How to position when your audience is everybody.
The biggest lesson I learned from a recent rebrand.
Hey, friends.
It’s common knowledge in marketing that when you talk to everybody, you talk to nobody.
What I mean by that is that when it comes to messaging, copy, and branding, you want to get really specific — as specific as you can — in order to create something that resonates.
That’s always easier said than done (that’s why it’s useful to bring in outside help for research — with people like Hannah Shamji and Dianne Wiredu being fantastic resources for that). But what do you do when you’re messaging for a corporate brand, with various sub-brands, and various audiences?
For the last few months I’ve been wrangling with a project that fits this exact criteria. We have a huge corporate brand, with two primary audiences. However, there are also six sub-brands each with their own audiences and capabilities (several which have been acquisitions, so they came with their own branding).
Our mission for the last few months has been to unify everything under one umbrella story and brand. When you can message to anybody (and I mean literally anybody), how do you do it in a way that resonates?
What I’ve learned from the last few months is that when you’re at this stage in the process, it helps to message to an identity, not capabilities.
In our case, brand strategy has made a huge difference. We’ve gone from marketing to “anybody” to all of the strategy documents acknowledging that we’re marketing to “innovators who aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo.”
The cool thing about that adjustment is that it still leaves the doors open to “anybody”… but it does it in a way that it speaks to a certain kind of anybody — the kind of person who is going to see the most success with our products.
And even cooler? It starts to turn our product suite from a commodity into an identity builder. Something that people want to use, simply for the brand name, because it makes them feel like someone who is smart, innovative, and forward-thinking.
I’ll have plenty more to say about this project. We’re still ironing things out, and there’s more work to be done before I can write up a full case study.
Buuuuut, it’s been one of the more rewarding projects to date, and one that’s opened up a ton of insights into how to be successful with a larger corporate brand.
In the meantime though, I’ll leave with this final piece of advice (which is really just paraphrasing Maya Angelou):
The way to get people to remember you is to focus on how you make them feel. If you can create a consistent, galvanizing feeling in your brand — you’ve done your job.
I just finished reading The Pursuit of Endurance: Harnessing the Record-Breaking Power of Strength and Resilience, by Jennifer Pharr Davis. It was a phenomenal insight into what drives endurance athletes to do things like set fastest-known-time records on the Appalachian Trail.
I’ve picked up The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter since then. I think this book is ridiculously timely — and it’s funny as hell.
If you ever happen to be in Traverse City, Michigan, you’ve gotta go to The Flying Noodle.
When circumstances force you to cast a wide net and market to "anybody," think: humor. The kind of humor that UNITES. The kind ANYBODY can laugh at and feel good about. Maya Angelou is right: people remember how you (AND your brand) made them feel.
Sounds like an exciting challenge, best of luck! Exited to hear how this wraps up! :)