World after but what after? After confinement? After the crisis? What crisis? Ecological, migratory, financial…? We are hard pressed to define this after as our environment has become completely VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) to use the acronym introduced in the 90s.
In 2001, a space odyssey, we see the Pan Am brand. It would therefore always be there, like a landmark from the past to the future imagined by Stanley Kubrick. This picture almost alone sums up how difficult the world today was to predict. Who would have thought that the world’s largest retailer would have virtually no retail space. Or more prosaically than we would be ready to swap our plastic can of laundry for a glass jar filled with black soap in the bulk section of an organic grocery store… Between great leap forward and “retrofuturism”, our present is as much VUCA as Yuka ! For Sigmund Freud, man is fundamentally the prey of his childhood and we could say that we are in touch with our common past. We are looking to build tomorrow and look as much ahead as behind us, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Marketing arose out of the desire and need to “bring to market” and promote goods and services. Advertising carried the voice and the imagination of the products. But “no one hits harder than life” (ie Rocky Balboa). We loved these models so much that we gleefully exhausted them, perhaps taking them to the extreme.
On all sides and in all markets, companies are changing, they are seeking to move forward, to do better with less for the greatest number. 96 French companies have already registered their raison d’être and 42 of them have become a company with a mission. It is not easy for those who were not born with these ambitions. And despite their determination, it remains complex. Danone, a leader which has set itself societal and environmental objectives, was forced to announce redundancies in France. The road is long, but the objective is laudable.
We speak of “transition”, like the “conversion” for organic. Before being marketing and advertising objects, brands are benchmarks. Marking makes it possible to identify, guarantee quality, recognize and choose. Start-ups, CAC or Amap companies, all need the brand to stand out.
Foresight, an ally of brand managers
Thirty years ago, the brand was a fragmented subject in France between the marketing and communication departments of companies, advertising and design agencies and consulting firms. Today, it is at the heart of all attention. However, the subject is rarely treated in its entirety and in a collegial manner. Branding consists of placing the brand at the center of the reasoning to make it a lever of value, in the monetary sense and of the values that drive it. This discipline brings together all stakeholders in the company, with their partners and agencies. To define or redefine a brand is to think of an ecosystem, when Alex McDowell (chief designer for Spielberg and Tim Burton) imagines a world, he rethinks all the systems to get us to think beyond what we imagine. The same goes for brands. Foresight, long the prerogative of governments, traders or speculators, is the ally of brand managers. By marrying design and strategy, branding is a catalyst that allows concepts to be reified, brought to life and tested. Contributing® makes it possible not only to imagine more desirable, relevant and acceptable brands, because they are more positive and “contributing”, but also to create collective energy and to mobilize all the “contributors” of the brands.
In short, whatever this “world after”, what counts is undoubtedly the energy to be mobilized today to begin, with the brands, to draw it.
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