Distinctive Brand Assets: The Shortcut to Building a Strong Brand on Social Media
In the oversaturated environment of social media, brands compete for attention and a place in consumers’ minds. The winner is the one who secures more neural connections and builds higher mental availability. That’s why it’s not so much about being different, but about standing out and being distinctive. Distinctiveness over differentiation. And in this regard, distinctive brand assets play a key role. Let’s take a look at how to work with them in your social media communication.
A shortcut into the customer’s mind
Distinctive brand assets help a brand make its way into the customer’s mind. Their primary function is to evoke the brand name, enable instant recognition, and enhance memorability. Every time you use these assets in your communication, it becomes easier for the customer to associate the message with your brand. And that is essential for building mental availability.
Core distinctive brand assets include the brand name, logo, font, color palette, tagline, brand face, jingle, music track, and symbolic shapes. For a brand aiming to go beyond social media, it’s important to have a broad set of distinctive brand assets ready to use across different media channels – for instance, a character or logo won’t help in a radio ad; you need a jingle.
Source: Building Distinctive Brand Assets (Jenni Romaniuk)
How to build strong distinctive brand assets
Let’s say you already have a set of brand elements. How do you turn them into truly strong representatives of your brand—ones that can stand on their own and support mental availability (and ultimately, sales)? You need to showcase your assets alongside your brand name, to as many category buyers as possible, consistently and with strong visibility. Let’s break it down:
- Broad reach among category buyers – Just like brands themselves, distinctive brand assets are built by showing them regularly to as many customers in your category as possible. Use brand-building platforms with broad reach to achieve this.
- Prominent execution – This is about how your brand assets are placed and presented within specific social media formats. Make sure your elements are prominent, clearly visible, and positioned near the brand name in all communications.
- Consistency – This is key to embedding assets in customers’ memory. Use your distinctive brand assets consistently across all formats and every touchpoint to strengthen mental connections. Avoid trying to be original every time.
Core distinctive brand assets of McDonald’s
Using established distinctive brand assets of McDonald’s on social media. Even a product can function as a distinctive brand asset—if it is well-known enough.
Two characteristics of strong distinctive brand assets
After a few months of consistently building your distinctive brand assets, it’s time for the first measurement. You need objective data on the current strength and potential of your assets to know whether you're on the right track. We recommend using Jenni Romaniuk’s practical framework (from the publication Building Distinctive Brand Assets), which works with two key variables: fame and uniqueness.
Fame refers to how well a specific distinctive brand asset is known. It indicates what percentage of people who buy in your category associate a given brand asset with your brand. For example, a fame score of 45% means that 45% of category buyers link that particular asset to your brand. However, they might also associate it with a competitor at the same time. You can build fame for your distinctive brand assets through the practices mentioned above—linking the asset to your brand name, ensuring broad reach among your target audience, and executing with high visual prominence.
Uniqueness, on the other hand, refers to whether a specific asset is perceived as unique to your brand and not confused with any similar asset from competing brands. A high uniqueness score means your brand is one of the few that comes to mind when consumers encounter that particular brand asset. For instance, a uniqueness score of 60% indicates that 60% of all mental associations with that asset belong to your brand, while 40% are linked to a competitor. Unfortunately, uniqueness tends to lie outside a brand’s direct control, as it largely depends on what competing brands are doing with their own distinctive brand assets.
Distinctive assets grid
By combining different scores of Fame and Uniqueness, you get a four-quadrant matrix known as the Distinctive Asset Grid. This framework maps how your current distinctive brand assets are performing and predicts their potential. It helps guide strategic decisions about whether it’s worth continuing to invest in your existing assets or whether it would be more effective for the brand to develop new ones.
Source: Ehrenberg-Bass Institute
Ideally, you want to be in the top right quadrant of the grid—Use or Lose—where both Fame and Uniqueness are above 50%. If you're approaching 100% on both variables, you've built strong distinctive brand assets that can often serve as a substitute for the brand name in large parts of your communication. But don’t forget: you also need to continuously build these assets for new buyers entering your category. If your assets sit just above the 50% mark, it's important to keep focusing on growing Fame—by consistently using the assets alongside your brand name.
