Courtland Thomas — The Importance of Brand Value Post Pandemic
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Having a stable brand that provides a lot of value to your desired customers is extremely important when presenting a new product or service to the market. If you put all your efforts into something that has no value to anyone, then you’re wasting a lot of time. It’s a lot of hard work to secure a well-known and helpful brand, but it’ll pay off a lot in the long run.

After speaking to Courtland Thomas, we were able to see how useful it is to allow your work to stand on its own — so you know that it has value. He came up with some incredibly insightful advice for anyone who wants to achieve their goals in the coming year.

It’s time to Rediscover Marketing and take a look at how you’re able to secure a good brand value to ensure growth in the coming years once the pandemic has subsided. Alongside this, we’ll delve into how data review is beneficial next to this process.

Meet Courtland Thomas

Courtland Thomas is the Growth Marketing Manager for Lyft and manages a Growth Marketing Agency called Noho Labs.

Noho Labs is a Customer Insights Growth Agency. Cortland set out in this agency intending to improve companies marketing. He was very interested in using customer insights in controlling the marketing and found that many brands don’t use this strategy. It wasn’t being applied to how companies market products. Therefore, Cortland and Noho Labs were there for marketing directors who want and need more actionable consumer insights.

How To Ensure Your Brand Maintains Value

Courtland gave insight into the fact that 2020 was a crazy year, but as terrible as it was, it provided very astute learning for him and his team. The main thing was the importance of giving the work you create strong legs to stand on.

He recommends that you should force yourself to peel back the many layers that make up your work and look at its core. This way, you’ll be able to realize if it’s strong and will be able to stand on its own during tough times. If you believe it’s not strong enough, then it’s likely not to provide much value to your brand.

Courtland and his team look at testing assumptions, stating them, testing hypotheses around the assumptions, and then ensuring the work can stand on its own during tough times. This enables them to secure their brand value and make sure it’ll be useful to the customer.

Another way to ensure your brand has value is by understanding your customer. Courtland recommends speaking to them directly through social channels and customer support teams. You’ll then be able to find out what they’re looking for and what solution your product is doing for their problem. It could be that the solution may not be what you thought it initially was, and you can adapt your brand in that way.

When the pandemic has subsided, you want to remain intact with your brand value and start getting ready for the transition. Courtland recommends looking at what the future holds for your customer and business. Your customer may not be online as much, which could affect your product or service’s usage. He suggests adapting to the forecast and ensure you don’t lose value along the way.

Lastly, you want to not just focus on your specific industry but actually pay attention to up-and-coming brands outside your sector. Courtland believes that there’s a true value in looking outside of your bubble and gaining inspiration from them. This can benefit your own brand.

Approaching Data Review in the Future

Courtland has an excellent approach to data review amongst his team and believes that data review will be a waste of time without these steps.

• Understand the objective

This is key before starting any other process in data review. You want to identify what you’re hoping to determine through data analysis. This needs to be clear before any analysis begins.

• Gather appropriate resources of data

Not every resource is going to be applicable or true. A common tactic that Courtland recommends is to determine the credibility of the source. For example, if you’re using qualitative data from an interview, you want to make sure who you’re interviewing is credible.

• Always fact check

You want to ensure the data you gather makes sense to your potential audience. Try and understand if this data will sit right and the story your portraying will make them do what you want them to do.

Finishing off the interview, Courtland gave us three tips for ensuring your planning efforts in the next year are successful. These were to keep your plan objective, focused and ensure everyone in the team is part of the planning process. This will provide a better incentive in achieving your end goal.

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