Relevance, ease, and distinctiveness

It has been a while since I read a good book about marketing. I decided to pick up “R.E.D. Marketing: The Three Ingredients of Leading Brands”.

R.E.D.

R.E.D. stands for relevance, ease, and distinctiveness. It’s a bit of a myth ball buster. Relevance consists of three components: cultural, social, and functional. Ease is easy to access and easy to notice. Finally, distinctiveness is just that: distinctiveness.

Forget everything you learned

Forget purpose, emotional connection, and (social) media buying. Forget rationale. Forget motivational motivation, the why people buy. Forget desire. Forget reasons to believe. Forget segmentation. Forget love.  Instead focus on picking the right category, creating memory structures (brain real estate), availability heuristics, data, social relevance, social proof, awareness strength, attribution strength, attention strength, charisma, character, tone, rituals, and culture. Do the people I trust, trust this product? Create moments of culture. Create a buzz. Create a memorable narrative.

Basics

It is back to the narrative, word of mouth, understanding culture, understanding instinct, focusing on making waves in the pond and creating excitement. The moment you feel trepidation about something is the moment you lean in. The moment you start feeling that something might be too daring is the moment you should own it and jump on it. Be the wave, not the pebble. Start with an idea, not a blank slate. Distinctively off is always better than perfectly correct.

R.E.D. Overview

First, your consumer has to have a need (or you must create that need within them). Then, you must have something that is particularly relevant (R) to that need, that’s easy to get (E), and that stands out as distinctive in their mind (D).

Relevance

They break relevance down into three main categories: cultural relevance, functional relevance, and social relevance.

• Does our team understand the cultural codes that are relevant to our customers? 
• Does our product reflect a cultural moment that customers want to be part of and will be proud and happy to be aligned with? 
• Am I part of an emerging cultural moment, or am I holding onto something that worked in the past but is no longer relevant? 
• Do I understand the deeper category code of my brand and how that might be changing?

Ease 

In marketing terminology, we call impediments to purchase friction. Ease is everything. Easy to access and easy to notice (we got the last one too many times). We humans (or, more accurately, our brains and the way they function) are actually deeply lazy creatures. A product that is easily available and removes as many friction points as possible along the purchasing journey, both psychologically and physically. And you need a broad advertising strategy that reaches both heavy and light users across the category with a breakthrough message that causes an emotional reaction.

Distinctiveness

Your ability to a) remember the Old Spice campaign and b) correctly attribute it to Old Spice is priceless. Why? Because more than 50% of advertising is attributed to the wrong brand. You need to be unique, ownable and consistent.

Desire

At its most basic level, desire is created by making something relevant to the consumer’s needs. If something is relevant to your needs, then you desire it. I’m running out of gas, and I see a gas station: that gas station is extremely appropriate. Yes, desire is the fundamental force that motivates a consumer. But right now you might be doing desire all wrong. The idea is that this emotional connection creates some sort of desire. Like love. You desire your partner. So, in the same way, you’ll desire your brand. What BS. Making something functionally useful and ensuring it helps consumers feel part of the culture is what makes a brand truly desirable.

Purpose

Purpose only works if it is distinctive (Dove, Patagonia) and can never be a me-too. It works for them because Patagonia was first out of the gate with this philosophy, and they are unwaveringly committed to it. This purpose not only makes them culturally relevant, it makes them distinctive. But. It probably won’t work for you. It isn’t how customers make decisions about what product to buy. If purpose were truly compelling, who would shop at Amazon? So, while noble, purpose is rarely a viable strategy to sell your product and connect with your customers. On the rare occasions that purpose does work, it works because it is distinctive.

What to do

• Apply history, system 1 research (Kahneman) anthropology and sociology.
• Fulfill a need. When brands are clearly connected to clear category use occasions in consumers’ minds, they become more desired. I have a need. Do you have a product to fulfil it?
• Be culturally relevant. Figure out a way to allow your customers to identify themselves as a member of a herd and express their membership in their herd through your product.
• Tap into the herd mentality: What’s Everyone Else Doing? Not only are we a herd species above all else, but we are also highly attuned to social cues and behaviours. And all of us, on some level, still instinctively want that safety, companionship, and sense of being part of an ongoing, multigenerational story above all else. Good brands send signals that other tribe members will recognise and respond to. Perhaps even more importantly, it tells you who you are.
• Give your users a reason to feel connected to your brand.
• Find a symbol that offers your users a sense of belonging to a particular herd that they believe they are a member of or would like to join.
• What you buy says a lot about who you are. Not just to others but to yourself.
• People buy us (or do not buy us) because of what that brand says about them, and more to the point, what herd that brand says they belong to.
• Don’t follow the conventions of your category, follow the innovations in your culture. It makes you both incredibly culturally relevant and incredibly distinctive in your category.
• Create icons. Icons have extraordinary value because they carry a heavy symbolic load for their most enthusiastic consumers.
• If you’re culturally relevant but not distinctive, you’ll fail.
• You’ll also fail if you’re incredibly distinctive but not culturally relevant.
• And it goes without saying that if you’re not easy, you should probably just hang up your marketer’s hat and go home.

The three cultural codes

There are three stages of a category’s cultural code: Residual code. What worked in the past dominant code. What works now is emerging code. What will work in the future? What cultural codes have worked for my category in the past? What is working now? And what is going to work in the future?

Ask the right questions

If your brand were a car, what make and model would it be? Pretend you’re having a dream. You’re one of the people in the dream, and your brand personified is another. What happens? And what happens when the competitor’s person comes into the dream? What did people think of your brand in the 1990s? What do people think about your brand today? Not you. Others. What’s changed?