Another interesting quadrant that signals strong potential for your distinctive brand assets is the bottom right—Invest Potential—where Uniqueness is above 50%, but Fame is still below 50%. This means consumers largely associate your brand assets exclusively with your brand and don’t confuse them with competitors—good job! Now the focus should shift to increasing Fame by reaching as many category buyers as possible. In practice, this means placing your distinctive brand assets near the brand name in all your communications. In video formats, ideally show them right at the beginning and repeatedly throughout. Sure, it might sometimes feel a bit forced—but memory structures are only built through consistent repetition of the same elements, over and over again.
On the other hand, the bottom left quadrant—Avoid Solo Use—should raise concern. Here, Fame is above 50%, but Uniqueness is below 50%. While your brand assets may be widely recognized, their impact is diluted because competitors benefit from similar associations. These are typically generic assets tied to the category itself—like soft blue shapes for yogurts, red for ketchup, or bird silhouettes for airlines. If your brand holds a smaller market share than competitors using similar distinctive brand assets, it’s usually better to stop relying on those assets and start developing new, more unique ones.
If you're a new brand and you fall into the bottom left quadrant—Ignore or Test—there’s no need to panic. Low Fame and Uniqueness scores may simply reflect that not enough people know you yet—let alone recognise your distinctive brand assets. However, if you've been on the market for some time, use your assets consistently in communication, and are reaching a large share of category buyers, then you've likely chosen the wrong assets. Not every asset has the potential to be memorable—they may be too subtle or overly sophisticated. This is where a creative (or neuroscience-savvy) expert comes in to help design new, memorable distinctive brand assets.
We’ve defined distinctive brand assets for Wobenzym, Strike TV, and Yolab. Shall we create yours too?
5 situations when influencers do not completely suck
5 situations when influencers do not completely suck
We always approach marketing trends with a skeptical eye and a triple measure, and influencer marketing is no exception. While some cannot imagine a future for brands without influencers, both live and virtual, we keep our enthusiasm in check. With a healthy dose of skepticism, we have summarized situations where influencers can truly bring business success. Yes, eventually, we found a few. Does this apply to you? Read on!
When does it make sense for a brand to collaborate with influencers?
Let’s get straight to it. Here are five situations when you might consider contacting your favorite influencer.
1. When you need to increase reach with a small budget
Collaborating with an influencer is an effective way to achieve a broader reach in your target group (thus increasing brand awareness), even if you are a startup with a small advertising budget. The prerequisite is of course a product or service attractive enough to convince an influencer to accept a barter or lower fee. In this context, some talk about influencers as a catapult that launches startups to their first customers.
2. When you want to reach younger generations (Gen Z, Gen Alpha)
These generations tend to trust content that is authentic and non-commercial. Conversely, they exhibit skepticism and aversion to advertising messages. Some even hardly open Google search and base most of their purchasing decisions on recommendations from influencers and creators on TikTok. If a large part of your target audience consists of these generations, you could consider engaging influencers.
3. When you need to create instant buzz
Short-term influencer campaigns are ideal for special events in your brand’s life, such as product launches. They create buzz among the target audience and support the trial of a new product.
4. When you have a niche target audience and no research
Sometimes influencers understand their audience better than brands understand their target customers. They know which type of content is not only relevant but also resonates on a deeper level. If you do not conduct market research, do not organize focus groups, and are not in daily contact with your customers, then an influencer can help you keep your finger on the pulse of the times, even in a very specific or dynamic segment.
5. When operating in a regulated segment
Collaborating with influencers may be one of the few ways to promote products in a regulated segment that otherwise does not allow paid advertising on social media. This is somewhat of a gray area, which can be utilized by brands with CBD products, electronic cigarettes, etc.
Paradoxes of influencer marketing
For an influencer collab to be really effective in business terms, two things are crucial. Yet they often contradict each other: the influencer’s reach and their authenticity.
The need for reach is obvious. Brands grow by regularly addressing the largest part possible of their target audience. And why is authenticity important? On social networks, first and foremost we all want to be entertained or educated, and if a brand’s message is overtly commercial, we automatically skip, scroll, and mute it. This is especially true for younger generations, who excel at ignoring advertising messages. Brands need to find ways to reach consumers on networks in a subtle or at least authentic manner – simply put, in a way that consumers are willing to pay attention to and from which they can feel positive emotions. Ideally, influencers and creators allow brands to do just that. Ideally, they also have an aura of authority that can influence the opinions, behaviors, and decisions of their audience. Particularly younger consumers trust them and consider them relevant sources of information that guide their consumer behavior.
