Proximity. Presence.

How We Move Is How We Live

The pandemic changed our interaction with the world around us and, in the Move Arena, decisions have become less about “how I get to people, goods, services, and experiences”, and more about “how people, goods, services and experiences get to me” with profound implications for brands in this space. From declining High Streets to remote working, the shifts we observe are registered as much in culture, way of life and livelihood, as they are on the NASDAQ.

Interbrand’s Global Chief Strategy Officer, Manfredi Ricca, on the rapid evolution and burgeoning opportunity for brands competing in the Move Arena.

As consumers move less, proximity matters more.

The Move Arena uniquely spans and connects individual choices to collective impact – from declining High Streets, to remote working, all the way a capital city’s reclaimed pedestrian zone.

At a time when individual consumers and businesses strive to make an impact, decisions about movement will make your brand part of wider conversations.

For instance, your local store isn’t just convenience or experience but, perhaps, belonging – the chance to be part of an investment in a community. Customers consistently rate H-E-B, a Texas grocer with little brand recognition outside its footprint, as a top US company*. Why? It considers itself a people business that happens to sell groceries.

How can your brand replicate that experience?

Especially if you’re not a mobility brand.

Proximity and presence are integral parts of any business model. In the Decade of Possibility, new technology combined with evolving customer expectations (accelerated by the pandemic) presents opportunities for meaningful innovation.

‘Mona Lisa: Beyond the Glass’ – the Louvre’s first virtual reality project – uses the latest scientific research on Leonardo da Vinci, his creative processes and his painting techniques. The experience gives you the chance to meet the woman in the painting face-to-face, and is billed as giving audiences a new way to engage with the world’s most famous painting on a more personal level.

Where does what you do meet your customers? How might that change next?

How you move is an act of brand leadership.

The way brands move people, goods and services offers a crucial opportunity to change and grow their relationship with customers – from the presence they have in customers’ lives, to the choices they represent.

Your delivery fleet says more about you than your sustainability report. In 2021, Amazon announced an order of 100,000 electric delivery vehicles from Rivian.

And a chance to shape relationships with the constituents that matter.

If moving goods and services is not at the heart of what you do, but is part of your service, look through the Move lens to inspire novel ways of segmenting your customer and employee base.

Provide each segment with an appropriate value exchange and combination of efficiency and closeness.

As an employer, the extent to which your employees move or don’t – through remote, in-person, and hybrid working arrangements – means that your brand’s employee experience will need to be engineered in different ways for different cohorts.

Because how we move is how we live.

Companies competing in the Move Arena are not only helping us move from point A to point B, but they are helping us live.

They are helping us to create new experiences. And providing us new choices. To change the environments in which we live.

And in those changes, they create new ways for consumers to imagine their lives and themselves. Where their new life is a product of how they choose new ways to move through it.