After all, doesn’t it make sense considering the steep investments in R&D, processes, better ingredients, superior formulation skills and novel manufacturing design? Thus, the theory goes, once the world is made aware of this better tech, consumers will in turn respond by beating a path to the shelf or showroom and reward the hard work and high-quality commitment with ever increasing sales.

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Better mousetrap marketing has been a foundational paradigm of go-to-market thinking since the dawn of the mass media era in the early 1950s.

Are You Always Reaching For Product ‘Betterness’?

The rinse-and-repeat environment that fosters this way of operating is woven into the institutional fabric of many brands and businesses.

Consider the regional potato chip brand that believes to beat the big guys they must be better by meticulously sourcing an improved strain of potatoes. They carefully curate a blend of frying oils to impart taste and texture without any greasy residue. In-house chefs work to test and combine the highest quality spices and flavoring ingredients for dusting the chips to assure the perfect taste notes. Their manufacturing technologists perfect a frying process to achieve the right texture and crunch. Surely this level of quality commitment and superior craftsmanship forms the foundation of a compelling story to capture the hearts and minds of chip lovers?

What if this isn’t the reason why your brand will be successful? What if the incredible investment of time, talent, quality and infrastructure is actually table stakes to your victory?

Facts Don’t Change Minds

The brand that gets closest to the consumer wins. That means embracing your customers’ humanity.

It also means acknowledging that consumers are feeling creatures who think and not thinking creatures who feel. Facts and features serve to feed our need for confirmation bias after purchase that we’ve made the right decision. The experience with your product is rewarded by its performance because you’ve labored to produce the very best product. However, when it comes to effective outreach communication — that’s something else entirely.

Heartfelt Connection

Moving as close to the consumer as possible means putting your brand in league with them on their journey. It’s forging an emotional connection founded on trust and integrity, where the consumer understands and wants to join your brand mission and its deeper meaning. Ultimately, they see via your integrity and actions you have their best interests at heart.

Your ability to form a relationship with consumers is not based on the stats and specs of your product formulation. Relevant brand engagement operates on a higher plane of context, much like the heartfelt bonds that form between people we care about.

Sound Strategy: Different Beats Better

Uniqueness and differentiation comprise the basis of beneficial strategy, not being better. This is a zero-sum and unwinnable game of one-upmanship that operates to commoditize your business.

When you know emotion rather than analytical arguments form the basis of successful communication, how will that change your messaging approach? It’s a given that you must never dilute your quality commitments. However, when it comes to brand communication, the most effective outreach is based on emotional drivers, not specsmanship.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

• Consumers have changed
• The levers of a purchase decision have changed
• Consumer relationships with brands have changed
• The dynamics of influence has changed

Far too many brands remain tethered to a legacy philosophy of command-and-control, awareness-chasing marketing. This way of thinking interferes with the ability to form vibrant, healthy relationships with consumers who look for added meaning from the brands they care about.

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• Our mission is to provide the tools, thinking, and pathway to a more successful future of sustainable brand growth. Here, we summarize the elements of new brand marketing based on a more human-like approach to creating brand relevance and resonance.

This Didn’t Happen Overnight… A Decade Of Trial, Error And Refinement

For 10 years we have studied and worked to construct a new, improved brand building system, one that is grounded in the latest science-based understanding of consumer behavior and the prevailing impact of modern culture on business. You might agree culturally informed brands are the ones that will rise to dominance in their categories due to enhanced relevance and resonance.

This post is truly a call to action to let go of past beliefs and brand building behaviors, dominated mostly by transactional thinking and feature/benefit selling. The old way of doing things has inadvertently held brands back from what they desire most: attracting legions of devoted believers, ambassadors and evangelists.

The Truth About Brands In The Era Of Consumer Control

Sustainable, lasting brand relationships are built now on admiration and trust and will produce significant financial premiums. They also uniquely deliver higher margins and traffic. By virtue of their inherent stickiness, they work progressively to roll-back the costs of promotion while improving ROI and bottom-line performance.

Perhaps most important of all, they create the opportunity for transcendence – the state of being admired – where consumers “join” the brand as members, not merely customers. It is that intersection between “why” and passion where people find affection and the basis for a relationship with brands they care about. We express it this way because the world has changed and relating to a brand is now fundamentally the same thing as relating to a person.

Key insight: To secure the opportunity for sustainable brand relationships, we have a responsibility to bring added meaning, trust, and belief to the forefront of the relationship. Of note, we have been afforded an incredible opportunity to build deeper connections at a time when consumers are searching for guidance. What’s driving this openness to a relationship?

