The business world today is loud because the marketplace is crowded with brands competing for attention. Consumers are flooded with promotions everywhere they turn, from sudden website pop-ups to influencers filling every second of their scrolling time. According to Dept®, 25,000 to 40,000 brand messages flood people’s daily lives. Digital platforms, social networks, and paid campaigns have created a noisy environment where attention is limited, and competition is constant. However, recent industry research indicates that about 32.8% of worldwide internet users now occasionally use ad blockers to avoid interruptions while browsing online.
The growing use of ad-blocking tools shows just how tired people are of disruptive advertising. Building brand relevance in such a noisy world can be a significant challenge. For marketing leaders and business owners, the real struggle is finding a way to rise above the chaos and genuinely connect with the audience. Brands would have to focus on authenticity, consistency, and deep customer engagement. Sometimes, many brands use storytelling and cold emailing to convey their brand values to potential customers.
Why Does Brand Relevance Matter?
Brand relevance may be confused with brand awareness, but they are different. The focus of brand awareness is customer reach. It is the extent to which people recognize a brand name or logo. Brand awareness involves marketing strategies designed to increase a brand’s or product’s recognition among new customers. The goal may be to drive sales and profit through awareness, or to build anticipation for a newly launched brand.
On the other hand, Prophet highlights brand relevance as a very dependable long-term indicator of success. It is the extent to which a brand aligns with a consumer’s needs, lifestyle, beliefs, and aspirations. It also involves a brand’s ability to solve consumer problems. Brand relevance builds unwavering customer loyalty. Here are some reasons why brand relevance is crucial for any business.
1. Customer Loyalty and Retention
In today’s AI-driven market, customers can easily compare products using AI tools and switch loyalty. This is because people today are more intentional about the brands they support. They want options that reflect their values, are more affordable, and deliver quality. When a brand stays relevant by understanding customer needs and adapting to market expectations, trust grows. That trust becomes loyalty.
According to EY, only 12% of customers agree that brand messaging resonates with their needs and values. This highlights the need for brands to reassess their relevance. When customers see themselves in the brand’s message, they are more likely to become repeat buyers and recommend it to others. Brands that continuously evolve with their audience build stronger emotional ties and experience higher retention, reduced churn, and long-term profitability.
2. Brand equity
Brand equity is the added value businesses gain simply because of who they are in their customers’ minds. When a brand consistently stays relevant by meeting evolving expectations, aligning with audience values, and delivering meaningful experiences, it earns positive perceptions from its customers. This shapes how customers view the brand and strengthens its marketplace position.
More substantial brand equity means more than just popularity. It directly affects financial performance. Brands with high relevance are often top-of-mind, command premium pricing, and enjoy higher customer lifetime value. They also become more attractive to investors, partners, and even top talent because they are seen as stable, growth-oriented, and well-connected to market demands. In simple terms, relevance fuels recognition, recognition builds trust, and trust ultimately increases the brand’s overall worth.
3. Brand Advocacy
Brand relevance plays a crucial role in turning satisfied customers into active brand supporters. When a brand consistently shows up in ways that align with customers’ needs and values, it builds emotional credibility. People feel understood, and that emotional connection is what transforms them from passive buyers into loyal participants in the brand’s story.
Relevance also encourages engagement. Customers who believe a brand reflects their values become more willing to share feedback, defend the brand publicly, and recommend it to others. This type of advocacy carries more weight than any paid advertisement, because it comes from a trusted voice.
4. Digital Innovation
As marketing continues to move away from traditional approaches, many brands struggle to impose their online presence. With 58% of consumers open to switching their brands for something new and better, the digital landscape has become both a challenge and a significant opportunity. When a brand prioritizes relevance, staying aligned with customer expectations and technological trends, it can innovate more confidently and strategically.
Digital innovation is about creating meaningful, seamless, engaging, and rewarding experiences that reflect what customers value most. Brands must learn to leverage digital innovation to deliver convenience, speed, personalization, and accessibility to their customers. Brand relevance drives the need to experiment with emerging technologies such as AI, automation, and interactive content to keep the audience engaged.