Often, however, it ends up other than ideal – collaboration with an influencer is overtly commercial and lacks authenticity. If it is obvious that the product or brand does not really suit the influencer, it won’t be successful among fans and will lead to a loss of trust in both the influencer and the brand. The same applies to versatile influencers who promote everything that comes their way, from collagen to plastic surgery clinics. This often happens especially with larger influencers or celebrities, who are exploited by a large number of brands due to their extensive reach. Here, the reach and authenticity of communication do not work together.
Authenticity and credibility are, after all, things where influencers often have a weaker reputation than plain money-driven businesses, as demonstrated, for example, by Mark Ritson in his juicy experiment. A brand seeking suitable influencers balances primarily extensive reach with authenticity and trust in the influencer. And of course, the budget comes first. The solution for extensive reach while maintaining authentic communication might be so-called raids – at one moment, you select a larger number of small, specialized influencers or experts on a particular topic.
Setting up your influencer marketing strategy
Creating an effective influencer marketing strategy starts by setting goals. Do you need to build brand awareness in the long-term? Increase sales? Or create a short-term buzz around a new product? Your goals will determine the form of influencer collaboration, ranging from brand videos to influencer events to discount codes. At the intersection of goals, target group, brand image, and budget, you will find names worth approaching. It is crucial to select influencers whose values, content, and style align with your brand image.
The next step is to integrate influencer marketing with your marketing strategy and, ideally, create a comprehensive campaign with a broader media mix.
In the creative process, give influencers and creators freedom. Trust that they know their followers just a bit better than you do and that they have insights you have not yet gained from any research. Therefore, give them free rein and just ensure compliance with the main values of the brand. Authenticity and creativity are the main pillars of a campaign’s success.
And what comes in the end? What else than measurement. Choose KPIs as close as possible to your objectives: for the objective of building a brand, your KPI will be the influencer’s reach in the target group; for the goal of increasing sales, it will be conversions. The fewer KPIs and objectives monitored, the better for your results. Learn from the results and contact us for collaboration.
Why 90 % of brands fail on social media
Why 90 % of brands fail on social media
We will break basic copywriting rules and tell you the answer right in the first sentence: 90 % of brands fail in brand building on social media because they focus on engagement, rely on organic reach, and do not have nor use brand elements. Ultimately, they do not stand a chance of reaching a larger part of their target audience and creating a memorable message. Classic plot twist: we know how to do it right and effectively. In this article, we reveal a large part of our social media brand building know-how. We talk about four basic tactics and how to update and adapt them to today’s environment. We draw primarily from the teachings of Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk, Les Binet & Peter Field, and the social agency Born Social.
4 timeless tactics for brand building on social media
1. Growth through market penetration
If we’re talking about brand growth in terms of market share growth, then the key is to regularly address the largest possible number of people within the target segment. In the past, brand communication was often limited to building relationship with loyal customers, based on the belief that retention and repeat purchases are cheaper from a marketing cost perspective than acquiring new customers.
However, current marketing knowledge and research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute show that market share growth is very difficult to achieve without strong acquisitions and gaining new (predominantly disloyal and occasional) customers. Therefore, it makes no sense to try to increase the loyalty of existing customers or to win customers from competitors, as they only represent a percentage of the market. Instead, brands should focus on gaining customers who have not yet bought from anyone in their category.
What does this mean for your social media strategy? Focus on the right ad settings—optimize ads for reach and set broad targeting for the largest possible impact in the target segment. The goal is to reach about 70% of your target group through social media advertising platforms.
Source: How Brands Grow, Byron Sharp: Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science
2. Balancing brand and activation
The need for quick results, which especially pleases your CFO, often leads to prioritizing activation / sales communication on social media. However, research by Binet and Field shows that short-term sales increases do not lead to long-term brand growth. If you want to build a brand that grows over the long term, you need to focus on increasing mental availability.
Even from the perspective of the buying cycle, it makes sense to combine activation and brand communication. Up to 95 % of the market (including your potential customers) currently (or at any randomly selected moment during the year) are not thinking about purchasing the selected product or service, and you have no chance to convert them into your customers. For them, you try to build the brand’s mental availability so that when the need arises, your brand is one of the first that comes to mind. The remaining 5 % of the market, who need your product right now, you try to persuade through sales communication.
