We’ve recently been talking about the importance of trust for a brand. High levels of trust lead to greater loyalty, preference and advocacy.
But some brands we have measured have a high trust score, but are failing to attract new users. Why? The issue seems to be ‘what are you trusted for?’ This relates to the latest trend in brand marketing which focuses on ‘Jobs to be done’.
This new concept of branding argues that brand equity is not the key to future growth. Instead, brand growth is directly related to delivering a unique job, or a specific job better than any competitor.
This new branding concept explains why the powerful brand equity that Nokia had for example, couldn’t save the brand if it failed to deliver smartphone functions. The new job that consumers wanted from their phone was touchscreens and online access. If you failed to deliver those, no level of trust or brand equity could save you.
This concept of ‘jobs to be done’ also explains the growth of new tech companies which meet unfulfilled human needs like Facebook delivering a social platform or Instagram which delivered an instant photo sharing service that camera manufacturers failed to provide.
The job to be done could also be related to price for example. Xiaomi is selling smartphones cheaper than anyone else. This unique ‘job’ is driving its growth at the expense of higher priced phones such as Samsung, despite Samsung’s high levels of trust and brand equity.
Samsung needs to find a job that it can deliver better than Xiaomi to justify its higher price.
So the lessons of ‘what are you trusted for’ and ‘jobs to be done’ is that a brand needs to be famous for delivering a particular service or feature better than anyone else.
And innovation is critical to continued growth.
Does your brand do a better job of doing something than any other brand?
What specific job does your brand do that a non-customer isn’t already getting from a competitor?