Industry insiders will struggle to get to a differentiating idea

There are plenty of instances when it is smart to hire consultants with deep knowledge and experience in your category. But defining your Brand’s core strategic premise is not one of those times.  In order to escape the traps, conventions and category benefits, it will be more helpful to bring in brand experts rather than industry experts. This is true not just because an outsider can bring fresh ideas to your category, but because that outsider will help the internal team be more creative by generating surprising, unfamiliar perspectives.

A 2012 New Yorker article called “Groupthink” debunked how brainstorming is usually conducted. The article cited research by Charlan Nemeth at UC Berkeley, as it concluded, “Even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creative potential…After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives.”

I find it surprising how many RFPs require experience in a particular category for brand strategy work. We’ve been at this a while and we’re fortunate to have a bit of experience in many categories. But when I look back at our body of work over the past 15 years, I’m struck by how so many of our best cases were in situations where we were brand new or almost new to a category. We’d never really done high-end fashion before we worked with Gucci, but the brand’s sales and value sky-rocketed after they embraced the strategic direction we helped them develop.

We actually go through a process of cross-pollination whenever we work on a brand strategy assignment. We ask ourselves what we can learn from our experience outside this category to bring fresh perspective? How can we bring smart but outlandish ideas into the room to stimulate the client team?

It is also helpful not to be competing with the clients to be the “expert” on the industry. I remember the Gucci clients really liking the fact that we were clearly not from their world. They could be the experts on fashion and we could be the experts as it relates to the process and ideas for re-defining the brand.

Prior experience in a category can be useful and help on the initial learning curve, but it doesn’t really correlate with a successful process, end-product or results.

Many ad agencies could use this same medicine. Generate ideas from outside the industry — or at least outside the company — to help change the way agencies work. If only there was another agency model…

No wonder we shy away from the unfamiliar

We call this human disposition to respond negatively to truly new and different things The Zajonc Effect. And it is one of the greatest reasons for the stunning lack of differentiation among brands in the same category. Imagine how this human reality impacts market research. Let’s say you have five potential brand positioning strategies. In an effort to make the best decision, you quantitatively test the alternative strategies. People being people, they respond most negatively to the most unfamiliar — and differentiating — concept. They respond best to the strategy they’ve seen before. The one your competitor is using already. That’s the strategy you run with because it “won” in research… and another undifferentiated brand strategy is born. At best, some minor incremental improvement or difference makes its way into the strategy. And nothing in the execution will save an undifferentiated brand strategy from becoming an undifferentiated brand in the end.

Look around at famous marketing failures and they are often the ideas that tested the best. Some of the greatest successes tested terribly because they were different. It is a frustrating  fact of marketing that the key ingredient to long-term brand success is differentiation but people are wired to respond negatively to a truly differentiating idea upon initial exposure. This explains failures like Coca-Cola’s Surge. Millions were spent behind the launch of a brand that looked like and promised exactly the same thing as Mountain Dew. It also explains why Seinfeld, Absolut Vodka and so many huge successes tested poorly. They were really different.

What do you do if you’re in a business culture that requires testing to move forward? Create a moat of quant data to support the new idea but don’t actually test the idea directly in quantitative research.  Show how this new idea addresses quantitatively derived segments’ quantitatively proven needs, but use very sensitive qualitative research to really delve into strategy development and selection.

But even more helpful, tell your boss and your bosses boss about the Zajonc Effect. They don’t know. They are probably operations or finance guys. But the marketer needs to inform and educate within the firm. I’m always amazed how open to change senior people are when confronted with facts. But I’m equally amazed at how many more middle managers and junior folks can hear about the Zajonc Effect and ignore it because, “we have to test things here.” Really? No wonder so many recent studies (Brand Keys, Greenfield/Copernicus to name a couple) are showing that few brands are differentiated. In fact, fewer were differentiated in 2009 than in 2003 according to the Brand Keys study.

Beware the Zajonc Effect.

Two problems with this last part. First, the moms in the volume target may not actually aspire to be harried moms. In fact, they may want to feel like they are in command of their lives or that they’ve got more on their minds than breakfast cereal. The communication is usually far more successful showing the aspirational self than the reality. We call this more aspirational group the Strategic Target. They are particularly important for badge brands where the user imagery for the brand is especially important.

Take Harley Davidson. The volume seems to come mostly from middle aged upscale professionals. You’ve seen them riding their shiny Harley’s on perfect summer days. They are living out a fantasy of rebellion on Sunday before heading back to their jobs as dentists on Monday. That’s the volume target. But if Harley started featuring this group of dentists in their advertising they would be finished. That’s because the “real biker” with the leather, beard, tattoos and genuine tough-guy demeanor is the Strategic Target. This real rebel biker is the guy the volume target wants to be. Even if that real biker isn’t really responsible for most of the volume, that’s who needs to be in the ads.

So problem one with a fixation on the volume target is that people don’t necessarily want to be reminded of who they are — they want to become something better through your brand. That something or someone better is the Strategic Target. The second problem with a communication focus on the volume target is that it’s hard to differentiate based on that kind of user imagery. The reason volume targets represent so much volume is that they are common. Common is not good for differentiation.

But a Strategic Target can be quirky or eccentric. Special and rare. I’ve posted before about the value of archetypes in defining user imagery (How To Differentiate a Brand I). However, a brand becomes particularly unique if it can understand the person its volume target hopes to become. Then find the person who has become that kind of human. That’s the Strategic Target and it can be a very interesting, textured person — even for a mass brand. The Strategic Target is a particularly powerful concept for really mass brands. We found that Best Buy struggled mightily with this concept but it was quite easy to find the person their volume targets wanted to become.