What does this mean for your social media strategy? Divide resources between activation and brand communication, thus balancing short-term and long-term marketing goals. The ideal budget split between activation and brand varies between categories, but as a golden ratio averaged across market segments, it is 60:40 in favor of brand communication.
Source: The Long and the Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies, Les Binet & Peter Field
3. Distinctiveness, under all circumstances
According to current knowledge in marketing and consumer psychology, consumers actually do not distinguish much between one brand and another, and strong brand loyalty is often a fictional phenomenon. Larger brands compete with each other primarily for mental availability (who comes to mind first in a purchasing situation). Therefore, brands should not try so hard to convince consumers that they are better than the competition, but instead work on creating a stronger mental availability (everything that is associated with your brand in the consumer’s mind) than the competition.
In this regard, creativity in communication is crucial to overcome people’s indifference to ads. However, we also want to talk about brand elements here—visual or auditory elements that are uniquely associated with your brand and distinguish it from the competition. They facilitate the brand’s journey into the viewer’s mind, help improve its memorability amid a flood of advertising messages, and over time, help build mental availability. This could include a logo, slogan, jingle, colors, brand face, and more.
What does this mean for your social media strategy? Clearly define your unique brand elements (different from the competition) and use them consistently across all communication (not just social).
4. Shared perception of the brand
Strong brands are those that have their place in social culture and are perceived the same by all their members. According to Kevin Simler’s theory, advertising works through cultural imprinting – a collective understanding of what the brand means and what values it represents. Thus, brand building is not just about influencing individuals but also about creating a collective image of the brand that emerges from a given culture. Think of cultures in this context more in terms of interest groups or smaller subcultures on social media.
What does this mean for your social media strategy? Identify your culture (there may be more than one within your target group) and get to know it closely. Study its typical behavior, including the best insights and jokes.
The environment is changing, 4 brand-building tactics persist – almost
It might seem that digital simplifies and democratizes marketing communication; even with a smaller budget and without a hundred-page strategy, even small brands can find effective ways to build their mental availability. On the other hand, digital also brings a significant challenge that becomes even more pronounced over time (along with the growth of social platforms and the number of users registered on them).
The challenge is the decentralization of communication; simply put, digital takes some influence away from brands and gives it to communities. Brands thus transform from monolithic entities into a collection of scattered fragments, often lying outside their direct control. In such an environment, maintaining consistent communication and a coherent brand image becomes a significantly more complex task and requires a new interpretation and application of the four basic tactics for building a brand on social media.
The way forward: brand building of the future
Tactic: growth through market penetration (broad reach)
Challenge: Brands compete for user attention, which is increasingly becoming a scarce commodity. With the growing number of platforms and brands present on them, user attention steadily declines, and they become immune to advertising messages.
The way forward: Reach users through multiple contact points. Utilize a mix of different social platforms and their specific visual formats, which together work synergistically and support each other in creating mental availability.
Tactic: balancing brand and sales
Challenge: perceiving brand-building and activation as competitive activities that vie for the marketing budget and operate separately, if not oppositely. In this regard, there is an increasing push for quick results (also in connection with economic uncertainty) and a reluctance to invest in long-term brand-awareness, which will deliver results over the years.
The way forward: Apply the principles of marketing effectiveness, that is, the integration of brand and activation communication across the entire marketing funnel, so that they work synergistically. Specifically: testing, scaling, and analytics for brand communication; and conversely, storytelling and emotions in activation communication. Select effective formats and channels for both lines of communication. Utilize social commerce tools for activation.
Tactic: distinctiveness and brand elements
Challenge: For brands, it is increasingly difficult to maintain a consistent presentation in the environment of social networks, which also gives a strong voice to consumers and influencers. The brand image is no longer created just by what the brand itself says and how it presents itself, but also by what others say about it and how they present it.
The Way Forward: Ensure consistency in brand presentation using soft power—subtly guide consumers and influencers in the desired direction. Use product elements instead of brand elements.
Tactic: shared perception of the brand
Challenge: the rise of a huge number of smaller and very specific subcultures with which consumers identify.
The way forward: Identify your own subcultures to which the brand speaks and their typical cultural codes (language, insight jokes, aesthetics, etc.). Build brand communication based on these cultural codes and the values of the subculture.
Mental availability as a path to market share growth
Mental availability as a path to market share growth
The more situations in which customers use your product, the more paths to higher revenues and a larger market share open up for your brand. The desired outcome, where customers remember your brand in a specific purchasing situation, is called mental availability. It is no coincidence that the biggest and most successful companies have a very wide portfolio of purchasing situations closely linked to their brand.
