Brand differentiation: why customers may not need it, but brands do
In a recent post, we raised the alarming notion that it doesn’t matter very much to people whether or not brands are recognizably different from each other.
Data on consumer behavior and attitudes suggest (falling somewhere short of proof) that people don’t differentiate much among brands, don’t hold stable brand perceptions, and ascribe similar attributes to all brands in a category. At the same time data shows that brands tend not to appeal to unique user bases.
It’s all very disturbing to marketers for whom brand differentiation is something of a professional religion. If brands are not about differentiation, what are they about?
If differentiation is no longer the holy grail, where does it leave us? Or more to the point, is there anything that branding and marketing people should be doing differently?
Actually, there’s been some provocative discussion over the last year or so on the subject of brand differentiation.
Martin Weigel, drawing on the data referred to above, believes being interesting is more important for a brand than being different. The idea is that since people aren’t paying very much attention anyway, the key task for marketers is to get people to think about the brand at all – just capture their attention. If you can do that at a time and place relevant to the purchase decision, your job is nearly done.
Blogger Seth Godin thinks brands should be not so much different as remarkable, in the literal sense that they should be something people spontaneously talk about – remark on – to each other. Conversations are what drive brand relevance and growth.
In the academic world brand salience is a term of choice. It refers to how quickly and how prominently a brand is recalled in the consumer’s consideration set at the time of purchase or consumption.
This may seem like so much semantic hair-splitting. After all, is different really all that different from remarkable, interesting or salient? But it’s not about the words. What commenters are getting at is that branding and marketing people become too self-involved in being unique, in being separate and different from competitors, while losing sight of what customers are interested in. Positioning maps, lists of brand attributes and SWOT sheets simply don’t have much to do with what is in consumers’ heads and how they choose brands.
Okay, so tell me what to do
None of this should be discouraging. On the contrary, a shift from difference-for-its-own-sake to something more customer-oriented points to some great ways to think afresh about what brands mean to our customers, and therefore to us as brand owners and marketers. For a start, here are few suggestions for a way forward.
1. Change your idea of what a brand is.
Stop thinking about a brand as something you massage and manipulate in order to influence customer behavior to your advantage. A brand isn’t something you have. It’s what you are. If a company is absolutely clear about its purpose and what it has to offer the customer, and acts accordingly, its brand will be salient and interesting to the customer. Will the brand be different? Probably yes – but that need not be a major concern. Brands are like people. Most of us don’t make a huge effort to be different, and we’re annoyed by people who try too hard. But we’re different anyway: if we know who we are, nobody has trouble picking us out of a crowd.
2. Change your idea of what different means
Different doesn’t have to mean unique, and it doesn’t have to refer mainly to what competitors are offering. Meaningful difference can be found in the generic. If you can present something completely common-to-the-category in a way that is interesting, arresting and memorable, you will achieve differentiation as far as the customer is concerned. This is excellent news for categories where many brands compete and product parity is the rule, in B2C categories such as casual wear and household products, or in B2B categories such as basic components and business services like recruiting or legal.
3. Be more customer oriented
Be interested in what the customer is interested in. Spend time with customers. Get to understand what drives them, what their purchasing cues are, how their relationships and networks affect behavior. Asking customers directly about these things isn’t enough – they usually don’t know themselves why they do things. Assuming that you already know enough about the customer is even worse.
4. Think big
Customers are likely to be interested in basic, obvious aspects of the product – the common needs addressed by the category as a whole. They will be less interested in fine-grained details and minor attributes. It’s best to start with what the customer is interested in and work backwards from there rather than interrogating the product for minor points of differentiation and building a brand on that basis.
5. Differentiation is the navigation system, not the destination
Even if customers are little interested in differentiation per se, it’s still a useful tool. As long as the differentiation is based on customer needs rather than product differences, it helps branding and marketing practitioners stay on track. When they’re being interesting to their customers, well-defined points of brand difference help them to be interesting in consistent ways that are mutually reinforcing. Knowing where the brand is different is also a good point of departure for creating or identifying something interesting to the customer.
The bottom line is that brands are about core purpose and how companies relate to their customers. If companies live their brands and if they keep their eye always on the customer – if they activate their brands, in other words – brand differentiation will take care of itself.
