Loyalty programs are effective at retaining customers by preventing them from turning to the competition. These programs can also maximize the lifetime value of a customer by offering incentives to spend more and buy more often.

Shifts in consumer behavior and technology have shaped both our relationship with brands, and the way that those brands seek to have relationships with their customers. Branding has followed and will continue to follow the trends and behaviors of the rest of society over time, and we are now on the cusp of a new era of the brand-consumer relationship, which I’m currently tackling in my follow-up to The Agile Brand.

The agile company doesn’t stand behind a rigid set of brand guidelines, and they know that in order to succeed, they must possess genuine corporate values that are demonstrated to their customers in tangible ways. Gone are the days when corporate social responsibility could be a bunch of words printed on a wall, programs listed on a website, but full of empty talk. Customers and employees alike demand more.

Measurement insights are a key part of optimizing your customer experience. At every step in the journey, it is critical that you understand what consumers are doing and how your channels and touch points are performing. It's also important that you not only have the ability to see what has happened in the past, but you also have actionable insights to help you make the best decisions moving forward.

Agile brands have the agile methodology to thank for their philosophy and approach. Agile’s rise in popularity and subsequent contributions to the world of software and the Web at large are wide-reaching and have changed the way we create and market products and services. The agile approach can be applied to many things other than software development, including marketing, and branding.

It is well understood that the better the data you have, the better the decisions you can make. For larger organizations with a lot of legacy infrastructure, this can require a lot of integration between systems and creating feedback mechanisms that tie everything together. The benefits of this can be dramatic, however.

Once when I was speaking on the topic of agile marketing at a conference, someone asked a question that should be addressed here: Doesn’t it go against the fundamentals of branding to be so agile, and adapt to change so easily? What about the core things that make up a brand? For this reason, we need to think of the Agile Brand as being nuanced.

As branding has evolved, the need for brands to tell unique and authentic stories that portray their mission and values has grown continually stronger. Jay Baer says, “If your stories are all about your products and services, that’s not storytelling. It’s a brochure. Give yourself permission to make the story bigger.”

Banking trends have evolved rapidly over the past two decades. As a result, banks are working harder than ever to keep up with the demands and preferences of their customers. These advancements include offerings that make banking more accessible, create the ability to bank more freely, and have a more tailored experience that is personalized to their needs.

There has never been more pressure for organizations to differentiate themselves and create loyal customers. With a growing desire by consumers to both have increasingly personalized experiences, and to share the values and culture of the companies they both buy from and work for, brands need to evolve in order to thrive. Agile brands will balance the need for control over their messaging, products and services with the need to connect with their customers in more meaningful ways.

In most professions, being “busy” is actually a good thing, because it means you are needed, and there are enough customers or clients to keep the lights on. But there’s a more toxic form of busy that keeps great work from happening, deadlines from being met, and work relationships from thriving. To help, let’s define a vocabulary that makes this easier. Being busy means that you’re running around from task to task, continually feeling overwhelmed, late to meetings, and overdue on assignments and tasks. Let’s treat that as the negative way of looking at things.

Jeff Bezos famously said, “your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” It’s true that a company or organization cannot control people’s opinions, feelings, perceptions or reactions to everything it does. A strong brand can help provide a common way for people to think and talk about your company, product, or services. Let’s explore a few ways that your brand is more than the sum of its parts.

I wrote my new book, The Agile Brand, based on the idea that modern brands need a more fluid and two-way relationship with their customers. In order to do this, however, it requires that organizations adopt an agile mindset. 

Playing a piece of music well takes a lot of coordination, skill at playing the instruments involved and an underlying sense of rhythm to tie it all together. Richard Wagner, the famous conductor and composer, once said, “The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability always to indicate the right tempo.” While the conductor can’t play all the instruments in a symphony themselves, they are critical to making sure the right notes are played at the right time.

Let’s face it. There are just too many stimuli today, from the constant barrage of advertising on every device, medium and channel, to push notifications on your smartphone, to your flooding email inbox, and, well, you get the picture. Consumers with information overload need a way to make quick, informed decisions and choose the right product or service.

The promise of artificial intelligence (AI) is its ability to be used as a tool to allow us to do things better, faster and (in some cases) cheaper than other existing methods. This is a major reason why AI has made inroads in many industries, including marketing and advertising.

Brands are being continually forced to keep up with the latest trends in order to stay relevant and successful.

Successful brands have been using social media listening in order to stay ahead of their competition for years.

There are many tangible benefits of mapping your customer’s journey, including improved efficiency within your internal operations and better end results for sales. Increasingly, marketers are turning to automation, personalization and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the customer experience within that journey.

Chatbots are increasingly being used by companies to engage with their customers. In fact, it has been reported that 8 in 10 companies have already adopted them or are planning to do so by 2020. This points to fast growth in the market. In fact, 15% of consumers have interacted with a chatbot in the last 12 months, and this number will undoubtedly grow at a quick pace over the coming months.

You have undoubtedly heard a lot about GDPR lately. This probably involved a slew of emails in your inbox asking you to update your privacy settings, or (depending on the industry you work in), several other changes made to the way you do business.