Uncertainty – people crave certainty in their lives, we can help provide it
Disconnection and isolation – inadvertent consequence of over-indulgence in social media
Absence of trust – bad business behaviors are writ large for all to see, all too often
Fear of the unknown – climate change deniers scoff at California wildfires – how is that possible?
Existential threats – heat waves, floods, weather anomalies, fires, droughts
Lack of control – we want to restore a sense of control in our lives
Financial and time pressures – mental health challenges are at an all-time high

However, many brands are not positioned correctly, and remain focused on transactional ‘better than’ stories. They lack higher purpose and a defined mission that should inform their positioning. Thus, they are not truly differentiated and focus instead on trivial points of bitterness. Consequently, they are not set up to provide deeper meaning to their customers and in so doing fail to attract evangelists and advocates who would otherwise “join” the company’s mission.

In Sum, Where Things Can Go Off The Rails:

Focus on ‘better than’ thinking vs. uniqueness and differentiation
Chasing awareness over relevance and deeper meaning
Absence of customer centricity
Higher purpose is missing or mis-applied
Brand narrative is not emotionally compelling
At risk of commoditizing their own category through competitive comparisons

An Improved Path:

1. Build stronger more engaging and profitable brands that are better positioned, more relevant and purposeful.
2. Discover/enhance/strengthen the strategic foundation, install customer centricity and higher purpose, while refining and improving the brand story.
3. Translate a highly differentiated brand into a transformational business by focusing on the customer and building emotional connections through the brand’s core “why” and related value proposition.

Resulting In A Healthy Brand:

• Defined higher purpose, value system, and deeper meaning
• Has cultivated a deeply resonant brand “why” that influences its core strategies
• Customer centricity and focus on enabling core user lifestyle aspirations and values
• Not pre-occupied with selling product features and benefits
• Recognizes the power of emotion to inform brand choice and purchase decisions
• Experiences sustainable growth and rapid acceptance of innovations
• Attracts a vibrant base of evangelists, enthusiasts, and ambassadors

What Is Customer Centricity?

Perhaps the most important characteristic of a healthy brand is the priority given to consumers who sit at the center of strategic planning, while all actions and activities operate in service of a devotion to serving the consumer’s needs.

If you ask marketers if the consumer is their top priority, many will say yes. Yet on closer examination we find the consumer is buried under other imperatives that put greater emphasis on brand self-promotion and a priority on balance sheet imperatives. This usually results in a transactional type view of consumers as audiences to be “sold” on product features. Brand storytelling is often inward-facing and the consumer — their hopes, beliefs and aspirations – remain secondary.

Creating “Vows” To The Consumer

However, consumer centricity is the strategic fuel that powers all successful brand-to-consumer relationships. To help enable this dynamic we believe brands should consider making vows much like the ones we tell our spouses at the start of a marriage.

The promises we make during a marriage ceremony are intended to be binding and foundational. Here are five areas of commitment – vows — that brands can deploy to build a relationship with consumers that reinforces the practice of consumer centricity:

Truth – fundamental to any trusted relationship is a commitment to honor the truth at all times
Honesty – disclosure and openness are critical to a long-term healthy relationship
Priority – when consumers matter, their priority in the business plan is always number one
Faithfulness – steadfast and unshakeable in the resolute commitment the consumer’s wellbeing
Devotion – helping people achieve their dreams and aspirations as an enabler of their journey

Can you make these vows to the consumer and endeavor to keep them? The expression of these commitments goes a long way to codifying the priority consumers receive at the center of your business universe.  This is how transformational relationships are formed with your customers. The focus on consumer priorities becomes a flywheel that sets everything else in motion. Vows represent a deeper and heartfelt commitment. It’s how you felt on the day you made them to your better half.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

• He opined: “When a man’s an empty kettle he should be on his mettle, and yet I’m torn apart. Just because I’m presumin’ that I could be kind-a-human, If I only had a heart…”

Brands and businesses function primarily on a Tin Man platform — the operating mechanics of product innovation, production and go-to-market always occupying first chair in priorities and investment. While matters of the brand’s heart may not appear to be relevant or attention worthy.

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The Tin Man is a woodcutter, so what does heart have to do with his calling? Does it make him a better woodcutter? Is being ‘kind-a-human’ an advantage?

This leads us to an important strategic point about the influence of culture change on commerce and brand building.

