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Brand Rituals: How Successful Brands Bond with Customers for Life

Presenters

Michael Grasso, Chief Marketing Officer - TXU Energy
Zain Raj, Chief Executive Officer - Hyper Marketing Inc.

Session Overview

Marketing is being pushed by the same forces as other parts of the business.  CMO's have to do more with a lot less.  Less budget and less headcount.  This is exacerbated by all the new channels and approaches available to them.  We’re entering new and largely uncharted territory in the way we identify, position, manage, and evolve brand relationships.  We’ll do better in exploring this brave new world if we’re focused on the challenges ahead of us rather than the baggage behind.  In half a century of eventful growth and evolution, brands have built up their own mythology.  Some of it is relevant, to be sure.  But some of it is the 21^st century equivalent of flat-earth myopia.  Now it’s time to let them go—or risk becoming today’s equivalent of people who still believe the earth is flat.

Brand marketing should no longer be just about consumer beliefs; it should be all about customer behavior.  This is new ground.  We’ve maintained for years that the key to making consumers buy from us is making them like us.  In our new time-starved, sound-bite-driven world, that’s not necessarily the case.  The payoff of creating brand rituals is that customers feel there is only one choice—our brand.  They will insist on it, even investing some of their own limited time to make sure they find it when they want it, use it, and do so again and again.

In this presentation, Michael Grasso will share how TXU leverages behavioral marketing principles to differentiate the brand in a highly competitive, deregulated energy category.   Zain Raj will challenge the existing marketing myths that no longer serve us and present a clearly defined four-stage approach to creating a Brand Ritual. 

1. Getting the initial transaction: Beginning with understanding the new equation that determines how consumers define value today so you can get your foot in the door.
2. Magnifying consumer attraction to your brand: Including these characteristics: becoming digital at the core, inviting consumers into your brand, creating a value-added interaction, and delivering interest and relevancy.
3. Building connections with relevant innovations and experiences: Recognizing that this is the place where most companies stumble because they stay more focused on new customer acquisition and don’t pay enough attention to existing customer needs.
4. Creating a bond by aligning on key values: The most sustainable bond is built when you can emotionally connect your customers with your brand by sharing the same kind of values.