With the close of the Olympics and all the excitement it brought, I can’t help but look back from at another time of my life when I was in competitive sports. As a former gymnast, I get butterflies in my stomach just watching the Olympic athletes march onto the gym floor on competition day. It takes me back to all the meets that I competed in and the numerous hours practicing routine after routine perfecting and improving my balance, coordination, flexibility, strength, and agility. Our coaches pushed us to do our best every time without mistakes. We were judged not only on our tricks, dance and skills, but also on the way we looked.

As I sat watching the women’s U.S. Olympic gymnastics team on TV, my heart broke for the sport. How could two former Olympians themselves criticize and further stomp out the dreams of one of the gymnasts?

Jordyn Wieber, a 17-year old gymnast whose dream was to compete in the Olympic all-around finals, failed to advance to the finals by a mere one tenth of a point. When the U.S. team marched off the floor at the end of the competition, Jordyn was in tears.  To add salt to her wound, rather than letting the girl whose dreams were just deflated walk to the locker room to compose herself, the security officials directed her to the media corral for interviews.

I understand as a marketing professional that watching someone else’s shattered dreams can make a great news story. It also becomes that replay moment in the media. But, everyone needs a moment when under that much pressure.

In marketing isn’t the same?  Pressure to ensure your brand is always at peak performance with your customers watching, observing, championing and critiquing every move. Sometimes brands stumble when trying to introduce a new logo, product packaging or entering new markets. As fellow marketers and professionals, rather than joining the chorus of critics, perhaps we can give our industry colleagues a moment to pause and learn.  We can benefit from their lessons learned, because after all, it could have very well been us.

There is no denying that marketers are persistently pushing the creative boundaries when developing advertising campaigns that are both meaningful and engaging to captivate their target audiences. However, marketers need to be even savvier when meeting their objectives. Superb creative alone is not enough to guarantee success in a world where audiences are under a daily barrage from competitor brands, an overcrowded marketplace, and the prevalence of media overload everywhere we turn. Today, marketers need to discover the Marketing Science to deliver effective messages to meet their brand’s desired impact.

The science of marketing goes well beyond just research analytics, the measurement of sales and predictive ROI modeling. Although these research tools are important, it is critical to first uncover the true attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors of the audience related to a brand in order to influence the decision making process.

For the past 14 years, I have been a Brand Planner, which essentially combines the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, and sociology, with the creativity of graphic design and unconventional thinking in order to understand the wants and desires of today’s target audience segments. The insights gleaned from the target audiences are translated from my research studies, to develop the overall strategic direction for marketing campaigns, as well as to generate the most appropriate positioning of companies to ensure that they stand out amongst the competition.  Sounds simple right?

So how exactly do you uncover the attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors of your audience? You talk to them and get them to open up about their feelings. You engage them in group and individual discussions. You have them to draw pictures to capture their true emotions. Discussions go beyond the rational decision-making process and into the emotional-based process. I have them think about the five sensory cues they may experience within certain situations. What would things taste like? Smell like? Feel like? Sound like? And look like?

This is the kind of information that is SO important in building and maintaining a brand. This information can be used to influence everything from the creation of stellar advertising that will stop people in their tracks, to the packaging that acts like a beacon on a shelf full of products. This information also ensures the most appropriate media buys, stand-out public relations efforts, mind blowing social media tactics, and more.

In today’s ever cluttered society, we must communicate with the intended target audiences in a way that is meaningful to them. It must also be believable by accurately reflecting all that the company stands for. It must be different from the competition. It must be applied in a consistent manner over an extended period of time. By understanding what is truly driving your customers to buy your product, you can make more well-informed marketing decisions and ensure that your ROI projections are met each time.

At Ideas Collide, we believe that by thoroughly understanding a brand, the audience for the brand and the world in which that brand lives; by creatively integrating brand planning techniques to learn more about your audiences with our innate ability to spot the latest trends, we can effectively create and communicate your company’s messages, direct the formation of your company’s desired perceptions in the minds of its target audiences, and ultimately create a band of brand devotees that can, by sheer force of will, elevate a brand to legendary status.