Think about your Strategic Target. It’s an opportunity to really differentiate.

Brands struggle to avoid category platitudes.

Don’t settle for a category benefit when you define your brand strategy. One of the biggest problems we see when a team tries to craft a new brand strategy is that they focus on highly important issues in the category — but those issues are simply category table stakes. Category benefits or category table stakes are the attributes or benefits that a brand needs to offer just to be in the business at all. They can also be important benefits that every brand in the category speaks to already. Category benefits may be important but they don’t differentiate your brand. They just put you in the game.

We like to use the example of snowboards. We had the opportunity  a while back to advise a large player in the category about how to better position their brand. The first thing we noticed was that every brand in the category had done research or intuited that the ultimate moment in snowboarding is the adrenaline rush when you catch some air. As a consequence, every single brand had ads running that featured snowboarders flying through the air. There is no doubt that this adrenaline rush moment is important in the category, but if your brand is all about that moment, it is still not differentiated. We pushed them on what their point of view was on that category benefit. How do they see it differently? How do they deliver it differently or better? Or, is there another equally important snowboarding moment that hasn’t become table stakes yet — a moment we could own?

We often see internal client teams become particularly smitten with category benefits when trying to define a positioning for their brands. A rental car operator that offers “safe, new cars” is probably speaking to a category benefit. Who doesn’t have safe, new cars among the big players? A financial services company that offers “trustworthy, informed advice” is also simply touting a category benefit. Is there a financial services company that touts its “lying, cheating advisers?”

Here’s a good test. If you have a brand position you think is good, ask yourself if there is a valid opposing position in the market.  If there isn’t, then you probably just have a category benefit and not a differentiating idea. Using the example of BMW, you could say that there is a valid opposing point of view from a “performance sedan.” It could be “supreme luxury.” It could be “precision engineering.”

The truck category is full of category benefits right now. Every truck is “tough, rugged and durable.” Important attributes in a truck — but only category table stakes. There is no “frilly, fragile truck” brand. The US trucks always have a dose of cliche masculinity and toughness. It’s obviously important, but it’s not a differentiator. The Nissan Frontier ads right now look a lot like the Toyota Tacoma ads from recent years. Yes, the Japanese trucks need to address a perceived short-coming here, but they also need to differentiate.

Selecting the type of brand imagery driving your brand should be done consciously.

The first step in defining a differentiated Strategic POV or positioning for a brand should be determining the type of brand imagery you want to use in your positioning. We have built on the work of Wendy Gordon to create different classes of brand imagery. A given Strategic POV will generally be built around one or two types of brand imagery.  And we often find that all the brands in a category are using the same type of brand imagery to position their brands. That’s an opportunity to differentiate. Selecting a different class of brand imagery will allow you to stand apart. Therefore, thinking about the kind of brand imagery you want to use in a careful, systematic way can change the vocabulary in your category and fundamentally differentiate your brand.

Let’s look at the different classes of brand imagery:

– Product Imagery (What functional product performance characteristics do we want to associate with this brand? Volvo used this for years to become known as “safe.”)

– User Imagery (What kind of person do we want to associate with this brand? Louis Vuitton uses globally recognizable, established/accomplished agents of change like Gorbachev and Keith Richards to signify the type of person or “badge” they want associated with their brand.)

– Occasion Imagery (What kind of occasion do we want to associate with this brand? Corona has become synonymous with relaxing in the U.S. and Kit Kat is the snack for a break in a hectic day.)

– Archetype Imagery (What kind of personality traits do we want to associate with this brand? Bud Light has a certain frat-boy sense of humor that fits well with its target group. It could be seen as the “Jester” archetype. We try to align a brand with particular, focused archetype rather than list a lot of personality terms that are often schizophrenic and useless when executing.)

– Proximity Imagery (How do we remind consumers of the great times and relationship they have with this brand? Brands like Coke and McDonald’s can reference birthday parties and first dates as ways to remind people how the brand is part of their personal history.)

– Values Imagery (What does this brand believe in? What is it’s philosophy for living? When Nike says “Just Do It” they are espousing a way of living your life. It demonstrates the values they hold dear.)

It is very common for a category to become fixated on one of these forms of brand imagery, with all the brands in the category using slightly different shades of that same type of imagery. For instance, the beer category was for years built on Archetype Imagery and User Imagery. To stand out in this context, Corona decided to consciously avoid showing a type of person as their drinker. The commercials showed the backs of people on the beach, enjoying a laid back relaxing moment. They used Occasion Imagery to differentiate themselves. In effect, they were changing the vocabulary of the category and it worked to drive share gains for years.

In research, it’s easy to use projective techniques to understand how consumers view the brand imagery for each brand. Then we have them imagine the “ideal brand” in the category. Often the “ideal” is described using imagery that is not used very much in the category. This is a huge opportunity. We saw this in the blue jeans category when working on Lee Jeans. At that time the category was all about Product Imagery — how you would look in the jeans — and User Imagery — who wears the brand. We saw that the “ideal brand” would provide confidence that actually changes behavior. It would allow (young men in this case) to escape being a poser and act on their beliefs and values. This ideal brand was more about Archetype Imagery (a man of action) and Values Imagery (doing the right thing rather than conforming). We re-positioned Lee using a Strategic POV that played to the imagery of the ideal brand. The results were spectacular with younger male share going from 2% to over 20% in stores where Lee Jeans were sold.

Differentiation is hard. Most studies show that brands are failing on this front. But it’s all that stands between a brand and a commodity. By looking for different types of imagery as your lever, you can move into fresh, original space that is highly relevant to the consumer. You can fundamentally change the vocabulary and the conversation in your brand’s favor.