Post-neo-capitalism

The labour, financial and ecological crises reflect the exhaustion of the dominant system.

Capital seems to have come as close as possible to its dream of making money out of money. It’s not a question of getting out of the crisis; the capitalist system as we know it will not emerge from intensive care.

What could the new paradigm be?
The most powerful lever for economic growth is brand awareness

Whether it’s a company brand or a personal brand, awareness is driven by the brand, which has become a means of identifying with values.

We are living in the age of an intimate relationship with the brand, which will henceforth provide individuals with points of reference for their identity.

The brand is the strategic and conceptual concentration of your activity expressed through a universe of meaning that evokes an emotion.

The importance of brand positioning and storytelling in customer acquisition

In the global village of the internet, the simple articulation of product/service – a shoe shop – is at best a reference to the giants of product distribution – Zalando, for example. Each company is a set of attributes, each of which is unique. This specificity is your unique identity.

Universalising your brand means knowing how to tell a story – what is your story?

It’s a semantic exercise – what is the meaning of what you do, sell, produce beyond your market, what are you doing for humanity?

Building the brand discourse means sharing your know-how beyond day-to-day contingencies by opening up new territories in terms of :

• Market segments / target product and appropriate distribution
• Partners (product or technology development)
• Use the business strategies made possible by the use of the brand as a strategic tool and growth lever.

The brand is the “capitaliser” of your future results.

Example

Via Roma is a shoe boutique in Geneva that focuses on expertise in colours and materials – it now delivers its designs all over the world to a local clientele – its ambition is not to become a multinational, but the boutique is doing very well without having invested a fortune.

Positioning, a few rules

There are hundreds of graphics/processes on the internet for positioning your brand, so I’ll just mention a few basic rules here.

The purpose of your positioning is to communicate the essence of your business in a few simple words.

To achieve this simplification, you need to start by lining up everything you can say about your business and then reducing it to its only difference.

Without positioning, investing in communication, and particularly digital communication, is just a waste of money – the most common mistake:

• Limit yourself to selling your product
• Does not allow identification with the brand and its values
• Does not allow for a unique and different identity

Positioning means working with a diverse team to differentiate your reality from the customer’s perception.

A few key points

1. Benchmark – research your competitors and above all your ideal on the internet – if possible not in just one language and especially in English.
2. What are the factual and emotional benefits that your target group can derive from your activity – this exercise is done by target group and will even enable you to discover market segments that you may not have thought of.
3. Take inspiration from Simon Sinek’s “what” – “how” and “why”.

The repositioning of a brand is an opportunity to rethink the whole essence of a business in terms of its universe of meaning, market openness and business development, including transformational growth (digital transformation).