Brand Leadership: Behaviors that Drive Brand and Consumer Engagement—An Abstract

Abstract

Ad spending worldwide was expected to reach $569 billion in 2015. Despite this level of spending, declining brand revenue trends and brand deaths occur (e.g., Oldsmobile, Plymouth, and Woolworth stores). What causes a brand to start losing market share, which could eventually lead to it being phased out of the market? Do they lose touch with the consumers’ wants and needs? Are management teams unable to influence the consumer’s reason to buy innovative products? Yet, some brands (e.g., John Deere) remain relevant to generations of consumers over time. What is the secret formula to sustainable brand growth? Research has shown that when brands are able to be consumer oriented, they have a higher likelihood to produce innovative product offerings that drive the value proposition with consumers. But what role do the behaviors of brand leaders play on driving the brand engagement with consumers? Do the behaviors of brand leaders impact the company’s culture to drive the brand engagement with consumers? These are the key questions that we sought to answer to reveal learnings on how brand leaders start building a road map to drive long-term brand sustainable growth. We conducted a qualitative research study by interviewing 34 executives who are leading or who have led brands from the consumer goods and consumer-packaged-goods industries. In order to gather a real perspective of the market, we talked to brand leaders that led brands with growing and declining revenue trends. We found evidence that growing-brand leaders exhibited behaviors and activities supported by emotional intelligence, hope, and social identity; whereas the declining brand leaders did not. Overall, the growing-brand leaders created a consumer-oriented environment through emotional intelligence, hope, and social identity to drive brand engagement with consumers (e.g., new innovative products), which positions their brands for sustainable growth. Emotional Intelligence—Leaders which expressed high levels of emotional intelligence established a team culture of trust, respect, passion, enthusiasm, and healthy risk-taking to drive innovation. Conversely, leaders that lacked in emotional intelligence represented a team culture of fear, anxiety, unhappiness, no trust, no respect, and no risk-taking that hindered their innovation. Hope—Leaders with high levels of hope managed teams which had vision and freedom to be consumer oriented, which created a team bond and alignment to drive new product innovation. In teams with low-hope leaders, the team did not have the freedom to operate and prohibited brand growth. Social Identity—Leaders which participated in their brand communities greatly increased the likelihood that the firm would be consumer oriented. By exhibiting the above behaviors, these leaders and their teams became more consumer oriented with their brands, which also allowed them to continue increasing their brand’s consumer engagement over time by (1) generating market intelligence pertaining to current and future consumer needs, (2) communicating the market intelligence across the internal teams, and (3) ensuring the organization is executing against the market intelligence.