The world has dramatically changed, and people no longer trust the assertions or claims made by brands. Meanwhile the consumer’s earnest search for brands offering deeper meaning, beliefs and recognizable values has recast the relationship between brand and user.

We Have Entered A New Era Of Humanizing Brands

This presages another important strategic challenge…

• In a great sea of product sameness, similarity and marketing noise, how can food, beverage and lifestyle brands stand out?

Our first critical imperative: the brand that gets closest to the customer wins. And second: the road to customer relationships and engagement is paved with lifestyle relevance, trust and higher purpose. Why?

Because it’s no longer enough —
to make a great product
to look and taste good
to secure broad distribution
to be made with simple, real and authentic ingredients
to participate in social communities
to gain attention in earned and social media channels

The relationships people have with the brands they care about look increasingly like the same kind they have with friends and loved ones. Conditions of trust, reciprocity, genuine caring and higher purpose come into play to create transcendence – where consumers join the brand’s “why” – it’s mission– as believers and advocates.

Yes, brands now require a heart and soul. Heart means the business doesn’t look at its customers as walking transactions. Nor should they focus solely on their product feature and benefit story. Rather the brand functions as a coach and enabler on relevant customer lifestyle aspirations and needs. Your brand can become a true source of deeper meaning and inspiration; a guide and teacher, a provider of resources and experiences — this is the outcome of having a heart.

Cultural Uncertainty Serves To Multiply The Value Of Heart-Led Brands

You already know that culture change impacts brand relevance and so we have an obligation to track these shifts and what they mean as it unfolds.

We are now in the midst of what could best be described as a cultural flood of ambiguity and transformation. It is an unprecedented time where contradictions, conflicting truths, and change rock the center of what people believe about social norms and relationships. The outcome of this societal upheaval feels a bit strange to many people who are increasingly turning inward and introspective. Two examples —

• A recent Harris Poll tells us that the vast majority of Gen Z consumers would easily substitute pets for children because they’re less disruptive and expensive to care for. Clearly a shift in lifestyle priorities away from family to furry wards.
• Jasmine Bina of the Concept Bureau flags the emergence of Mommunes, where single mothers cohabitate and raise children together. It is an outcome, she describes, of the de-centering of romantic relationships while centering more on friendships. Evidence perhaps that the person you fall in love with vs. the one you trust may not be the same person.

This evolutionary condition challenges accepted behaviors while delivering added uncertainty in the process. In the midst of this change brands have an opportunity to help guide people through these transitions that greatly challenge conventional thinking and comfort zones.

The Tin Man lesson is clear — when you need a heart for the right reasons, you should manifest one. Marketers are in the brand heart and soul business, helping identify, refine and activate that core purpose — and leverage key strategies that come after it to push greater meaning onto the company’s operational shirtsleeve.

In business terms, what benefit is derived from having a real heart? Ironically as a trusted partner on life’s increasingly upside-down journey, it paves the yellow brick road to more transactions.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

Most of the brand messaging they see will be analytical and based on assertions of “better-ness” in the form of ingredient comparisons, quality assertions, or claims of formulation and taste superiority. What’s missing is the type of beneficial distinctiveness that sets a brand far enough apart that such comparisons become moot.

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Moreover, we know that consumer actions and decisions to buy are governed by the brain’s Limbic System, a part of our physiology that is influenced through emotion and not rational messages. Humans are not hard-wired to function as fact-based decision-making machines. It’s always heart-over-head. Surprising to be sure because we all like to think of ourselves as rationally informed beings. In reality, preferences are influenced by how people feel in the presence of your brand.

• The battle for market share, sales velocity, and sustainable business results resides in the six inches of grey matter between both ears of your brand’s core and prospective customer base. Your real marketplace challenge is how to secure and maintain mental real estate.

However, many brands are preoccupied with trumpeting their product features and benefits. Ultimately, your business success will be proportional to how greatly (or not) your brand matters to its intended audience. Mattering is an outcome of occupying a unique and positive frame inside your consumers’ minds. When your brand is distinctively positioned with users in a relevant way, you can secure a place in the brain that continuously emerges to reinforce brand preference and purchase.

Take the best-positioned brand in the beer industry. Much to the chagrin of all other large beer manufacturers, Corona is in a class by itself, having honed and invested in its association with beach, surf, sun, and vacation-in-a-bottle vibes. Even the lime ritual helps fortify the mental associations of wanting to relax in that sunny beach locale while enjoying a cold bottle of Corona. Notice the brand never talks about its liquid, brewing credentials, or quality of ingredients. It’s an emotional proposition and distinctively owned by Corona as a desirable lifestyle image association. This is positioning at its finest in a business where brands routinely fly over this important work by running a clever ad campaign featuring a catchy slogan.

