From Consumer Data to Democratized Engagement

The second mindset shift that can help you create an Emergent Brand through the lens of Brand Anarchy

We’ve written at length about recapturing the magic of being a brand by shifting from brand strategy to Brand Anarchy. Brand Anarchy is what’s needed to create Emergent Brands: brands that are always in motion, deeply human, and constantly growing. We’re continuing our deep dive into crucial mindset shifts that can help marketers and strategists move toward this new practice of brand building.

The second mindset shift, From Consumer Data to Democratized Engagement, is all about tuning into the inputs that actually create meaning with people in our world today, and uncovering cultural ideas that resonate with the audiences that help you grow. This wider aperture helps brands hear and incorporate the perspectives of a broader range of people, while engaging those people in democratic dialogue and partnership. All together, this combination—resonant ideas and an engaged community—act as wind in your brand’s sails.

Where to start

Emergent Brands need to tell stories about the future. And our research methodologies, historically, are best at telling stories about the past. That’s not to knock research: Consumer insights, shopper behavior and audience data are still important inputs to a mindset of democratized engagement.

The crucial evolution is that these are not the only tools you have to hear your audience—just the first of many. So take stock of what tools are helping you build a brand of the future, and which tools you use simply because that’s the way it “should” be done.

Emergent Brands don’t focus on chasing algorithms; they focus on building meaningful stories that people will connect with. Authenticity, point of view, and relationships will be rewarded in this new world. How are you hearing about new happenings in the world and culture? How are you taking in emerging conversations, beyond searching popular hashtags? What is your brand’s media diet?

That means talking to people inside and outside of your organization, engaging beyond data points to uncover deeper meaning and aspirations that can’t be quantified or measured just yet. Where do you have opportunities to hear unfiltered individual voices, not “representative” or summarized thoughts? Who are the attractive outliers that introduce needed tension to your brand? What role do contrary voices play in your audience research?

And purely from a desire to be a better, more artful brand, you might ask yourself: Who inspires me as a brand builder? Where are thought-provoking ideas coming from? Who’s driving culture forward?

All together, pursuing these threads starts to create a fuller picture, not just of your audience, but of your people—and they will help you get so much further than data.

Putting it into practice

How can you start adopting this mindset shift? One way is to look at the tools you already use and what you use them for, then identify new ways to level them up to gain more meaningful insight.

🧠 If you’re relying on narrow or fragmented research, try widening your aperture and unlocking new opportunities with Mindset Research, a Zeus Jones specialty. Think about who you want to grow with and actively listen to them using a broader set of input methods.

🫅🏽If you’re already using audience segmentation, try designing an Aspirational Muse to help uncover future need states. Find out who inspires your brand to grow, and what their world looks like.

🌊 If you’re looking for demand spaces, think about the Cultural Waves you can ride to play, innovate, and co-create with your people. Find out where you can move forward big ideas rather than recite information.

Data is typically the output of traditional marketing tools, but the ways of Emergent Branding need more human-centric inputs to get to more human-centric results. This shift toward democratized engagement provokes more expansive thinking and understanding around where your brand can play in culture.

How AI can accelerate

Access to loads of data doesn’t always lead to understanding how to create meaning with people—or what is already creating meaning for people—in our world today. And the costs of a data-reliant organization are the cognitive load and time requirements to sift through it all—as anyone who’s tried to synthesize hundreds of pages of audience research can tell you! 😰

It might sound counterintuitive, but AI can be a big help in humanizing all that data. For example, what if you trained an AI model with all of your audience data, then talked to it? You could make connections between data sets, “converse” with your customer, and move from working across thousands of consumer data sets to creating engaging conversations—all while doing away with the need to toggle between a dozen research reports. And it makes the insights more accessible by making it easy for entire organizations to see, touch and talk to your research—raising its value dramatically.

The key to making AI tools like this more relevant and human is to add in layers of constantly refreshed cultural data inputs. Those will help you develop culturally relevant outputs that keep your brand looking forward in culture.

Start building your Emergent Brand

We’ve created the Building Emergent Brands guide as a quick-hit resource for Brand Anarchy mindset shifts.

Click the button below to get the second chapter of the guide, which is centered around this mindset shift and builds on what you just read here. Flip through to find what resonates, then share it with your team to get inspired to keep moving toward Emergent Branding. And stay tuned to Within Sight in the coming weeks and months as we reveal more chapters and tips.

Is your brand or team ready to start talking and/or listening to people differently using a Democratized Engagement mindset?

Let’s talk: hello@zeusjones.com.