If you’ve hung around marketing meetings for any length of time, you’ve noticed that brands are keen on being very, very active. They have to sell and conquer, defend and convert, recruit and sustain, grow and penetrate, break through and stand out, conquest and evangelize. They must do heavy lifting, drive or generate various things and create movements out of thin air. And that’s all before they have to land the plane.
Consider for a moment if none of that existed. If there were no weapons, no tactics, no use of military language at all. What then? Brands would simply have to connect with human beings. Successful brands will always be practiced at the art of winning people over.
Just a short time ago, winning people over was pretty straightforward (it was never easy, but it was simpler). A brand had three levers and could pull them in any combination.
They had the product lever: Build a better mousetrap and you win. Today, that might make you one of the 12 million products on Amazon, but that’s about it. Brands could also win on price -- imagine that. As if Walmart wouldn’t strong-arm your competitors to go just as low. Or a brand could stand for service, back when service meant friendliness and helpfulness. Again, see Amazon. Despite the smile on every box, friendliness and helpfulness mean little to Amazon consumers. Free return shipping -- now that matters.
So, in this day and age, what’s a brand to do? How can brands win people over?
Be Multidimensional
Personality still matters. These days, though, that personality had better be much more complex. A brand can’t show up with the exact same approach in its various channels. It can’t take itself too seriously on Instagram or be too jokey when using Twitter for customer service. To borrow from my 7th grade English class, consumers demand that brands be round -- not flat -- characters. Consumers crave authenticity, and that requires dimension.
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