What Are the Key Strategies to Brand Relevance?
Staying relevant as a brand requires a clear understanding of audience needs, planning, strategic thinking, and continuous adaptation. Businesses must track market changes, embrace innovation, and ensure their messaging aligns with customer values. Here are some proven strategies that help brands remain relevant in the marketplace:
1. Customer Centricity
This involves using metrics to gain proper insight into target customers. These metrics could be quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative metrics include the number of shares, likes, and comments on a social media post. Qualitative research comprises emotional responses and user feedback. Business owners can research their competitors and compare their results to identify areas that need improvement. The purpose this serves is to provide a proper view of the consumers and meet their needs. They can tailor their result to create an excellent customer experience, helping them build brand relevance ahead of the competition.
2. Brand Conviction
Every brand needs to have a clear understanding of what it stands for. It should have a clear purpose, mission, and set of values it preaches. This can be used to tell an authentic story that deepens the emotional connection with customers. A genuine story that depicts a brand journey, including the clarity and changes that reading this blog post brought. To build brand relevance ahead of the competition, you need ruthless pragmatism about what works. For example, Nike’s co-founder Phil Knight said, “Play by the rules, but be ferocious.”
3. Resonance
The word resonance encompasses three concepts: innovation, inspiration, and connection. Every brand must be able to consistently stand out by meeting customers’ expectations. Meeting these expectations fosters trust and creates a unique culture for the brand. They should be able to make a customer experience that sparks action. Every brand needs to breed a sense of purpose. Finally, the first step in understanding the customers must be repeated constantly. This is to ensure the brand continues to meet the needs of its customers.
4. Pricing
Brands need to get the right pricing balance. This means the need to refine their Price Pack Architecture (PPA) to optimize their price-to-volume strategy and avoid attrition. Refinement includes smaller pack sizes for cost-effectiveness and single-portion packs for impulsive buys, while profit remains balanced. This move reinforces customer loyalty and minimizes attrition rates.
5. Performance Excellence
Minor issues in brand operations can prompt customers to consider alternatives. To achieve brand relevance ahead of the competition, brands must have effective supply chain management. The products or services ordered must always be available, of good quality, and at an optimized price. This depicts that operational excellence is essential.
6. Artificial Intelligence (AI) Ranking
Artificial Intelligence visibility is critical to relevance. As digital participation grows, brands must sharpen their reach without increasing their budget. EY states that 50% of AI recommendations favoring mass brand visibility are essential. Also, though Artificial Intelligence influences purchase decisions, 58% of consumers didn’t follow its recommendations. Brands must stay ahead of their competitors by keeping pace with automation trends. This will ensure their relevance, visibility, and status as the customer’s best choice.
How Do You Measure Brand Relevance?
According to Marq, here are the brand metrics you need to build brand relevance ahead of your competitors.
1. Brand Engagement
This measures customer interaction at every point of contact with a brand. The access points include a brand’s website, social media channels, e-commerce stores, sales team, and other relevant platforms. The more interactions on these platforms, the higher the engagement. Brand engagement is derived from metrics such as web backlinks, website traffic, social media engagement, purchases, subscriptions, and other relevant indicators.
2. Brand Association
Brand associations refer to the concept that consumers form an emotional connection with a brand. It may be events, emotions, and activities. Consumers’ connections between a brand and its concepts, emotions, events, and activities.
This is a qualitative metric that can be used to measure customers’ perceptions of a brand, whether positive or negative. Tools such as brand asset management and brand templating platforms can help shape a brand’s desired associations.
3. Net Promoter Scores (NPS)
This measures the probability of customer advocacy for a brand. Simply put, how likely a customer is to recommend the brand to family and friends. NPS is a survey that asks a simple question: the likelihood of a customer recommending a brand. It provides a scale from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). The answer divides the customers into promoters (9–10), detractors (6 or fewer), and passives (7–8). The score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.
