Brands want to be different. But is that what people need?

May 29, 2015 0 Comments TACTIVATION Eric Wedemeyer

It’s hard to say much about a brand without talking about what makes it different. Those of us who work with brands have lots to say about why differentiation is necessary, how to find the point of difference, how to communicate the unique selling proposition. Differentiation is a core principle of the branding and marketing disciplines – that’s just plain commonsense.

But… what if people don’t really care if a brand is different from others? What if it turns out that differentiation doesn’t drive purchase decisions after all?

That could shake up the whole way we think about brands.

The importance of brand differentiation: a brief interrogation

If you think about it, there’s no good reason why difference per se should play any important role in most brand purchase decisions. People want what they want and think about whatever impinges on their memory and attention at any given time. Unless what they’re explicitly seeking is uniqueness (in which case branding and mass marketing are likely to be counter-productive in the first place), potential buyers won’t be considering difference. Unless there’s a particular reason to bring to mind the universe of alternatives, people will not even make a considered choice. They’ll just act on what is in front of them at the moment. Uniqueness is not a commonly desired brand attribute.

It’s a bit like product variety. Marketers often like to brag to customers that they offer a “broad range of products” to meet everyone’s needs. That happens because product range figures prominently in marketers’ own internal strategic thinking. But any given customer only wants one product at best, so the “broad range” argument is irrelevant.

So here’s the intuitive case: brand differentiation is more captivating topic for the brand owner than for the customer, who doesn’t really care about it.

If that seems insubstantial, there’s also a data-driven version of the argument. In a fascinating post, Martin Weigel plunges into a sea of marketing research supporting the notion that brand differentiation matters less to customers than we might like to think. Among his many findings:

Consumer brand perceptions tend not to differ significantly
Consumer perceptions of brand personality do not differ significantly
People’s brand perceptions are not stable over time
When asked, people do not say they believe brands are different
Brands do not have unique and discrete user bases
Different brands do not appeal to different kinds of people

Wow. This is not the way you would expect the world to behave if brand differentiation were a driving force of consumer nature.

Let’s step in here with a caveat: Weigel is using available data from a limited range of brand categories. His conclusions are more suggestive than definitive. But they’re certainly consistent with my own experience of brand perception tracking data. Big brands go to enormous effort and expense to amass data showing very subtle differences in aggregate brand perception and customer profile against competing brands. In most of the data I’ve seen those slight variations in the average are overwhelmed by individual variation within sample populations. More noise than signal, in other words.

So where do we go from here?

If there’s any truth in the above, it leaves us in a pretty strange place. After all we’ve been through, is brand differentiation only an elaborate just-so story? Are we all chasing our tails here?

I don’t think so. But we do have reason to take a good hard look at our approach to brand differentiation and its role in the brand activation process.

Brands want to be different. But is that what people need?