thefunnel

I came across an interesting article about brand loyalty. Basically, the notion is that in the current “participation economy” traditional marketing attention and interruption marketing paradigm) is obsolete and that “movements” needs to be generated instead of communication. The reason for this is that most products are good enough, for what they are intended to do, and the way you succeed in branding is to “achieve or create a loyalty without reason”. This means finding that emotional connection by attaching a level of mystery to the brand (the more the consumer knows about the specifics of a brand the less interesting it becomes), because people are today looking for things beyond rational value. The article claims that this applies equally to B-2-B products, and that intimacy, a story, a relationship leads to “unreasonable loyalty”. In addition marketing should be aiming to measure the return on involvement, rather than the return on investment. The above is one of the reasons, for example, why traditional approaches to market research, based on information, knowledge and data, often fails to provide an accurate prediction on the success of a new product. Marketers should forget about focus groups, because in a focus group environment, customers hide their real feelings towards a brand, and therefore, aspects of “unreasonable loyalty” are never uncovered.

Is messaging easy? Not if it is done right. The old saying goes: If I had more time I would had made this post shorter! The shorter and fewer words, means more time spend to think through what you really want to say.  Also, a very smart person that I know, once said, “perfect never is”.How true that is, particularly for copy writing. When do you reach the point of diminishing return? Or, maybe your customer in the first place never cared as much as you did? So here’s an interesting case study. Highest level message for a particular company.

All You Need to Confidently Design, Test, Measure and Monitor. For more than sixty years, engineers have turned to ”the company”  for test, measurement and monitoring instrumentation to solve design challenges, improve productivity and dramatically reduce time to market. You can always count on us to give you the domain expertise, innovation, performance, practical advice and quality you need.

That’s 396 characters including spaces. Takes 30 seconds to read. Good for web, highest level value proposition. Let’s analyze:

All you need = we provide you with everything you need, hardware, software, service, support, people etc.

Confidently = many company do the same, but in our results you can trust, why?

More than 60 years = evidence, reassurance, testimonial, don’t just listen to us, look at your peers

Solve design challenges = what the company does

Increased productivity and reduced time to market = the value proposition (not unique)

You can always count on us = yes we are a company, but more importantly we are people, not a pile of bricks

Domain expertise, innovation, performance, practical advise and quality = the highest scoring differentiated brand attributes

Practical advise = we are people, who are here to help you out

As you can see from the above, every single word means something, either explicitly or implicitly, and every word chosen is done so for a very particular reason.

This is the story about a shoe manufacturer who wonders whether a market exists for shoes on a remote island. He first sends an order taker to the island to investigate the market opportunities. The order taker visits the island and reports back.  “The people here don’t wear shoes. There is no market”. 

Unsatisfied with the answer the shoemaker then sends a sales person. The sales person returns and reports.  “People do not wear shoes. There is a tremendous market.” 

Now completely confused the shoemaker sends the marketing person. The marketing person too visits the remote island, returns back and reports out.

“The people here don’t wear shoes. However they have bad feet. I have shown the chief on the island how shoes would help avoid these foot problems. He’s very enthusiastic. He estimates that 70% of his people will buy the shoes at the price of $10 a pair. We probably can sell 5,000 pairs of shoes in the first year, because there’s currently very little competition. Our cost of bringing the shoes to the island and setting up distribution would amount to $6 a pair. We will clear $ 20,000 in the first year, which, given our investment, will give us a rate of return on our investment of 20%, which exceeds our normal ROI of 15%. This is not to mention the high value of our future earnings by entering this market. I recommend that we go ahead.”