Kellogg on Branding in a Hyper-Connected World

CHAPTER 8Leveraging Touchpoints in Today’s Branding Environment

Kevin McTigue

One of the greatest struggles in modern marketing and branding is staying current with the rapid evolution of channels, marketing vehicles, and technologies. Should our brand be on Instagram? How about Facebook? What content do we need to provide on LinkedIn? Should we allow customers to interact with us on Twitter?

Across B2C and B2B, marketers are racing to keep up with the rapid consumer adoption of new digital tools and channels. Some are entirely new, such as voice-activated technology, as popularized by Amazon’s Alexa. More frequently, new opportunities to interact with customers—touchpoints—come in the form of new features available on popular existing platforms such as Facebook and Google. It seems that every week a new window of opportunity opens for brands to connect with their customers. At the same time, marketers are dealing with scarce dollars, time, and personnel resources to allocate to the most important touchpoints.

To those responsible for ROI, critical questions emerge: Which channels and touchpoints are most important? Which ones drive actual business value? And, most important, how do we bring our brand to life across these touchpoints to create a valuable and differentiating experience?

Given the pace of technological evolution, we could answer these questions today, but by the time you read this chapter, the answers would be wrong. So we won’t discuss what channels and touchpoints ...