Cool Brands is the Conversation Manager’s missing link

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As most of you know, my co-managing partner of InSites Consulting, Joeri Van den Bergh, is about to launch his book: “How cool brands stay hotâ€.

We see Joeri’s book as the logical next step after the Conversation Manager. If you have read mybook in great detail, you will remember that the core of Conversation Management is brand identification. If people have a strong emotional connection with a brand, the number of conversations increases. Eventually this leads to an increase in sales, more frequent recommendation behavior and a stronger emotional bond.

In the Conversation Manager, I omitted elaborating on a very important issue, i.e. I never answered the question: ‘How do you increase brand identification with your consumers?’ This is where our new book ‘How cool brands stay hot’ comes in. Joeri describes in great detail how to achieve this very strategic foundation in Conversation Management.

After years of research and practice with the consumers of the future, the so-called Generation Y, we were able to define the 5 success factors that lead to brand identification. Our CRUSH Branding model is the basis of the How Cool Brands Stay Hot book.

In short, these are the key criteria:

  • Coolness: What does it mean to be a cool brand? How do you achieve a cool status and why should you bother?
  • Realness: Brand authenticity is a key aspect that discerns long-term winning brands from fads. With Generation Y, authenticity is attained in another way than through the traditional approach of claiming origin, heritage or history.
  • Uniqueness: A clear positioning based on a sustainable brand DNA will increase impact among youngsters, a generation which is craving for anchor brands in a fragmented world. But how do you assert uniqueness when most innovations are copied within a couple of months’ time?
  • Self-identification with the brand: Gen Y’ers will only feel emotionally connected with your brand when they consider it to be a friend. This implies that your brand should reflect their diverse lifestyles. A better understanding of their identity construction will make your brand fit in with youths’ lives while embracing diversity.
  • Happiness: Popular youth brands know how to leverage from positive emotions and how to avoid arousing negative ones.

Oh, and should some of you wonder whether InSites Consulting has become a publisher on top of being an innovative & fast growing marketing research & consultancy firm, I can assure you: the answer is no 🙂 The reason why we write these books is that we strongly believe in our marketing vision and want to share it with the world. And if the new marketing is still under development, we are very curious to hear all your feedback, thoughts and suggestions to our new story.