4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value deals with the individual. It measures the revenue a brand can expect from a typical customer. It is a reliable indicator of the customer’s trust in a brand. CLV is calculated using data obtained from sales platforms. It is calculated as:
Average Order Value × Average Transactions Per Period × Average Customer Retention Period
5. Online Platform Analytics
As digital engagement increases, customer interactions increasingly take place online. Various metrics can be used to show the result of a brand’s marketing efforts. Here are some key metrics:
- Website Traffic: This reflects a brand’s landing page performance and the number of website visitors.
- Traffic Source: This indicates the source of visitors to a brand’s landing page or website. It could be from social media, display ads, third-party sites, and search ads.
- Average Session Duration: The time visitors spend on a brand’s website.
- Conversion Rates: This is the percentage of visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase. It is relative to the number of visitors.
- Bounce Rate: It measures the percentage of visitors who leave a brand’s website or landing page without taking the desired action.
- Inbound Links: This measures the number of times external sites have linked to a brand’s content and landing page.
6. Top-of-Mind Awareness (TOMA)
TOMA is an indicator of a brand’s position in consumers’ hearts. It is usually measured with market surveys. Marketers present a specific product category to a targeted market segment and calculate the percentage of consumers who identify or mention the brand associated with it.
What Are Key Examples of Brand Relevance?
Brand relevance can also be termed as a purpose-driven campaign. Here are brands that have practiced this act and have fully achieved that customer resonance.
Nike
Imprimis Media states that Nike created a purpose and saw its market value increase by $6 billion. Nike took a stand by standing with Colin Kaepernick, who faced public outrage for kneeling during the national anthem in 2016.
Nike used its tagline, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything,” when launching a Dream Crazy campaign featuring Kaepernick. They created a controversy and stood with it despite the consequences. Nike also creates cultural relevance by always associating with trending social issues. Now, Nike is seen as a brand with courage, purpose, and authenticity.
Dove
Dove did market research and noticed the lack of variety in beauty ads. The beauty ads always focused on perfection. Dove built brand relevance through inclusivity. They decided to go for originality in their ads, featuring wrinkles and freckles that competitors ignored. They launched a Self-Esteem Project to empower young minds who are always seeking perfection.
According to Imprimis Media, this alignment within ten years of the campaign led to $4 billion in global sales. Dove is now recognized for its inclusivity and originality, driven by purpose and customer-centricity.
Patagonia
Patagonia built brand relevance by being a step ahead of its competitors in terms of transparency. They associated themselves with a cause: environmental sustainability. This cause was highlighted in their campaign, “Don’t buy this jacket,” in 2011.
The campaign laid bare the environmental impact of the jackets produced, including carbon emissions and waste. In 2022, Chouinard transferred the company to a trust and a non-profit dedicated to fighting climate change. This move further reinforced their mission statement: “We’re in business to save our home planet.”
According to Imprimis Media, this move positioned Patagonia as a true leader in sustainable fashion. It also elevated the brand loyalty of eco-friendly consumers.
Lego
Lego has been a tool for learning and creativity. They took it a step further by encouraging critical thinking and creative innovation for children through their Rebuild the World campaign. It doesn’t stop there. Lego built inclusivity by creating “LEGO Braille Bricks” for visually impaired children.
This move strengthened Lego as the world’s most loved toy brand, according to Imprimis Media. Lego is not stopping here; plans are to make its packaging and products 100% sustainable by 2030.
Conclusion
Attaining a competitive edge is tedious, but the three key strategies can serve as a guide. Building brand relevance goes beyond simply getting a guide. It requires partnering with a top-quality digital marketing agency with proven results, like OneQ Digital. OneQ Digital is an all-in-one digital marketing agency with focused strategies to achieve your goals seamlessly. Book a consultation with OneQ Digital today and gain a true competitive edge.
