Once you’ve defined your audience, who the person you seek to impact via your brand story, your product and/or service, is, it helps to pay attention to the group the individual is part of. After all, we humans are social animals.
How does the group influence the buying decision behavior of the individual?
What are the accepted norms within the group?
What is “proper” behavior which others within the group reward in what kind of way?
What is the meaning that individuals find within the group?
What gives them a sense of connection?
Analyse the terrain, the habitat of the individual, when it comes to being part of a group. It might give you insights into important dynamics when it comes to choosing or not choosing your brand.
Why don’t they?
If you choose to lean further into the empathy aspect of marketing, the following question deserves your attention: Why don’t they choose us? They being the audience you’ve defined you seek to serve, and us being you, your product/service.
You wish they did but for some reason, maybe even multiple ones, at least for now, they don’t. What could these be? Are you able to come up with five convincing ones, apart from “the price is too high?”
Buyer persona
People can be grouped by many things: age, nationality, gender, which party gets their vote….
What interests us as marketers is the worldview of the people we seek to serve, the audience we made our product/service for.
What do they fear?
What do they believe in?
What is their perception like?
What do they hope for?
What are their go to brands for different needs?
What is it they aspire to be/become?
What kind of decisions do they tend to make?
What are the internal narratives they keep telling themselves?
When doing marketing, it helps to first imagine the worldview of your audience, the lense they see the world through. Once you have that, you can frame your brand story in such a way to create hooks. These serve as signals to your audience who, when you’re just starting out, will mistrust and judge you.
What’s the opposite of busy?
I wonder what the opposite of busy is. A busy day can either be fulfilling or exhausting, or somewhere in between. The opposite of busy leans towards the fulfilling. You are intentional about what you do and the way you show up in life creates a certain vibration. If you pay attention to what is going on inside, you can feel it. Some people near you feel it, too, since it radiates.
It’s a quality of being that has to do with inner calmness. Instead of draining energy, it energises. Even if your inside of a tornado, you are able to be at the centre of it, smile inward and say: “everything is perfect precisely the way it is now.”
Sonder
Sonder is a noun invented by John Koenig, the person behind the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It stands for the “realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own”.
We all have a voice inside of our head, that is constantly speaking, filled with mentations of different sorts.
What if, when we meet a complete stranger, it would be ok to ask the following question: In what ways are you crazy?
A thought experiment
There exists an experiment which you can do in order to find out if you’re selling yourself short, which particularly might be happening if you are a freelancer.
Here it goes: Imagine if you had to charge 10x more than what you’re charging right now, for your product, for your service, whatever it is that you’re offering?
Just doing better or working harder is not a valid answer. Think about the product/service and determine the changes you’d make. Feel free to bounce your ideas off of me by dropping me a message.
Getting to know a market
Empathy is hard. It’s just hard to imagine how it’s like to be someone else.
If you’re truly curious about the people you seek to serve with your business, though, here’s an exercise for practicing empathy and gaining insight into a market.
Step 1
Pick something that is not from your “world”. With this I mean something you know little to nothing about, preferably you don’t even like it at all. For example, if you dislike heavy metal music, visit websites to research it, the kind of language they use, the kind of images, the colors, everything. Dig deep to understand that world, go visit a concert if you can. Talk to heavy metal geeks, ask questions.
Step 2
Extrapolate from what you’ve learnt and go broader. Imagine how it would be like to be part of that group, what you’d be like, what type of content you’d consume, how you came to love heavy metal music.
Play with this and do it with different worlds: a nutty snack, adventure travel, first person shooter gaming, fishing…
Wants and needs
Once you’ve defined your audience and brand positioning, it’s helpful to understand the difference between desires and needs. When you’ve reached a decent level of wealth, it’s easy to mix the two. (Primal) needs are things you absolutely have to have. Think of the lowest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: air, water, food, shelter, clothing (the basic kind, not those fancy party dresses)…
All the rest are desires, not real needs.
If you can frame offer in a way that will address a primal need of your customer, your marketing will have more impact. If you say “people want fast, luxurious cars”, then that is all you can frame your brand story around. If you dig a bit deeper, though, you could e.g. realise that “people want fast, luxurious cars because it gives them status and a sense of power”.
Step 1
Have a look at the following elements of value.
Step 2
Compare these elements with your offer. What are the primary elements where you add value? How do you communicate and make this clear to your audience?
Always be testing
Once you’ve figured something out that works, you should keep doing it. The challenge is to avoid neglect continuous testing. You can test your copy, your brand promises, your storytelling, your distribution channels, your pricing, an endless amount of thing.
What will you be testing next?
A recipe for brand positioning
When I ask people to describe their brand positioning what most come back with are descriptions of why they are better than the competition. This is not in service of their customers but in service to themselves. Here is an alternative way of defining your brand positioning which is based on Seth Godin’s work.
Step 1
Make a list of all your audience’s desirables. The following are random examples which might or might be relevant to your own brand:
– spiritual
– minimalist
– natural
– ethical
– personal
– crafty
– playful
– participatory
Step 2
Pick two of them and put them on a graph with two axes. Define where you’d like to sit within this graph and add a few of your competitors, too. Try your best to find a place where there is a lot of free room. What you’d want to avoid is joining a red ocean full of organisations that are shouting for customers’ attention.
Step 3
Put obsessive effort into becoming really good in providing high satisfaction regarding the two desirables you have picked. Frame your brand story around that and put processes in place that serve the outcome your audience seeks.