Recently I had the pleasure of participating at a WARC webinar on behavioral economics and marketing. It gave me the opportunity to share some thoughts on how marketers can navigate the differing approaches to brand building these days; brand distinctiveness – with its focus on driving meaningless top of mind awareness, brand experience – which focuses on frictionless customer experience, and brand purpose – which focuses on brands maintaining a high level of social and political relevance.
These different approaches lead to very different types of marketing. But marketers rarely articulate why they are choosing one approach over the other, leading to a lot of disagreement, confusion, time-wasting and inefficiency.
Based on the work of Polish philosopher Edna Ullman-Margalit, I believe these approaches are complimentary, but best seen as different approaches to different types of decisions.
- The smallest decisions, are decisions we’re broadly indifferent about – they’re barely a choice, more a pick, and are most suitable to marketing focused on brand distinctiveness and achieving top of mind awareness.
- Mid-sized decisions, involving complicated choices we want to get right, require a focus on brand experience, ensuring a frictionless, personalized customer experience that minimizes the physical and mental effort for shoppers.
- Big decisions, where people are seek to change their lives and their world, lead to marketers having to focus on brand purpose, ensuring that brand choice is aligned with where people want to go more broadly as they seek to change their world.
For marketers the trick is not to choose one approach for all types of decisions, but first identify what type of consumer decision their brand is best placed to influence.
Here’s the full video here:
