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Ten brands that enhance customers’ lives

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January 11, 2021 | 8 min read

Many brands choose to shout about the superiority and excellence of their products

But the smart brands overtly position themselves as catalysts for change, as enablers and facilitators of a better life for their customers.

Such companies still need a great product, but they also need to create a brand proposition that clearly articulates what they stand for and the role they feel they can play in customers’ lives. Communicating this means investing in compelling content, and in providing digital applications that are useful, content-rich, easy to use, and which become an integral part of their customers’ lives.

Let’s take a look at 10 of the brands getting it right:

Eve Sleep

The bed and mattress company invests in helping its customers to have a great night’s sleep. Its Sleep Better blog offers a wealth of advice, and its content-rich web site also has an insightful ‘Morning Diaries’ section profiling different people’s sleep routines. The brand forges partnerships to further both its knowledge and its value — for example, it recently worked with British Rowing to design a sleep sanctuary at its national training ground. Eve Sleep’s passion for enabling better sleep is embedded in everything it does.

Gymshark

This brand exploited a gap in the market for affordable, attractive fitness gear for 18-25 year olds, and smart content creation on social media enabled it to raise awareness in a targeted way, building a community beyond its products. It has tapped into a network of influencers, and recruited a team of brand ambassadors, fuelling content such as tutorials, vlogs and work out videos on YouTube, which in turn spawns UGC. Gymshark also conducts regular Twitter polls, and the feedback informs future content. In August 2020 the company received a valuation of over £1bn for the first time.

Under Armour

Community building is at the heart of Under Armour’s success (it projects to be worth $10 billion by 2020). The fitness brand has bought a number of fitness apps and technology platforms including MapMyFitness and MyFitnessPal (which has over 180 million users) to boost its community building, helping to connect people with a shared passion. The brand has recently invested in long form content using podcasting, in partnership with iHeartRadio, giving listeners an insight into the training secrets of elite athletes.

Headspace

This brand’s mindfulness app is dedicated to helping users live ‘healthy happier, more rested lives’, and its platform lends itself well to making a real difference (for two million paid subscribers). Even non-paying customers can access a wealth of valuable content, and articles and guides about meditation and mental health are promoted before any mention of the brand’s product features. Its content is positive, engaging and evergreen, from ‘how to stop worrying’ to ‘how to sleep better’. Critically, it encourages a strong community by enabling users to ‘buddy up’ and inspire each other.

Glossier

This D2C beauty brand was spawned from a beauty blog (Into the Gloss), with user discussion revealing a market opportunity to involve beauty consumers in product creation. The blog has resulted in a highly engaged online community that is at the heart of the brand, using the insights gathered to create new offerings. Glossier combines product-focused content with UGC, but its transparency and openness to feedback and discussion means it has become a trusted source of beauty information.

Dorset Cereals

Dorset Cereals’ products and ethos are all about nourishing the soul. Its web site is distinctive as a result of its playful style, with online games as well as a rich blog that is tightly tethered to the company’s location - Dorset - reinforcing the provenance of its products and underlining its authenticity. Content is aimed at helping people to discover their locality in a wholesome way, and its products are simply part of the bigger picture of living well.

GoPro

GoPro successfully engages audiences who are passionate about sport, building a community and encouraging users to share their experiences of the brand’s products. Its product range — quality action cameras — is perfectly suited to UGC, but the brand maximises this value, buying the rights to self-shot, inspiring videos, polishing them, and posting them to its owned channels. By focusing on the customer experience, GoPro promotes loyalty and trust among users. In 2019 it passed two billion views of its content on YouTube.

Gousto

The D2C recipe box company is all about helping its customers to cook tasty, nutritious meals at home, and it uses customer data to create a better customer experience. In April’s lockdown, the company prioritised serving existing customers rather than taking on new ones, shifting the team that would normally work on customer acquisition to producing more content, communications and newsletters. Its slick, colourful blog includes a wealth of ‘cook like a pro’ tips and seasonal recipes as well as content on time saving and sustainability.

Burton Snowboards

Sustainability is core to Burton’s three pillars of People, Playground (environment) and Product, committing that every person making its products works in safe, healthy, and environmentally friendly conditions, for example, and stating that it is working toward making all of its products with organic and sustainable materials. People can track the brand’s live progress on its web site (it is 38% towards achieving its sustainable materials goal), while other content includes a revealing article on waste and pollution in the textile industry. Burton’s mission clearly goes beyond product or profit.

Sundried

The ethical, eco-friendly sports gear company is built on the belief that clothing should last a long time, and be high quality, not cheap and disposable. Its web site is content rich, supporting its stance and educating visitors on how it meets its goals — for example, one article explains how it produces clothing from recycled coffee grounds — rather than pushing its products. Its blog contains interviews with its athlete ambassadors, as well as insider guides to preparing for events such as ultra marathons and triathlons.

Not all brands have a proposition that overtly states that their purpose is to truly help their customers get the most out of life. These ten brands are the exception, not the rule, but they do pave the way to the future…

Talk with the digital marketing specialists

Today’s customers demand authenticity and transparency from brands. Digital is the perfect platform for companies to communicate this, using thoughtful, targeted, relevant and timely content to express their commitment to helping their customers to get the most out of life. Mediablaze has a wealth of experience in working with brands to build engaged online communities, deliver stand-out content, and develop digital experiences that add true value.

To find out more about how we can help you to help your customers, email hello@mediablaze.com.

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