Nike doesn’t sell running shoes. It’s an emotional and aspirational brand. One that inspires passion and commitment to athletic endeavor and achievement. ‘Just Do It’ is a more than memorable call to action. It’s a state of mind and purpose. It works to plant a positive association in the consumer’s mind by surfacing their quest for self-improvement. The predominant voice of Nike’s brand is decidedly not about running shoe design and engineering, advanced materials, or other product feature details. Nike owns the emotional context around a powerful desire for personal achievement.

• Do you see where this is going when you rise above self-promoting product features and focus on the consumer and their lives and how you can operate as an enabler of their hopes and dreams. Suddenly, you find yourself in rarified territory, exploring a path to uniquely position your brand in a more powerful way – creating a meaningful correlation that can take root in the consumer’s brain.

Far too many brands don’t labor at this. Instead, they focus squarely on themselves — through a circular story about product bona fides and feature advantages. It’s important to consider that consumers no longer buy products. A purchase is now a flag and symbol of what they believe in, their values, and who they are. Want to have a deeper relationship with your core users? Then, imbue your brand with deeper meaning. Give them something larger than themselves to embrace and advocate for.

• By doing so, you open an incredibly important strategic examination of how to create a memorable, sticky brand position. Consumers are naturally drawn to a brand with a higher purpose and belief system that aligns with their own.

Just be careful not to conflate a strong brand position with an advertising campaign. Creating emotional context around your brand and its “why” is a more demanding exercise. We refer to it as curating your Brand Stand — a decisive view about why your brand exists and its human-relevant purpose. It will serve as an anchor for every business decision coming after it, the value you create and how you do what you do.

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We won’t devote space here to examining all the prescriptive details around brand positioning discovery. Perhaps the most important guidance we can offer is embracing uniqueness and differentiation—especially important in business categories where sameness (most of them) is a systemic problem.

A Good Place To Start…

• “We are the only brand that delivers _____________.” What does the consumer get from you that they can’t get anywhere else? This is one of the toughest questions your brand will face. Remember, it’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing on a trivial distinction that won’t deliver a genuine path to differentiation.
• What are your core customers’ beliefs and lifestyle aspirations? How can you further support and enable their hopes and dreams as your brand’s superpower? Suddenly, you are marketing something more vital to them than the table stakes expectation of a well-designed and produced product.

Positioning Is Most Effective When Trust Breaks Out

Trust is essential to unlocking the business value of a unique brand positioning. Trusted brands retain loyalty, motivate repeat purchases, and deliver a receptive audience for the trial of innovations. That said, trust can only be earned. Here’s a six-point checklist to help you think about trust:

1. Values and beliefs – a higher purpose brand that has a belief system beyond transactional considerations is immediately trustworthy
2. Consistency – when the experience with your brand across all points of contact is reinforced through repeat performances, you earn trust
3. Keeping promises (walking the walk) – when earning trust, efforts to demonstrate dependability through actions and behaviors are more powerful than words
4. Social proof – validation and verification of your competence through the testimonials of real people is powerful affirmation of trustworthiness
5. Transparency – another form of validation is taking consumers behind the corporate curtain for an unfiltered look at what you do and how you do it. Showing extraordinary openness is  characteristic of a trusted brand
6. Help rather than hype – If you truly care about your customer’s well-being and success, you will operate unselfishly as an enabler of their lifestyle goals and wishes, earning their trust along the way

A uniquely positioned and trusted brand is your organization’s most powerful business-building asset. Your devotion and energy to creating emotional connectivity and trustworthiness are the formula for rising above the competition and driving sustainable, profitable growth. Positioning creates a memorable place in the brain, while trust seals the deal. Together, they deliver a formidable and powerful business-building platform.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

Now more than ever before CPG and retail brands are suffering an existential challenge to the very essence of advantage that was once responsible for their success. Simply stated, we observe a proliferation of business categories where too many brands are failing to make much of an inspirational impression. The consumers’ eyes are starting to glaze over.

This article is part of Branding Strategy Insider’s newsletter. You can sign up here to get thought pieces like this sent to your inbox.

