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Have you ever noticed that so many car commercials look and sound the same? Regardless of the brand, you’re likely to see gleaming paint on winding roads and hear the rush of a vehicle driving by, often with a happy car-owner getting out at their destination to punctuate the experience. Or, have you ever looked at make-up ads side-by-side and noticed how similar they are — featuring fresh-faced beauties with every skin type looking directly into the camera as their hair flies in the breeze? We could go on and on with other category examples.
So, why, when so many marketers recognize the importance of standing out, do so many brands in any given category look the same? And how can your brand avoid falling into the same trap?
The Importance of a Strong, Multi-Faceted Brand Story
Often, the tendency to gravitate to a sea of sameness within a category starts with chasing a trend. In the beauty industry, for example, there is a (welcome) movement toward inclusivity. As brands embrace this moment, they take care to include women of various sizes, skin tones and hair types within their ads to showcase the range of their products and to speak to their brand value of empowering ALL women to embrace their beauty.
Notice that we mention highlighting their brand value without distinction — that common brand value of embracing the beauty of all women. In any given industry it is likely that certain values will be common across many brands. But an important element in building an impactful brand is finding the whitespace, the place where your brand distinctly stands, so you can differentiate and help customers understand what ELSE you’re about — and why they should care — otherwise your brand will begin to look like all the others.
In brand building this is done with a competitive analysis, which results in a brand positioning map. Competitor brands are plotted based on their market positioning to see how closely they are aligned with each other and with audiences. Visualizing brand positioning in this way helps to identify where there is room to be distinctive. When the whitespace aligns to your brand’s mission, vision and values, you can build a brand promise and brand story around it.
But building a strong brand story is only part of the equation. You cannot simply create a brand book and file it away. You must strategically manage your brand to purposefully ladder back to it and consistently tell the entire brand story with each campaign. Without a doubt, each beauty product on the store shelf has a brand story that is about more than the single principle of inclusivity. But in the quest to speak to what is going on in the world at the moment, the rest of the brand story can easily go untold.
The Importance of Knowing Your Audiences
In the beauty industry example above, we highlight beauty ads which try to honor the importance of inclusivity by highlighting the beauty of every type of woman in their ads. Surely, if these brands make products for all women, they should be speaking to all of them and making them all feel equally important. But a woman with sensitive skin, another with oily skin, and others with easily-sunburned or acne-riddled skin will not be buying products for the same reason. They should not be treated the same way in ads which try to speak to all of them at once.
To avoid homogeneous ad campaigns, brands should develop detailed audience personas to understand the real people they are selling to. This should include their pain points and purchase motivations, what they like and dislike, where and how they shop and consume media, and how they prioritize their time and money.
Knowing your audiences in this way allows brands to take a storytelling approach to create meaningful campaigns which resonate more deeply with consumers. When brands create ads which make consumers feel something, they are more likely to stand out and be remembered.
The Advantage of Thinking Outside Your Space
One of the reasons we see so many brands failing to follow these principles is a tendency to gravitate to proven players in their industry when hiring internal team members and creative agencies. It feels logical — if your brand wants to sell more cars or beauty products, you look for a candidate or partner who has a proven track record of doing so. But this approach, especially over time, often leads to siloed thinking and iterative creative that fails to stand out.
Individuals and groups who have been dedicated to a single type of effort for an extended period of time are less likely to challenge the status quo and more likely to fall back on tried-and-true solutions. If what they’ve always done has always generated predictable results, these individuals and teams are likely to believe that these approaches are the best, and will continue to stick to them. Unfortunately, they are not always right.
As an industry-agnostic agency, we’ve been able to clearly see that many of the best practices and norms of one industry can translate very effectively into another, often with the result of shaking things up — and winning awards. From taking a consumer-first approach in B2B marketing, to leveraging a storytelling approach about making memories in a new home rather than focusing on the construction, we’ve been able to apply best practices from multiple industries for each of our clients to create ads that stand out and get results.
When you break free from looking through a single lens, you open yourself up to see more opportunities. Think of industries you admire, even if they seem to have little to do with your own, and unpack what you admire about them. When you look at those individual elements, you’re likely to find an opportunity to shake things up — and help your brand stand out in the process.
Since 2008, Gigasavvy has helped brands find whitespace and identify opportunities to connect with their audiences with meaningful campaigns. Contact us to get help with breaking your brand free from the norm.
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