Go the fringes

Authors of books or research relevant to your category.  Professors who specialise in a specific discipline related to your work, such as professors of gender studies and women’s rights activists, if you’re talking feminine care and beauty standards. Micro or macro influencers are people who other people look to to be on the cutting edge of culture. Get a good sense of where culture is headed and then take the big next step. Lay your brand’s bold, distinctive flag in that general direction.

Functional relevance

Make brands functionally relevant by owning what we call CUOs, category use occasions. We define functional relevance as a consumer’s basic need to find a product that provides the function they are looking for. Over the years, we’ve found that expanding your CUOs is the primary way in which you grow your brand.

Nike

Nike was started in the sixties by Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight, selling innovative running shoes out of a car on college campuses. The brand began dominating more and more CUOs: soccer, tennis, cool clothing for hanging out, and on and on.

Brooks

Brooks Running Company, on the other hand, took the opposite tack. They were founded in 1914, fifty years before Nike. Originally, they developed shoes for a variety of sports and activities (bathing shoes were a thing!), and eventually, they narrowed their CUOs to only running. They also never really made their brand culturally relevant outside of the running circle, and never had a Michael Jordan moment to make it culturally relevant.

The folly of segmentation

Segmentation is the process whereby a larger group of potential customers, let’s say, “women who buy financial services,” is broken up into subcategories defined by their demographics and psychographics—or beliefs and attitudes. The problem is that while we aren’t homogenous, we aren’t consistent either. If you cut your brand into four small brands, each with a different look and feel, each targeting a different group, then you’ve wasted the benefit of double jeopardy. Why lose your most important asset—your distinctiveness—and lose your opportunity to stand out in an impactful way? Ask:

• Are real-life consumers in my category actually that distinct from one another and consistently so?
• Will my brand really be stronger by being different things for different people? 
• Will my brand truly be able to grow long-term if I’m so narrowly focused on one target and one need?

CUOs

Instead of needlessly and questionably segmenting the marketplace, spend that time cataloguing all the different use occasions in the category and devising a plan to own as many as you can. Forget about the consumer for a moment and just focus on the use occasions. Measure all the CUOs in your category. Next, go through the lower-hanging CUOs and decide which ones have the most potential for your brand to distinctively play with, given the memory structures your brand already owns in consumers’ minds. Come up with the most culturally relevant and distinctive way to fulfil that CUO.

• What category use occasions do you want to own? 
• How do you do this distinctively?

As a quick exercise, write down every need you have had over the last twenty-four hours: anything that requires you to make a purchase or use an existing purchase to satisfy it.

Focus on action

Your actions have to be aligned with your emotions. It’s incredibly hard to change a person’s emotions and then use that shift to influence their behaviour. But it’s much simpler to change people’s actions. Make it easier to use or engage with the brand. The easier your brand is to use or engage with, the more likely consumers will convince themselves that they like it.

Friction mapping

What friction is your customer experiencing when buying your product? As a “real” consumer, go through the entire shopping experience with your brand, then with your competitor’s brand. As you go through each part of the consumer decision journey, keep track of how much friction or pain you experience as a consumer of that brand. Include the psychological frictions. They are the uncomfortable pauses and doubts you sometimes feel going through a purchasing journey.

Media

The enemy is not social media. The potential enemy is some folks trying to sell you hyper-targeted marketing.  Highly targeted media almost never pays out, mostly because it’s incredibly expensive. Marketingland has fallen in love with the siren song of short-term sales and activations. Advertising works by creating memory structures in people’s minds. You create these memory structures by targeting all your category users with consistent campaigns; the more memorable and consistent the advertising, the stronger the memory structure. The greater the number of people that have your brand’s memory structures in their minds, the more sales. The purveyors of these products pitch the idea that, instead of building memory structures in lots of people’s minds, you simply have to appear at the exact right moment with the exact right message for the exact right individual, and they’ll buy your product.

Make it memorable

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” A salient idea, memory, or image will literally leap to the front of your mind, seemingly unprompted and out of nowhere. Because this memory is easily accessible (or salient), you perceive it to be important. Once you understand salience, the next question is, “How do I create a salient campaign?” We are not concerned with creating an emotional connection. We are only concerned with creating an emotional response. No matter the reasons and the methods, our lives are shaped by our emotions and our emotional responses to external events. It’s those moments that are linked to a defined emotional response (rather than a general sense of happiness or sadness) that stick.

Different versus distinctive

Easy to notice is understanding that humans are deeply lazy and that we will buy the product that is physically most accessible and most salient in our mind. We define distinctiveness as the unique, ownable, and, most importantly, consistent use of distinctive brand assets. Byron Sharp is probably the most famous marketing guru to criticise this concept of differentiation. He stated that when brands seek to differentiate themselves, they miss the fact that consumers are more swayed by distinctiveness than differentiation.

Iconic

Iconic brands and products have built lasting memory structures by nailing unique, ownable, and consistent. When it’s up to your brain, your brain goes to the most accessible memory and the one with a strong emotional reaction. Think of the emotional reaction like a chain, which allows you to pull the memory up from the depths of your subconscious: up comes the brand, no matter what your personal preferences or beliefs about food.

Mirror vs. magnet

Mirror advertising reflects back what consumers expect to see. That’s great, but if you can’t remember the name of the beer, how on earth are you going to buy it? Magnet advertising focuses on the brand. It creates a unique, ownable, and consistent world that attracts consumers in a magnetic fashion.

Culture

Ultimately, marketing is culture.  Being distinctive is culture. That means your organisation needs to be distinctive, too.