A brand has to stand for something. In marketing this is often called the Reason to Believe (RTB). At the highest level this is your brand’s WHY.
Why should anyone care, why should anyone invest in you? Why should they choose you?
"HubSpot recently found that 42% of companies don’t listen to their audiences. Which leads to incorrect communication of your unique WHY, to the people who should care the most."
Brands have not been investing in personalized human relationships, but instead human impulse. And brand identity rooted in a human truth is more important long term than performance will ever be.
Understand your audience need AS WELL AS their expectation. Brand is everything you do. Not just advertising but what the audience experiences in the real world on retail shelf, appearing IRL in their best friend’s refrigerator, makeup bag, next in cue Netflix list, in dealerships, in medical offices, when they hear your leadership speak. The central human truth – that drives your audience to pay attention to you, is the most impactful way to stand out in a crowded market.
At LM2 Creative, we are seeing a vast number of companies that launched with the mindset of “problem/solution” twenty to thirty years ago, working backward today to build in their RTB and brand positioning. This is due to disruptor brands within their category considering brand positioning strategic work as table-stakes during their own launch, giving them a greater share of the customer’s attention.
Standing out in a crowded market when you have already existed for a decade, or more is no easy task. It requires stepping out of the day-to-day marketing routine and corresponding campaign creation,, into:
Brand immersion Sessions – both internal and audience focused.
Empathy Mapping – the opposite of brand immersion, where mapping the audiences POV is the focus.
Ideation Scrums – a set process that is iterative and adaptive in workshop but with an end goal and timeline of actionable results.
Blue Sky Meetings –recording and brainstorming ideas without boundaries vs. the how it can be executed in reality.
Leadership Storytelling – aligning key career moments across each individual’s experience that tell the story of the overall business strategy.
Standing out in a crowded market when you are in launch phase requires three key things where budget must be reserved before executing your actual content creation and marketing media buy:
Consumer Research – nimble, cost-effective, and accurate ways to test everything from concept to message to user experience to packaging and more.
Channel Strategy – Don’t be everywhere in the beginning, nor focus on where your competitors are but instead where your audience is.
Content Strategy – way more than a typical content calendar, take the initial brand book and style guide and build real examples of how that shows up within your brand’s earned, owned, and paid media.
A unique approach to storytelling, creating narratives that not only convey the brand’s message but also resonate with the audience on an emotional level is achievable with the above creative strategy planning. Whether the result is an impactful campaign, engaging on-going content, or innovative brand experiences, anchoring each action in your brand’s WHY will create lasting impressions and therefore loyalty in consumers’ minds.
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