Ok, how long till the other guy comes up with a Fizzybig?

By Robert Wheatley

It is an essentially American thing to be pre-occupied with improvement. It is culturally systemic with us to make things better, to constantly upgrade our technologies and processes. This is good. And fundamentally it is the driver that drives business growth, no matter the category or brand.

But better today is harder to achieve in material leaps. So for many businesses the battle is more about incremental-ism than leaping tall buildings at a single bound. Why? Because technology has so sufficiently improved in so many categories that products at the nuts and bolts level are quite similar. The points of difference become thinner when looked at from the engineering or formula vantage point.

So we make great hay in a shorter period of sunshine when we launch our Wizzywig, because of course our arch competitor will be fast at work to one-up the achievement with their Fizzybig. And so the cycle of marketing life continues.

Are we having the right conversation about business growth?

Isn’t design and engineering excellence table stakes now?

There are more products in more categories competing for consumer attention than at any other time in history. That’s a lot of sku’s my friends. And guess what? Much of what we see pound for pound is about the same.

The human response to over-choice and sameness is almost as predictable as the next new line extension of your most popular brand of _________________. The buying decision process has become more of an emotional calculation than it is a rational one.

• Our internal editing system winnows out the noise of specsmanship and settles on what we perceive to be relevant, useful and rewarding to our lifestyles.

Brands are now all about relationships and personal value

So what does your brand stand for that is relevant and distinctive? How do your best customers feel when they are in the presence of your brand? What meaning does your brand evoke?

• If Sharpie pens can identify a way to tap into the inner creative soul and bring to life the spiritual side of what we do personally to express ourselves, then there’s hope for everyone who is reading this right now and thinking bad thoughts, like “hey, I’m in a commodity business so who will care.” Pen is a pen is a pen, right? Wrong.

If in fact you buy the idea that relationships matter to brand growth, then how about working overtime to imbue your brand with greater meaning?

This may feel uncomfortable to those who are inspired by the latest ingredient from R&D that makes their product 15% more effective than brand X. This is still and forever will be a necessary and important and good thing.

• But the battle for preference and sales resides entirely, yes entirely in the six inches of grey matter between the two ears of those we wish to sell to. And their decision tree has now evolved.

Trust, peer-to-peer communication and the social era

Just as consumers turn the corner to react more emotionally and to separate brands that matter from those they only want to pay less for, the media world somehow works in its mysterious way to offer the most relationship-forward of media platforms ever devised.

• Social media is at once a conversational, relationship-building environment that provides brands with a path to forging connections that come across as more friendship focused than transactional.

From an article in today’s MarketingDaily on Ford Motor Company’s digital media guru, Scott Monty, we hear that 77% of Americans trust corporations less this year than last. Wow. Trust cannot be over-stated as fundamental to any successful brand relationship. Trust feels like a very human thing. And it is.

According to Monty, Ford’s social media strategy is to humanize the brand, to connect people with Ford. Awesome. If Ford can find a way to create greater distinctions for its brand so it owns an idea in the consumer’s head apart from being a dependable, well-built American car, then they have the best of both worlds: value and emotional fabric built on a foundation of human interaction and conversation thus the behemoth corporation becomes approachable, maybe like-able. Trustworthy even?

Now that’s a defensible, own-able brand proposition in a sea of technical sameness and periodic one-upmanship.

What do you think?