Your task as a brand builder is to ensure you differentiate from competitors and alternatives and remain meaningful not only to your customers, but all your key stakeholders. In other words, you must continually develop your brand’s positioning, preferably by looking forward than backward. In addition, in their search for unique positions, means to provide added value and untapped markets, brands seek a forerunner status.    

Strategic foresight about the business environment is a useful tool not only for developing growth strategies, but for building the brand’s thought leadership position.

Why is that?

Leading brands not only envision their organization’s future state but engage their stakeholders in envisioning the future(s) of their shared business environment. By doing this, brands show leadership, prove their claims of being forerunners and shape their markets. Foresight and scenario thinking provide the means for envisioning the shared future(s). 

What’s in it for me, you might ask.

With foresight, we can imagine one or several scenarios of the future of your business environment. In the process we identify the most relevant future-oriented communication themes that resonate with your audiences and use those as building blocks in the scenario work.  The point is to have a foresightful view of the key questions you share with your stakeholders and invite them to co-operate in building a future where you and your stakeholders flourish. Here, foresight provides you with compelling content for your brand building – knowledge and inspiration about the possibilities of the future that is crucial both to you and your stakeholder. Better yet, scenarios of the future also provide a communication framework where you can illustrate the value-add of your brand’s innovations and offering in your shared context.

Forerunners like Shell, Wärtsilä and Bosch and many others have utilized foresight as means of brand building with great success. This is exactly what we did with Kemira when we imagined together the Future of Water, and you can read more about the case and its results here.

How do you build your brand and would you like to hear more about how you could benefit from strategic foresight as a brand builder?

Let me know and let’s talk!

Tomi Heikkinen
Director
+358 40 709 9530
tomi.heikkinen@capful.fi