Marketing
MARKETING AFRICA
Marketing
Abigael Ikamba
What Is Your Visceral Feeling About Your Brand?
We spend a lot of time in marketing talking about brand equity, market share and positioning. We obsess over data and consumer insights. They ' re all important. But I ' ve been wrestling with a different question: what is your visceral feeling about your brand? Not what the market thinks. Not what your latest research says. Not what your CEO wants the positioning statement to be. What does your gut tell you?
For years,“ trust your gut” sounded like something people said when they couldn ' t explain a decision. Then science caught up. Today we know the gut and the brain are in constant conversation. The microbes in our gut don ' t just help us in digesting food; they affect our mood, our energy, how clearly, we think and even how we handle stress. Perhaps our instincts weren ' t as irrational as we once thought. So, when I ask what your visceral feeling is about your brand, I ' m not asking a poetic question. I ' m asking whether, beneath all the presentations and quarterly business reviews, something inside you either believes in what you ' re building or doesn ' t.
I ask because I ' ve noticed something. Sometimes marketers don ' t lose their capability. They lose their conviction. The work is still getting done, campaigns are launched, budgets approved, slides polished yet something has changed. The curiosity that once fueled great ideas disappears, and instead of building brands, we start managing them. I ' ve come to believe this isn ' t usually a motivation problem. It ' s a values problem.
Before You Understand Your Brand, Understand Yourself
Ask someone to list their core values and they ' ll give you words from a leadership workshop: integrity, excellence, innovation, teamwork. Those aren ' t necessarily your values. Your real values were shaped long before your first job by your upbringing,
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your disappointments, your successes and the people who influenced you. For many of us, they are also shaped by our faith and the convictions we quietly carry.
Values show themselves long before we can put them into words. Pay attention to what keeps frustrating you; there is usually a value being stepped on. Notice the leaders you admire; chances are, they live out values you respect. Think about the decisions that came at a personal cost, what were you protecting? That ' s where your real value system lives. Those values shape every decision you make, including the way you market brands.
Your Values Will Always Show Up in Your Brand
We like to believe marketing is about strategy, segmentation and execution. Those things matter. But underneath them sit something deeper: marketing is the transfer of belief. Before a customer believes in a brand, someone inside the organization has to believe in it first. The medical representative standing in front of a healthcare professional must believe the brand will make a difference. Before the representative believes it, the marketer must. Before the marketer does, the leaders responsible for the brand must. Belief always moves downstream. So does disbelief.
The brand is downstream of the marketer. Every campaign, every positioning statement and every business case passes through the values of the people building it. A marketer who values honesty will resist claims that stretch the truth and will be uncomfortable making promises the brand can ' t keep. That isn ' t in any job description. It happens because values always find a way into our work, whether we intend them to or not.
The opposite is just as powerful. When the people responsible for a brand no longer believe in it, the market eventually notices.
Not immediately, the campaigns may still win awards, and the activation photographs may still look fantastic on LinkedIn. But you can ' t fake conviction forever. Customers know when a promise feels genuine and when it feels rehearsed. Every brand becomes a reflection of the people trusted to build it.
The Cost of Marketing Without Conviction
Most of us don ' t wake up one morning and suddenly stop believing in a brand. It happens gradually. You begin overlooking things that once bothered you. You stop asking difficult questions because you already know the answer. You tell yourself it ' s just business. Until one day you realize you ' re no longer giving the brand your best thinking you ' re simply giving it your time. Psychologists call this emotional dissonance: the tension we feel when our actions keep clashing with our beliefs. It happens in every profession, but marketing depends on conviction. Every day we ask customers to believe in something, and belief is hard to pass on when you ' ve stopped believing yourself.
The cost is yours to carry. First, you lose energy: creativity becomes compliance, innovation gives way to routine. Then your identity shifts. You become comfortable saying things you don ' t fully believe because“ that ' s the messaging.” Eventually the gap between who you are and what you do becomes so familiar that you stop noticing it. That ' s the most dangerous stage, because once dissonance becomes normal, authenticity quietly disappears.
I know this because I ' ve lived it. At some point in my career, I managed a brand that looked successful on paper. It had recognition and market presence. But I didn ' t believe the promise matched the reality. We were asking customers to believe one thing while delivering something else, and the difference wasn ' t small. It was fundamental.