by Brian Honigman
2015 promises to be a year of both
challenges and opportunities for startups. The diminishing barriers to enter
the marketplace and increasing avenues for reaching and serving new potential
customers means that there is more potential for a startup than ever before.
However, an abundance of opportunity
means an abundance of competition.
In an already crowded marketplace,
setting your startup apart will be crucial to its survival and success. The
four recommendations below represent strategies that have already proven
successful for startups and that reflect trends currently developing in
branding and consumer behavior.
1.
Start telling stories
Humans are natural born
storytellers. We are also naturally wired to listen to stories. In fact, Spanish researchers
demonstrated that stories not only activate the brain’s language processing
center, but also activate parts that would be active if we experienced the
story ourselves.
Related: 6
Secrets to Writing a Better Brand Positioning Statement
It doesn’t take a neuroscientist to
see the power of stories to invoke emotion and stick in people’s memories.
Teachers, authors and politicians (to name a few) have understood this for
years. In fact, storytelling has also served as the backbone of nearly every
successful marketing campaign in one way or another.
While an important part of branding
is to tell a story about your brand, more and more marketers are taking an
alternate approach. Instead of telling stories about their brand, they are
branding themselves as storytellers.
A great example of this approach is
OkCupid’s consistently incredible blog. Each post takes the reams of
data OkCupid collects about their users and artfully weaves these insights into
a fascinating story about how their users behave and what this says about
dating as a whole.
Instead of just telling its
customers a story about itself, OkCupid decided it would be much better to
develop its voice by telling customers a number of different stories.
Nobody likes that guy who just talks about himself, and the same thing goes for
brands.
The very act of choosing what
stories to tell and how to tell them does more to develop your brand’s
personality than trying to construct it from a singular narrative. Instead of
trying to brand itself as a data-centric dating site, OkCupid figures that
posting about the statistically best questions for a first date
will create the same image more convincingly and will also provide something
useful to your customers in the process.
As more brands enter the landscape
clamoring to tell potential customers how they want to be seen, defy the trend
by simply telling customers stories they want to hear and that reinforce the
overall branded story you hope to tell.
Or, to borrow phrasing from the
previously mentioned OkCupid blog post, the stories your brand should be
telling are the ones that “are easy to bring up, yet correlate to the deeper,
unspeakable, issues [your customers] actually care about.”
2.
Take a stand
Although many members of the older
generation feel that millennials are apathetic and selfish, almost all the data
suggests the opposite. Multiple studies show that this key consumer demographic
actually has a very real affinity for philanthropy.
In fact, what might be mistaken for
apathy is simply cynicism. Due to the increased exposure of this generation to
marketing messages, millennials have just become more discerning and less
trusting of much of the “cause-driven” marketing being done.
The reality is that cause-driven
marketing is dead. If your company’s mission statement is “to maximize
shareholder revenue” or even “to provide business solutions” your cause-driven
marketing seems disingenuous.
Instead of doing cause-driven
marketing, millennials expect you to be a cause-driven business. This doesn’t
mean you need to be a not-for-profit. Making money is not a bad thing, it just
can’t be the main thing -- at least if you hope to capture the attention of
millennials.
One of the most effective examples
of this strategy had no grand, world-changing plans in mind, but they did want
to solve a problem and do so in earnest. Harry’s is a monthly subscription
service that delivers affordable high-quality razors.
The company began when co-founder
Andy Katz-Mayfield went to buy razors and was shocked at how expensive and
uninspiring the product he received was.
The company does not have a grand
mission. It simply wants to give customers a better option for razors. The
result of taking such a simple stand but sticking to it wholeheartedly has
resulted in a business that consumers trust to be genuine in other ways.
So, when Harry’s partnered with the
prostate cancer awareness initiative Movember (that encourages men to grow out
their mustaches to raise money for prostate cancer) not only did this
cause-driven marketing improve the company's reputation, it caused a 360 percent lift in
traffic to Harry’s website.
Related: Erase
the Line Between Cause and Marketing
3.
Defy expectations
Part of taking a stand means setting
yourself apart from the mainstream. With so many competing offers, one clear
way to make your product stand out is to defy certain conventions within your
industry.
Which conventions you choose to
break and to what extent you defy them depends on your industry and your core
audience. For the purpose of illustration though, let’s pick an incredibly
extreme and very recent example.
Cards Against Humanity is a party
game with a highly irreverent attitude and fairly raunchy sensibility. Even
bearing in mind its reputation, the company's approach to a Black Friday
“sale” still managed to shock nearly everyone and generate a great deal of
interest online.
While almost every company under the
sun attempted to capitalize on the post-Thanksgiving rush by slashing prices
and pushing products, Cards Against Humanity’s website looked very different on
Black Friday.
Its flagship product was nowhere to
be found. Instead the one thing for sale was a box that simply offered
“Bulls**t.” Within hours all 30,000 units had sold. At
$6 apiece, Cards Against Humanity pocketed a cool $180,000 on that product alone.
However, the real win was in the
amount of buzz generated. On a weekend where nearly all media was covering big
discounts, Cards Against Humanity almost managed to steal the show.
While I definitely do not advocate
anything this extreme unless it absolutely fits your brand and audience, this
ridiculous example should serve as proof that defying expectations can be a
powerful method to drum up interest in your brand.
4.
Focus on great design
Another way to set your startup
apart from the crowd that is becoming increasingly important is to focus on
good design and to make products or experiences that are remarkable.
Making things that are beautiful or
at least look nice is certainly not a new strategy, but great design doesn’t
necessarily equate to beauty in the traditional sense. As many products move
towards software, looks cease to be of central importance. The real important
thing for interactive products is the overall user experience.
An unlikely example of a product
that succeeded largely due to great design is Tinder. Now, Tinder is not
exactly the most elegant or beautiful piece of software. In fact, it is
unapologetically crass and blunt. Most people equate great design to subtlety
and charm, and Tinder possesses neither.
Yet Tinder is a marvel of wonderful
user experience design. Its simple, intuitive interface not only made the
service incredibly addictive, it perfectly communicated the company’s casual
approach to online dating.
The example of Tinder is actually a
fitting place to end this discussion because it embodied a number of branding
tactics that will become increasingly effective in the coming years. Beyond
focusing on great design, Tinder also took a stand. The company claimed that
online dating could be as natural and casual as a bar, and in doing so, defied
expectations.
These guidelines can help better
brand your start up, but only if you apply your brand’s unique twist to them.
None of these strategies can truly differentiate your brand or make your
product unique on their own, but if used correctly they can help more reliably
and effectively communicate what makes your brand special. And in an
increasingly crowded landscape doing so will be key to your brand’s success in
2015.
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