Everyone strives to win, but what happens when you compete in a market where you are, and can never be more than, number two? If you’re Pepsi, for example, or Bing, how do you find the energy to continue to build out a business that will stay where it is, behind a massive incumbent? How do you do that without becoming uninspired, distracted or stuck?
A recent conversation with a client looking for a brand agency was a reminder of just how little of its own dog food the industry eats. Her assertion that “they all look the same and say the same things” highlighted just how difficult brand differentiation is. It’s so hard in fact that even those who claim to do it for a living struggle to do it for themselves.
Consciously or not, many brands are now running a freemium model. They are giving away a lot more than they used to, particularly across social media, just to keep up with the changing competitive landscape. And they are hoping to recoup on that significant content investment when consumers do buy. So has any of this changed the fundamentals of brand economics, or has it merely altered the manner in which brands achieve visibility?
In a recent address at Cannes, Monica Lewinsky made a plea for brands to play a more direct role in building a compassionate society: one where the power of social media to generate shame and humiliation (and gain money by doing so) was eschewed in favour of an environment that collectively supported and inspired individuals and their actions.
Marketers often talk about brand leadership as if it is one thing. But there are many different brand leadership strategies that a brand can use to distinguish itself in a marketplace. The critical decision for brand owners is deciding how you will lead and why that will work.
In a market filled with possibilities, there is power and focus in constraint. I pressed this point home recently in a discussion on why brands can’t just continue to add to their visual language. The argument I was getting – we need an extended palette to show the diversity of what we do and to prevent our brand looking monochromatic. My view – that adding layer upon layer of visual language to a brand doesn’t free up anything. On the contrary, it adds complexity that make no sense to buyers and that end up looking confused in the shopping aisle.
Brand will tell you a lot if you let it. How you brand, what you brand, where you’re found, who buys you and how often … these and many more questions are all things that competitive businesses ask themselves on a regular basis. I see brand as a highly effective lens for assessing the relevance and competitiveness of a company. Here are 10 ways that you can use “brand” to reveal what your business may need to change or capitalise on:
Brand trust resides in different places in different markets. The location and nature of that trust should directly influence how you compete.
Short answer – yes it is, but not in the way it was. I haven’t met a brand manager yet who didn’t tell me that they had a differentiated product. I’m not surprised. It’s part of the job description of any brand owner to be marketing something that is disruptive, market-changing, blue-ocean, category-killing … 15 years on from when I first suggested “parity is the real pariah”, every brand’s still talking up difference – but consumers are increasingly hard pressed to see any.
Both Jeff Swystun and Mark Ritson have taken aim at the brand industry with characteristic frankness. Whilst applauding the advances in turning brand into a recognised commercial activity, Swystun believes that an industry developed to fight commoditisation has itself succumbed to that market pressure. It has, he says, become “… highly stylized, shiny, and cool but largely standardized, prescribed and frequently devoid of substantiated benefit.” Everyone is being different in exactly the same way. Brand is today’s shiny metal object.