Why? Because uniformity and conformity have taken root, pushing brand behavior collectively by efforts to match competitive “one-ups-manship” moves over time. The irony of ironies: competitive competence will eventually submerge brand distinctions because like the laws of gravity, feature mirroring and spec creep inexorably push products closer to each other.

All airlines have frequent flier benefits
All detergents offer stain fighting formulas
All delivery is fast
All retailers have loyalty card programs
Should the Hummer slide towards the larger addressable market of a family friendly ride or remain the “toughest motherf____er” on the planet?

Take pet food and the impact of category premiumization. In herd-like fashion many premium pet brands have moved to mirror each other on:

• High quality animal protein ingredients
• Biologically appropriate standards of nutrition
• Low impact, minimal processing
• Customization to specific need states like food sensitivities or aging

Once a higher bar is set, pet brands across the business spectrum rise to it and differentiation quickly dissipates with it.

Build Brand Passion And Investment?

Competitive differentiation is increasingly a rarity. It is being replaced by the mastery of imitation and similarity. Eventually, uniqueness begins to exist only in the minds of some marketers while the reality is lost on consumers who simply don’t see it. In the absence of authentic distinction brands begin to collapse on top of each other because the differences between them is ever more trivial.

Connoisseurship, devotion, passion and inspiration is the hallmark of brands that matter to their core user base. This is a top priority for brand owners because of an increasingly demanding challenge: what comes next when consumers decide the differences between brands are too narrow and don’t matter anymore? We know the ability to compete successfully over time is dependent on a brand’s efforts to create and maintain meaningful separation from everything else. To be a category of one.

When Mavericks Become Champions

Sustainable differentiation is never an outcome of well roundedness but rather lopsidedness, intentional tradeoffs, taking stands and decisions to fight conformity. There’s just too much preoccupation with solving for competitive moves that leads to regression towards the mean. Over time categories start to slice and dice into ever smaller segments that hunt for unique appeals to narrower targets of interest. Until — the profusion of alternatives gets less meaningful — and then the rust of category commoditization starts to spread rapidly.

Trying to squeeze differentiation out of minuscule discrepancies is essentially the marketing version of making mountains out of a mole hill. Our calling as marketers is to build a process and strategy that leads people to be more discriminating and picky about what they buy. The villain we fight is purchase behavior based on routine rather than passionate commitment. If a person publicizes their affinity for a brand, it means the connection has gone a whole lot deeper.

• When brands pay too much attention to adjacent competitor changes and keeping up with those feature adjustments, the business eventually becomes incompatible with consumer devotion to it. Instead, we strive to continually earn a foundation of loyalists who retain a stubborn passion for the brand – a fanatical hard core fan base.

You know when brand fidelity starts to shrink, something is definitely amiss. Usually, the result of accentuating non-essential differences. Until — a brand comes along that does something unpredictable, shaking people out of their complacency and enticing them to move away from entrenched consumption patterns. This also means a planned escape from focusing on the competition altogether.

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Celebration Of Outliers And Iconoclasts

When you’re too consumed with tracking competitors you lose the bandwidth to generate real inspiration. It’s just…

• Harder to be an outlier
• Harder to develop a market disrupting strategy
• Harder to imbue a brand with deeper meaning that invokes conversation

Unafraid brands will put a stake in the ground, take a point of view and fight overblown promises and spurious claims. When other brands go north, the outliers head south. Instead of conformity and uniformity, these disruptive brands are preoccupied with unearthing unique ideas because they are more interested in separation than comparison. They know real differences can be truly charismatic and magnetic.

How To Escape The Competitive Herd

• Differentiation – a way of thinking, a mindset and commitment to pursuing a unique journey
• Subtraction – removal of some common features in a declared move towards specialization
• Polarization – taking sides by narrowing the preferred target audience cohort

Marketing is the intersection of where business meets up with real human beings. Consumers don’t organize their worlds with charts and graphs.  They are unpredictable, disorganized and make emotional decisions. Then we task them with selecting products in a sea of similarity – the differences diminished to package graphics or a compelling image.

We want them to be advocates and ambassadors but then refuse to offer any deeper meaning they can attach to and believe in. Said one marketing advisor, “the mockery quotient of a category is directly correlated to the amount of meaningless differentiation in it.” What’s missing are meaningful grooves of separation enhanced by a higher purpose and mission that touches the hearts of people who want to be part of something greater than themselves.

We should be laser focused on that agenda rather than relentlessly tracking competitors to make sure we aren’t outgunned on the feature playlist. It’s time to get off this comparison merry-go-round to work on genuine emotional relevance and resonance.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education