As 2025 approaches, marketing leaders are facing considerable challenges. How do they decide what their brand’s key strategic priorities should be? How should they respond when a competitor shakes up their category? And how can they stand out while staying authentic?
The last three years alone have seen energy crises, international conflicts and inflation. 2024 was a year of major elections, bringing forward heightened tensions and polarisation. And what’s more, AI is rapidly transforming our lives. It’s no surprise, then, that our research finds that consumers are increasingly worried about volatility. Comfort and security are now people’s top concerns, while the personal values rising most since 2019 include empathy, mindfulness, escapism and wealth. And while country confidence remains low, personal optimism is returning.
These value shifts point to consumers needing two things to navigate today’s world. First, they need comfort. They need to soothe their anxieties and insecurities.
MarketingKantar 20 Nov 2024
This year, McDonalds has stood out globally by focusing on personal escapism through nostalgia, releasing new Happy meals for adults. And the fintech brand Revolut offers a modern take on securing wealth through well-designed products and services with a distinctive look and feel. But even among the most successful brands, there are often ‘predisposition gaps’ where there’s room to find further growth. Kantar data demonstrates how McDonalds, for instance, has an opportunity to build consistency in its brand by strengthening its difference across markets.
We instinctively understand the difference of brands like Tesla, TikTok, and Red Bull. But for many others, the path to finding a unique point of differentiation isn’t obvious or clear.
So, how do you build your brand’s difference in 2025? Thinking carefully about the questions below is a great place to start.
1. What matters for my brand?
Understanding the factors that really make your brand different helps direct your organisation’s attention on what’s needed to drive growth. But when trying to identify a ‘secret sauce’, it’s easy to get thrown off course. Some concentrate on the wrong metrics. Others underestimate apparently minor considerations. And simply following your competitors is rarely a winning formula: what succeeds for them will most likely not get you or keep you in a leadership position.
So reliable evidence to support your planning is crucial. Good data and analytics can help brands pinpoint which themes matter most – as well as providing insight on how important each of these are, and which levers can improve them.
One global financial services firm, for example, was looking for a new KPI to set across different markets. Through a Kantar BrandStructures analysis, it realised it could best build sales by focusing on driving brand consideration. It was able to boost this metric significantly by improving ease of interactions – which the data revealed was a crucial customer concern driving consideration.
2. How can I build difference?
It’s also essential to think carefully about how to build difference and what makes your brand different already. Traditional driver analysis can identify key factors and give a sense of their relative importance.
But when you examine in detail how these factors and drivers interact with each other, the insight is likely to be more powerful and actionable. In a food and drink category, for instance, it might appear that consumers prioritise quality over taste.
A deeper study might find that it’s by changing or updating its packaging that a brand could best build its difference – because this would effectively reinforce both taste and quality perceptions.
A unique positioning or finding new space can contribute to building difference in a cluttered category. One business that has benefited from this approach is the Swedish coffee roastery, Löfbergs. Based on Kantar’s analysis, it realised there was an untapped opportunity across different category entry points which included: people’s first cup of morning coffee, heavy drinkers in big cities. The insights also helped Löfbergs develop a campaign which linked this strategy to its identity, its unique assets, as a values-driven family business. In this way, the company grew by 42%, regaining its top market share with no increase in budget.
3. How do I build a sustainable and agile strategy?
Leadership changes, new entrants, lack of data. For one thing or the other, sometimes, strategic priorities are determined by the personal biases or preferences of marketing or C-suite leadership. While this may bring about a consensus in the boardroom quite quickly, it might not be best for the brand in question.
Today’s access to technology and data, makes possible the existence of simulators. The BrandStructures simulator, for example, can help make sure different investment paths are pre-tested and allow for in-the moment decisions in the boardroom. Based on Kantar’s bespoke modelling, the simulator allows brands to explore alternative strategic options and its impact on desired outcomes – whether that’s which combination of product benefits to emphasise, or whether to focus on packaging or a different segment of the population. It means you can test hypothesis to devise your most efficient path to growth.
In 2025, will you disrupt or be disrupted?
In today’s world, we know disruption is the only constant. The most successful brands make it to the top ranks through a well-informed and authentic approach to brand building. To do this, they’ll need a strong grasp of what makes them different, and how to express this – as well as a clear understanding of consumer trends. In an increasingly dynamic world, trust is crucial: people want brands that can deliver on their promises and live up to their stated values.
With this understanding, and armed with the right evidence, brands can respond to unpredictable events with confidence and agility, setting themselves on a resilient and unique path to growth.
Learn more by watching our on-demand webinar: Navigating Brand Growth: Build Difference in 2025
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