion to invasive and polluting media; more diverse and complex lifestyles and behavior patterns in constant transformation; scarcity of tangible differences between products; emotional motivations inducing consumption; sustainable development by imposing social and environmental variables in the business equation; a more critical, informed society with greater pressure on corporations. Everything powered by the technology that fragments channels, creates and recreates networks, definitively establishes the two-way street as standard, allowing all receivers to become emitters as well.
Only well-established and well-placed brands can thrive in a time when change is the constant and the only certainty is uncertainty.
Brands are made of meanings. The more sense they acquire for their audiences, the more they generate identification and, consequently, real value for companies. Conventional communication models have become impotent to sustain brands in contemporary society. They have lost relevance and credibility, because they are ruled by worn-out fictional content. They cannot authentically express the constitutive attributes of brands, nor can they enter them into the real life of their audiences.
To break down skepticism and resistance, brands need to fulfill their promises, make their attributes tangible. They need to act. Acting before speaking. Communicate by attitude.
When it acts in the aspirational fields of its audiences, the brand creates affective bonds, becomes closer and more involved, consequently gaining market and institutional results. This effectiveness has increased the action and communication of companies in the social, cultural, environmental, sports, behavioral, style and entertainment areas in order to influence consumers, customers, employees, shareholders, governments, suppliers, press, opinion formers, communities.
Sponsorship, support and partnerships; brand projects and events; promotions with content and the dissemination of the corporation’s social responsibility occupies the top management’s agenda.
Ad hoc and tactical in the past, brand attitudes have become constant in the present. They integrate strategic marketing plans and institutional relations, absorbing 20% of the communication budgets of the largest companies in Brazil *. In the future, they will constitute the main platform for most brands.
This process requires communication agencies with a business approach that does not depend on “more of the same” but which, instead, has a team of professionals capable of creating concrete brand experiences with their audiences and interact transversally with multiple business sector objectives.
Between the present and the future, the big brands will define the specific areas of their attitudes in order to transmit their values, attributes and commitments, increasing businesses returns, benefiting people and civilizing the market.
