#BrandZ100: It’s not just about “digital lipstick”

Doreen Wang, Kantar China CEO and global head of BrandZ, on the five most important lessons brands need to take away from the current crisis. Speaking from Beijing, Wang was interviewed live by David Roth, WPP The Store CEO, as part of the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Brands diginar launch on Tuesday 30 June 2020.

Lesson 1

Crisis time is the time to test and drive your resilience. Based on the 2008 financial crisis BrandZ data; strong brands are able to recover nine times faster than the average brands, because brand building is the most important investment, particularly in challenging times. Brand investment has a high correlation with market share gain.

Lesson 2

In quarantine, strong brands have done a better job to drive demand through building meaningful difference.  They are able to create distinctive territory by owning an occasion or offering a wider ecosystem of benefits. That is the strongest route for growth now and in the future. All brands are uprating from product and service brands, to ecosystem or occasion brands.

Lesson 3

Strong brands will drive perceived value and through holistic innovation. Consumers are impacted by COVID-19 and their income is being reduced; so how to drive that perceived value and perceived worth, becomes so important.

Lesson 4

Strong brands must digitalise their business model, not just by putting on digital lipstick, but go through the whole digital transformation, through logistics, to O2O (online to offline). Every brand now needs a digital strategy, an O2O strategy.

Lesson 5

Many, many strong brands realise that it is time to go back to the basics: trust is the foundation. Trust is driven by two factors – your expert reliability and corporate responsibility. Trust is the cushion until the door is fully reopened.

*For the full diginar recording and to download the digital assets of the BrandZ 100 Most Valuable Global Brands, go to: https://global.diginar.io. There are longer versions of the interviews, a copy of the full report for download, and a Diginar app to watch the brand documentaries and more.

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