Take Coca-Cola, for example. Customers are likely to remember it in situations when they want to refresh themselves on a hot day, when buying non-alcoholic beverages for a family lunch, or when you’re the unlucky one who has to drive home from the bar so that others can drink unrestrained. Coca-Cola is a proponent of well-developed mental availability. Another example is McDonald’s: breakfast, a quick snack on the way home from work, food for a hangover, or a cheat day on Sunday after a healthy week. The more consumption opportunities customers associate with a brand, the greater the potential for brand awareness. Thus, the goal of your marketing department is to build more associations with your brand than with the competition and to regularly maintain these associations.
But how do you build mental availability?
As with any marketing initiative, we should ideally begin with research. You may know your category well enough to identify individual situations in which your product is used, but… do you really want to base a multimillion-dollar marketing activity stretching across several years and shaping your brand’s image on assumptions? Not to mention that research will provide you with data that you cannot easily estimate. Is your main competitor more associated with a purchasing situation you thought you dominated? Or are you perceived more strongly in connection with a situation you had not considered as the main use of your product? Or is your product used in a situation you had no idea about?
The output of marketing research is thus a list of the most common purchasing situations in the market, with various frequencies of occurrence. By frequency of occurrence, we mean the fact that fast foods are indeed used more by people to satisfy a sudden craving for something unhealthy than for breakfast. At the same time, we find out how we compare with the competition. Do customers in your category associate your brand with most purchasing situations, but are you always the third brand they think of? Or are you clearly the first brand, but only in one purchasing situation?
To ensure the entire process of building mental availability is not just a crafty walk through a rose garden, we now come to the hard part. Ideally, we would try to strengthen our position in all purchasing situations at once, but marketing budgets are not infinite, so prioritization comes into play. That is, which one or two purchasing situations will we try to associate with our brand during this period? Do we want to start fighting with competitors for a prominent purchasing situation? Or do we want to strengthen our position in situations that are not so common?
Alright, research. What is next?
How do you make customers remember your brand in the situations you’ve chosen? Simply. You will communicate these situations in connection with your brand. Creativity is important and will definitely help overcome ad blindness; however, it is crucial that the situation is clearly readable from the advertising message. An important aspect is then precisely the connection with the brand through brand elements that are typical for your brand – the logo, slogan, brand face, and others. It is praiseworthy to communicate the purchasing situations in your category, but if the customer does not remember your brand when they are actually in that purchasing situation, then the advertisement has not fulfilled its purpose.
Another key factor is reach. You can clearly communicate purchasing situations and have them perfectly linked with your brand, but if the advertisement does not reach enough people, then the communication again has not fulfilled its purpose—it did not build mental availability with enough people. And although the regularity of communication is immensely important in the short term, if you want your brand to grow, then over the years it is important to focus on a wide range of purchasing situations. Do not continually build an already-established association. This brings us full circle back to research, which will reveal that the time has come to take your brand a step further.
The book How Brands Grow: Part 2 was not only the source of this article, but should also be the foundation for any activities related to mental availability and Category Entry Points.
Mental availability. Let’s get to work.
As you can see, even the article itself on how to build mental availability is full of questions. Answer them together with us and build the mental availability that will open the doors to genuine business growth. Grizzlink has already addressed the question of mental availability with clients such as Vapiano, Business Lease, and Cambridge University Press, helping them achieve measurable results.
Social media hygiene
A large number of companies are trying to use social networks to promote brand building. In the long run, however, they are still making the same textbook mistakes that cost them both time and money. With regard to the current situation and the impending recession, comes the ideal time for the hygiene of the social networks, and the search for unnecessary costs and inefficient practices.
Social media
Recently, we have reviewed several audits of the social networks, that were primarily about the evaluation of the work with content on Facebook and Instagram – from creative through optimization to efficiency, which is in the current period more than required. In addition to the classic mistakes, which, even today, appear over and over, we came across one more interesting fact, which we hadn't encountered before, at least not on this scale. Indeed, there was a large imbalance between the amount of content produced and its delivery to the target group. An error that was beautifully rendered in the long-term data analysis.
