Random Thoughts
August 10, 2023
In a recent conversation with a fellow marketing professional, I found myself delving into the intricate landscape of soft marketing tactics, such as crafting thought provoking opinion pieces that we do weekly (well, most times). Such efforts are often challenging and frustrating: 1) you have no idea what the true impact is on your audience, and 2) it is difficult to sustain a wellspring of interesting and difference making ideas to write about. During our dialogue a suggestion emerged—demolishing prevalent marketing myths, and idea that quickly took root within me after some research. Credit for this inspiration goes to the individual who sparked the thought, you know who you are and thank you!
So for the coming weeks, I shall be unraveling a number of popular marketing myths and ultimately putting some sort of end-user qualitative research twist on it (I have to, after all, I am in the end-user research business).
Let's start this off with a bang and dispel the most common and important myth there is: branding is not as important as the product you are selling, and to some, it is just a name and a logo. This sentiment is especially prevalent in the startup sphere where the lion share of resources are devoted to product design. And fair enough, when a startup with a new product type that boasts unique and disproportionately advantageous attributes compared to market peers, a rudimentary brand identify may suffice in luring buyers initially. However, the marketplace evolves, rivals adapt, and the initial allure of novelty fades. Herein lies the crux—effective branding is what ensures your lasting success in the ever-evolving market landscape.
At the end of the day, branding is much more than a name and a logo, it is the personality, the image, the values, the spirit, and the soul of the product you are selling. To end-users, the brand they choose projects the image they want others to see, and image matters across cultures.
Consider the personal computer market where purchase decision is largely based on product specifications and therefore quite logical, effective branding can overcome that and make the purchase decision much more emotional. Think Apple in this case, their masterful marketing strategies and execution, especially during the Steve Jobs era, had buyers willing to pay significantly more for their products than other brands with similar spec for significantly less.
Nevertheless, you must not think of branding as an end all and be all element. It still needs to work in concert with the product itself, that there needs to be a synergy between the product’s intrinsic and extrinsic values, with each supporting one another. Putting it simply, you cannot sell a value that the product simply doesn’t have.
You must be thinking to yourself by now that this all sound well and good, but how does one come up with an effective branding strategy that is relevant to the marketplace? Well, in the realm of qualitative research, this is how we do it:
Pinpoint your target market: When I say this, I don’t mean just identifying those that use your type of products as target market (which I see a lot of times smaller companies do), I mean performing an end-user segmentation of those potential buyers, and identifying the target segment based on what makes the most sense for your product. Take for instance the beer market, not all beer drinkers are the same type of consumers, there are plenty of different types of drinkers within, each desiring different things. If you create a branding strategy treating all drinkers the same, then your brand values will only be so general that there are no distinction and uniqueness, and therefore ineffective. And in our practice, we believe in motivational segmentation, that is segmentation based on the usage motivation for your product.
Create a brand perception map to help identify branding opportunities: Once you identified your target market, the second step is to understand how they see the market from a branding perspective. This is often presented in a diagram we called brand perceptual map, with X and Y axis each representing a common but distinguishable value that all brands share (one of the axis is often premium vs cheap as price is usually a common perception factor). The point of this map is to place all the brands in the market there so that it allows you to see where the gaps may lie, giving you an idea where your brand values can be for it to be unique.
Branding conceptualization and refinement: At this stage, different versions of branding concepts would be created based on the foundational data captured already, usually through an ideation workshop that sit together the internal brand team, outside creative professionals (e.g. ad agency), and us (the research guys). Armed with the concept options, we can then take them to some form of qualitative research (e.g. focus groups) and test to see which one performs the best and further optimize it based on reactions from the target market.
Well, that’s all I have to share this week. But I like to close it off by turning your attention to the rebranding of “Twitter” to “X”. How do you guys feel about it? I personally think it is a disaster waiting to happen (or perhaps it is already happening). My reasoning is simple, Twitter has so much values as a brand that it has become part of our lingual (you commonly hear people say, “I am going to twit this and that”.), the word “twit” is the service itself. Abandoning the brand name and logo means abandoning the legacy that Twitter had created over the years and starting anew. Plus, what are people going to say now instead of “tweet”? That I am going to “X” it? That sounds terrible to me!
As usual, I hope you had a fun read, and follow us on our LinkedIn page for more!
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