MET Branding - Beyond Relevant to Irresistible

Branding is more than your logo and brand identity. While these are two essential components of a branding strategy, it only makes up a part of the greater picture and impression - both of who you are and what you stand for as an organization. 

It's essential to go beyond and help people feel something when they think of your brand and connect with it emotionally. Why? 

Given people often make choices based on their feelings rather than their thoughts -- You become irresistible when you can tap into your customer's emotions and create a deep and lasting bond. 

But to do that, you must get all the touch points inch-perfect. And that, friends, is much easier said than done. 

Luckily, we could hear from someone who's been there and done that successfully.

Cynthia's a seasoned brand strategist who's made a name for herself by breathing new life into brands and helping them resonate with fresh audiences.  She's worked with countless organizations, like P&G, Ogilvy & Mather, and United Way Worldwide. 

Thanks to Cynthia's expert guidance, United Way Worldwide raised a whopping $5 billion across 40 countries. With that kind of success under her belt, it's no wonder she's considered a leading authority on creating irresistible brands. 

And that was exactly what we were fortunate to discuss - how to go beyond mere relevance and craft brands that people can't resist. Cynthia's talk focused on her work with the MET, but the real magic lies in her message, challenging us as marketers to aim higher than just being relevant. 

So buckle up for a wealth of knowledge we were privileged to hear and now share with you.

A brand is much more than just a logo or a tagline. It's a relationship that needs to be nurtured and earned. As Cynthia always tells her clients, having a logo doesn't automatically make you a brand.

In fact, the most successful brands understand that they co-own their brands with their users. 

The users give the brand value, and the marketers' job is to cultivate that relationship.

Here are some golden nuggets for doing just that.

Did you know emotional bonds with brands are twice as valuable as customer satisfaction regarding lifetime value? According to research on over a thousand consumer brands, emotional connections with customers are worth twice as much as customer satisfaction.

This is fascinating because it shows that making customers happy isn't enough to create a truly irresistible brand. Instead, it's the emotional connection that we build with our customers that really makes a difference in the long run. 

When we make our customers feel a certain way about our brand, we build a strong and lasting relationship.

It's often an impulse to only focus on addressing customer satisfaction and reducing friction in the customer journey. That was before she understood that building an emotional connection is often easier and more valuable in terms of lifetime customer value. 

We need to pay more attention to building emotional connections with our customers. We need to think of our brand as a relationship; the emotional context is key to nurturing and growing that relationship

Here's something to ponder - do you know how your brand matters to your loyal customers? 

Sometimes we rely too much on big data and numbers. But as marketers, we need to understand people's emotional connection with our brands. It's not just about what they do but also why they do it. 

Consider that and dig deep into your brand's significance to your customers.

In her own words, here are a few snippets of context and experience that illustrate how she helped elevate the MET from relevant to irresistible:

The MET is a huge museum in the US, with over 5,000 years of art and culture from all over the world. But like many cultural institutions, it had become unintentionally more elite, appealing to a smaller audience of wealthier people. So they brought us in to oversee a rebranding project and make the museum more open and accessible.

The board and director wanted to put the MET on the bucket list of everyone in the world, which was quite a challenge! But we wanted to ensure that people worldwide knew about the museum and felt their visit to New York wouldn't be complete without seeing it.

To really understand the emotional connection loyal users have with your business, you first need to peg why your business is relevant to them. And that's what we did. 

We started with the question: how is the museum significant in the lives of its loyal users?

One of my favorite quotes from the qualitative research we conducted was from a guy who said that when he's at The Met, he feels like he can place himself in the stream of humanity because all cultures are represented there.

This became the touchstone of the project. So we set out to create an experience that was more living and real in connection rather than distant and about facts. Something more welcoming, centered on insight and curiosity. Something to help people be confronted with the unexpected and experience the joy of discovering something new.

We decided to use The Met as the audience-facing brand rather than the formal legal name, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was friendlier and more accessible and helped to brand the different locations, like The Cloisters.

Think about your brand along these lines. What resonates with your people and sticks easily? Do people constantly call your brand name differently?

We also decided to create a brand mark using a custom font in red, the color of love and passion, which plays an important part in many cultures. 

The letters in the logo were connected to represent connectivity and how the MET was bringing people, art, and cultures together. To make it more open and accessible, we created maps, guidebooks and offered guided tours in 12 different languages. We even put a sign out in front of the building, which had yet to be done before, to clarify where The Met was located.  And it paid off, as many people started taking selfies in front of the sign and sharing them on social media!

Then, we developed experience guidelines to take the MET beyond a visual and verbal identity. 

The first was to perforate the walls, which basically meant taking the museum experience outside the physical building. The second strategy was creating distinctive experiences that people would remember and discuss. 

The third strategy was probably the most important one for us. We wanted to convert visitors into users. This meant changing how we thought about the people who visited the museum.  One way we did this was by creating a new website. We had 6 million people visiting the museum in person each year, but 30 million visited our website. We wanted to ensure our website was as engaging and inspiring as our physical museum. 

Another thing we did was rethink the entry experience. 

Let's be honest. The first thing that usually happens when you walk into a museum is they check your bag. Of course, it's an important function, but we wanted to make it more welcoming. 

So we gave our security guards a new title, some spiffy red ties, and buttons that said "hello" in their native language. We wanted people to feel like they could connect with someone right away, and it worked - we have guards that speak over 60 languages!

Another cool thing we did at the Met was a program called Teens Take The Met.  We invited 2000 high school students to come on a Friday night, and it was a totally different experience than when they came with their class. We had music and other cultural institutions, making it really lively. It was so successful that they now do it monthly. 

Another thing we did was to brand MET Fridays as New York's Night Out and market it to remind New Yorkers to stop by and have a drink, listen to some live music, and visit their favorite painting before they go on to dinner. And it worked! 

Of course, it won't happen until you see your brand as more than your logo and identity.

Start thinking of your brand as a relationship. Why?

Trust is key, meaning being authentic and consistent in your messaging. It's also essential to have open communication and engage in two-way dialogue with your audience.

To truly create an irresistible relationship with our users, we need to inspire and empower everyone involved in the enterprise. This means going beyond marketing and getting everyone on board to work towards the same goal. 

It's a 360-degree experience that requires collaboration and dedication from all parties involved.

While there are more than a few secret weapons for branding success, we hope it's clear by now that it's not solely about being relevant anymore; it's about being downright irresistible. And lucky for you, Marketing Leaders Connect is the perfect place to learn how to do just that.

Marketing Leaders Connect is a global community of professionals who come together to celebrate the unique connections that inspire us to be happier and more effective marketers. 

It's a chance to expand your circle and create lifetime friendships, where members from diverse industries and geographic areas meet virtually every month to share new ideas, insights, and experiences on how to find solutions to complex marketing challenges.

You connect with other marketers, share ideas, and learn from industry experts like Cynthia Round. 

If you're not already a part of this amazing group, you're missing out on a game-changing experience. Join Marketing Leaders Connect and start getting those real, hard-earned insights from the best in the biz. 

Click here to sign up and start your journey toward truly irresistible branding.