The pages posted hundreds of posts a year. Most of the contributions were optimized for interaction, being promoted with a very low amount. Part of the contributions did not promote at all for sure, and it relied only on an organic reach. The result of this effort was that each post got on average only to the lower units of thousands of users. For better context, I note that the target group always covered a large portion of the Czech population, and the brands strived for the social networks primarily to promote brand awareness.
What is the point of trying to build a brand on social media if the brand speaks to barely 1% of the target audience? And how does it then affect the budget and time spent by an internal specialist or an external agency? There is an unnecessary waste of a marketing budget that could either be used more efficiently on a given platform or invested into another communication channel.
Since most companies use social networks primarily to build brand awareness, I've put together some simple tips to think about when trying to build a brand on social networks.
Advertising is not for free
It is estimated that there are more than 60 million business profiles on Facebook, which already creates a very competitive environment. Thus, on the platform, the amount of contributions is constantly growing, while the degree of interest (interaction) with them decreases sharply. In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook would continue to limit organic reach on corporate pages. Brands are increasingly being pushed towards using of paid content, and for many of them "reasonable" organic reach becomes unattainable. Often relatively large resources are spent on preparing eye-catching creatives that are seeded on the social networks without promoting or with only minimal support, and reach is only to several thousands of users.
You don't build the brand with the page fans
According to the study of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (one of the largest drivers of the world of marketing last years), ion which he participated even Byron Sharp, the fans of brand pages are by a large part their most loyal customers. By doing so, the study pointed to the inefficiency of targeting the page's own fans in order to build a brand. In this case, it will always be more interesting to expand the reach, spreading out to new audiences.
Save Microtargeting for activation campaigns
Accurate targeting options are one of the key advantages in online advertising, but like everywhere else, everything must be in balance. Exaggerated microtargeting and personalized creatives for microsegments can also have negative consequences from the point of view of brand building. For brands, that gradually build their brand, there should be something like a common awareness – all potential customers should understand the single idea of the brand, what it means, what it costs.
But microtargeting is the opposite. If serve an individually personalized content to everyone and so build different associations with micro-audiences, the brand as a whole actually starts to fall apart. On the other hand, microtargeting definitely has its place in the activation and performance campaigns, where it may in short term increase performance in the form of sales. You can read more about why personalization harms brand building here.
No one gives likes to TV advertisement or billboard, and yet works
The last point I would like to mention is that many brands still use level of enthusiasm as one of the main KPIs in social networks. Meanwhile, Facebook itself discourages from using its Engagement optimization purpose, and demonstrates it with the results of research by Nielsen conducted on 478 global online campaigns.
The research did not prove a significant correlation between engagement and brand metrics. In addition, optimization of the ads for this purpose makes the reach of target group considerably more expensive, because the advertising system must, in a more complicated way, choose among a smaller number of users, so-called clickers, which are still targeted by a large number of incorrigible advertisers.
Long story short:
Do not rely on organic reach and promote posts sufficiently. The costly creatives to be seen by a hundredth of a target group are inefficient. To do this, balance out the amount of posts so that you can allocate enough media support for them.
Fans are most likely your loyal customers. With them, you no longer need to invest in brand building.
Build a unified association within a segment or category. Keep the Microtargeting for activation.
Set the right KPIs. Likes, shares, comments look nice, but they do not help the brand growth. In addition, optimization for engagement makes your target group's reach more expensive.
But nothing is simply black and white, and definitely there will find a brand or page which, by the nature of their business, generate such an entertaining or useful content that they can get organically to a large number of people or pages that were established just for the purpose of communication with your customers and fans are so very precious, as well as microsegment for the brand with a narrow target group. However, for most brands, that generate an average ad with an average budget for a relatively large audience, these tips are valid, and it is certainly not off-topic from time to time to reflect, and to confront yourself with the state of the page, for which you have responsibility.
Stereotypes in marketing
At the center of any marketing communication there must always stand the customers. However, despite technological advances, we still cannot collect all the data about them. This is why we often make our work easier with a number of projections designed to help us refine our targeting. But we must treat them with caution and verify whether we are not just subject to socially deep-rooted stereotypes in our conclusions.
A good example of stereotyping, for example, is the player of computer games. Many imagine a younger man who spends the whole day at the computer and practically doesn't talk to anyone. Therefore, it can come as a surprise that the statistical representation of men and women among global players is perfectly balanced (year-on-year deviation of +/- 2 %), and with one quarter, we are talking about a persons aged 45 years and older.
