Your ultimate marketing goal is behavior change — for the simple reason that nothing matters unless it results in a shift in consumer actions. This might seem obvious but more often than not, marketing objectives are seldom cast in terms of behavioral modification. Said another way, if the objective of your strategy is X then consumers will need to do Y and Z. Once you are clear on actions the consumer must take, the rest of your ideation and planning quickly gains more clarity. Why focus on behavior?
With the complete disruption of mass media and related one-size-fits-all brand messaging, we’re rifle focused now on aggregating various special interest constituencies and the media platforms that engage those unique stakeholders. Once we’re clear on behavior change, we can deliver a precise message to a hyper-engaged audience with a clear call to action.
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Hyper Engaged Audiences
Unique to the digital era is the emergence of highly curated communities of people with common interests and the narrow media channels that serve them. These groups aggregate individuals with shared beliefs and values and represent a super-engaged audience which brands can serve with relevant and resonant content (guidance and coaching).
What Do Brands And Businesses Really Need?
Deeper relationships with core users. For their part, consumers want to know where you can take them. They especially want to be part of something greater than themselves, thus why if you seek to have a deeper relationship with them, it all hangs on your ability to embed greater meaning in your brand. This forms the compelling foundation and motivation for behavior change.
Insight: consumers are ready to join your brand as believers and evangelists, but only if you offer them something to believe in. This is important because consumers are no longer buying what you do or how you do it, instead they resonate to why you do what you do. This is best understood as an expression of your mission, purpose, meaning and values that stands apart and beyond commerce (selling stuff). Ironically, it’s this insight that leads to selling more stuff.
- What human-relevant purpose do you serve beyond financial rewards to investors?
- What would the world truly miss if your business were to disappear tomorrow?
Your agenda is to escape the endless circle of chasing awareness, features and product benefit selling that comes with a side order of unintended consequence. How? In this legacy-type marketing endeavor your embedded goal is always to be better than competing choices. However, strong strategy is laser focused on creating “only” — which is always better than being best.
- The market doesn’t really resonate to better, but it does take notice of different. When trying to be better, you’re creating a recipe for similarity (feature comparison) that inevitably works to commoditize your brand and won’t deliver on behavior change.
Instead, your brand “why” is uniquely yours. When you work to optimize higher purpose and deeper meaning, you are investing in a path to uniqueness and transcendence – a state of consumer admiration for your brand that causes people to happily join your community as evangelists and advocates.
Competitively this is a much stronger position to defend than trying to depend on specsmanship improvements and ‘better-ness’ matched against rivals in a category. We devote our story to this topic periodically because the tendency to hunt better is so reflexively common and systemic in CPG and retail brand marketing.
- Different connected to refined purpose is the strongest strategic play you can make and paves the road to behavior change.
- Different should also show up in your product concept, design and delivery
Six Questions For Competing Differently With Purpose
- What can you offer consumers that they can only get from you?
- What do you believe in beyond balance sheet considerations?
- What do you want consumers to do?
- What behavior do you hope will manifest?
- How will this change the behavior of your own organization?
- What will you do differently?
The power of a real, human-relevant, and unselfish purpose and devotion to it will indeed fuel your financial performance. This is the best characterization to explain the predominant culture shift that now influences marketing best practices. Because relating to a brand is now fundamentally the same thing as relating to another person we care about.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.
At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education
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