By adopting a multipronged strategy, brands can scale up and grow sustainably by successfully discovering new markets and acquiring potential customers while keeping costs in check.
Breakthrough innovations, growing expectations, and changing environments have today become a norm in the business world. These challenges are quite hard to overcome and even established brands find it difficult to scale up and grow sustainably in these circumstances. Further compounding the challenge is fickle consumer behaviour and eroding business boundaries that have led to companies competing for the same set of prospective buyers from different business sectors.
Take, for instance, the automobile industry. While conventional companies like Toyota, BMW, Mercedes, etc, are competing for consumers, organisations such as Apple and Google are also reportedly developing their autonomous cars. Clearly, this cross-category competition is turning out to be a big challenge for brands.
In such a challenging environment, the following strategies can help your organisation to stay competitive, and sustainably scale up the business by resonating with both present and future customers:
1) Diversify Offerings: Putting all your eggs in one basket is not a good strategy. Businesses which are heavily reliant on one or a few prominent products/services risk losses and even extinction. To scale up sustainably, companies should focus on diversifying their portfolios, which offer a wide variety of benefits. It’s a sure-shot strategy against recession as firms can easily make up for the losses in case of a slowdown in one or more sectors they are operating in. The diversification of products and services also helps organisations derive synergies from their operations that, in turn, is instrumental for scaling up operations quickly and efficiently.
2) Retain Existing Customers and Attract new Buyers: Both retaining the existing customers and attracting a new set of audiences are important for business sustainability. While retention of the existing customers helps in boosting overall profitability in a very cost-effective manner, bringing in new customers widens the scope and horizon of the company’s operation in the long term. The overall increase in customer share will, in turn, help organisations scale up and power their growth story to the next level.
In addition, having a market share across different product categories and services is also helpful in building a strong brand image for the firm globally. In order to re-engage the existing set of customers, basic marketing techniques such as re-marketing can do wonders. By changing users' inertia from inactive to active, this re-engagement process helps organisations retain not only their own first-party audiences but also generate third-party audiences accessing data management platforms such as Bluekai, Lotame, and Adobe among others.
3) Taking the Green Route: Communities today have become very sensitive to the prospect of the environment and brands' contribution to preserving the global ecology. Hence, for sustainably scaling up and receiving the unwavering support from customers, integrating green practices into the culture of organisations is a must.
There are many ways through which green practices can become part of the company’s functional procedures and operational mechanisms. For example, firms can increase the use of renewable sources, drive the use of electric vehicles up, or extend the contribution of wind power or solar energy into the operational mechanisms of the company. Further, getting all these processes accredited by an independent agency will help brands cement their image in the minds of customers. This will ultimately lead to stronger brand equity and allow organisations to leverage customer patronage by scaling up in a sustainable manner.
4) Explore Virtual Domains and Harness Digital Marketing: To attract new-age customers, having a virtual presence and digital marketing capabilities are indispensable. For organisations to scale sustainability in the coming years, they must take advantage of digital marketing to explore virtual avenues of growth and profitability. For example, organisations can choose to digitally market their products on metaverse platforms which are increasingly witnessing enhanced participation of users, investors, and communities from all across the globe. These virtual worlds offer immense growth opportunities and this explains the foray of many big brands into these networks of virtually connected universes.
5) Use New-age Technologies: To quickly scale up and keep that growth momentum intact, brands must focus on the use of new technologies to boost their productivity and efficiency. Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and automation procedures can help brands significantly scale up even without making a substantive investment.
Further, the use of Personalised Advertisements can be of immense benefit to get more patronage from target audiences. With the help of Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO), brands can project both their global aspirations tailormade to suit local tastes and preferences. DCO also helps brands customise the look and feel of advertisements on the basis of the location of customers. For example, the same ad will show text in Telugu for a Hyderabadi user, while for a prospective buyer in Mumbai, the text will be displayed in English. Even images in a single creative change automatically from Hyderabadi biryani to Mumbai vada pav, thereby helping brands to retain their brand communication but be local with the end users.
6) Cultural adaptations: For successfully scaling up brands sustainably, organisations must need to realign their culture with their objective of growth and profitability. As organisations broaden their customer base, a number of new challenges and issues emerge almost on a daily basis.
To overcome these novel challenges, the top management of companies must work to align the values of their employees with the new growth aspirations. Leadership must inspire employees and help in building an environment which becomes conducive to achieving excellence in the long run. Remember, the culture of the organisation is one of the most critical aspects and without aligning it with the objective of sustainable growth, the vision of growing and scaling up brands can’t be realised.
— The author, Ashish K. Tripathi, is Co-founder & Managing Director, Auburn Digital Solutions. Views expressed are his own.
