While we can’t ignore how technology is shaping the branding space as well, it is comforting to realize that certain fundamentals remain.

Authenticity is where the story should begin

The power of personality and an engaging story persist at the heart of great brands and successful brand activities. You can call it whatever you’d like; being real, being authentic, being honest about who you are. This is a direction in branding that is trending in a big way. People are turning their backs on overt luxury and shiny, polished and airbrushed expressions of excellence. The idea of normcore has become a trend rather than an ironic statement. But this doesn’t mean that your brand should be content with being average!

The role of storytelling is as important as ever. Your brand should have something to say – and be willing to stand behind its words fearlessly. Greg Hoffman, former CMO of Nike said it well in his presentation, “What separates great brands from the average brands is emotion!” He also talked about the idea that brands should be both aspirational and accessible.

This was a sentiment shared also by Tom Beckman, the Global Chief Creative Officer of Weber Shandwick, who talked about the “eat the rich” movement, where consumers are turning their backs on luxury brands that portray an image of exclusivity and unattainability, in favour of something more real. People want to connect with brands with a real purpose.

Finding courage is the first step in creating a legacy

Just about everyone present at the event agreed that creativity is and should be the ultimate act of rebellion. Seeing the world differently and doing things differently both take courage and conviction: something both agencies and brands should hold in high regard. If you want to be remembered as a brand, you need to be bold enough to forge your own path, break down barriers and eventually spark a movement. As a brand you don’t have paying customers, you have followers. What you sell is not your products. What you need to be selling is your purpose and promise as a brand.

This ties in well with what I always say to our clients. In the B2B market, your customers already know what they need and have made the conscious decision to buy. The decision they need to make is who to buy it from. That literally means that the decision comes down to your brand and quite often how your people communicate to the potential customer. This is worth remembering: people buy into brands and brands align with brands.

Being vulnerable and open will ultimately pay off

I like sayings. Sayings like “no brand is an island” or “if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound”. What if brands were islands? They certainly wouldn’t be desert islands where nobody is around to see, hear or create change. So, what does your island look like? It looks like a combination of its natural state and the environment that outside influences have created. The future of brands looks much the same. One key player in developing your brand is the community that interacts with it. In the realm of B2B the transition is far slower than in the sea of consumer commodities, but the direction is the same.

At the Paradigms 2023 event, Zoe Scaman, CEO and founder of Bodacious, was one – but certainly not the only – advocate for new types of user generated content and the idea of opening brands to the audience. In today’s brand playground, the toys available make it virtually impossible to build your brand as an impenetrable fortress. Even big and traditional brands such as Coca Cola were heard talking about their brand’s sacred core elements and those aspects of the brand that have been opened up for their community to “play” with. In other words, it seems that we are leaving behind the era of rigid brand policing and entering a time of flexible brand management and continuous evolution.

We live in exciting times

In terms of the landscape of brands and branding, we are living in an era of re-evaluation. We are seeing creativity and the desire for building legacy acting as a counterforce for blandness and conformity. We see stronger emotionally engaging brand stories and richer and more varied visualities pushing their way into the foreground. We are starting to see brands looking, sounding and feeling more and more like their communities, customers and creators. Perhaps brands will finally look like themselves. The truest form of themselves. The way the world sees them, not the way they present themselves.