It concludes that a stereotypical assumption does not equal statistical data.
Multinational FMCG company Unilever decided to set an example in breaking stereotypes in advertising . Their corporate marketing communication tries to follow social developments and so break the traditional roles and social portraits, which belongs perhaps to the last century, and today, they cannot be arbitrarily applied on consumer behaviour. Already in 2017, they founded an association that connects other organizations, and they all work together to eradicate stereotypes in all advertising formats.
In the video below, you can watch their DNA experiment.
Presenting the two most common stereotypes that interfere with segmentation, now.
Age matters (not)
We often apply a common stereotype in dividing and comparing generations to each other. We attribute to them uniform patterns of behaviour and define their consumer decision-making only on the year of birth basis. We call them inappropriately segments and pair them to one medium, which this or that generation uses most often – for instance, the Digital First approach for Generation Y or Social First approach for Generation Z. However, the generation does not resemble a definition of any segment, by far. You can just look around yourself, how behave those of same age, our peers, and we can notice a surprising thing – our age says nothing about our interests or how we spend our work and leisure time.
Take, for example, millennials. Every once in a while, a study that analyses Generation Y behaviour comes out, but the results don't support what is widely claimed. The behaviour and decision-making of millennials doesn't make a significant difference to previous generations. It is just younger and maybe a little poorer till certain age. Therefore, marketing should perceive age only as a number, that itself says nothing tell, and don't fixate on presumptions. It is the behaviour of each individual itself that should interest us.
Another widespread stereotype then applies to traditional media. We often see them as retreating, with younger generations spending their time on phones alone. Again, statistics say something else. Though, one cannot of course deny that, today, we spend more time on-line than ever before, to underestimate the reach of traditional media would also be a costly mistake. Instead of looking for the most relevant media, we should rather decide in what proportion a suitable mediamix will be compiled.
Mr Blue and Mrs Pink
With the problem of the for some outdated perception of gender roles of men and women today, we still encounter almost everywhere, although the topic itself is not that new. The ways in which these stereotypical roles are reflected in marketing are increasingly causing the opportunity to reach potentially more profitable customers to be missed. Research by the British research agency Kantar suggests that two thirds of women think current ads negatively portray the role of a woman.
Whether we're talking about a social role, or the ways the product is communicated, marketing often overrates whether a customer for a product should be woman or man. Still, in advertising there apply old standards, that the man is the head of the family, at the same time, the technical type, and clueless in the household, while women on the contrary, belong to the house-keeping and in their spare time they buy things they don't need. But that certainly this cannot be applied nowadays, so brands possible forgetting some of their potential customers is based solely on these unfounded assumptions.
But gender stereotypes by far don't concern adults only. Gender marketing among children's toys may be an even bigger problem than among adult products. Division of products in pink and blue or cars for boys and dolls for girls today is a complete standard, which has surpassed the period before 50 years ago, which was generally on far more discriminatory in social norms. Even despite the fact, that according to research, the girls today equally with the boys show interest in the video games and quarter of them won't wear anything pink. For example, the worldwide popular brand Lego decided to test its products by a mixed group, only a few years ago. In doing so, it is clear that such a decision may have previously had a major impact on prototyping products and expanding the portfolio of small customers.
In the year 2018, the British Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) came with the new set of rules, which should the British advertising industry follow in order to eliminate, as much as possible, the negative impact of advertising on the perception of male and female roles in society. But it was rather a first try to point out the fact that old order no longer fits today, and may generally have a negative impact on society.
How do brands try to work with breaking of stereotypes?
In 2019, globally popular sub-brand Diet Coke set out into the world with the campaign Unlabeled – Imagine the World Without Imposed Labels, that tried to tear down stereotypes built around gender roles, ethnic groups or sexuality. It was also a message that not every "label" is bad, it just needs to get to know to the individual more in depth.
In recent days, there has been a wave of reactions in recent triggered by spot of Girls. Girls. Girls magazine "Don't be a Slut. Be a Lady they Said" that shows gender labels and stereotypes associated with the role of a woman in society.
Thus, it tries to provoke a discussion over the absurd demands that are burdened on women, and the impact on their self-esteem. Also the Dove brand has been successfully fighting with this in its ads, for a long time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=7rM6BOdqORE&feature=emb_logo
How to avoid the mistaken stereotypes?
The difference between targeting a stereotype, and a real group of potential customers is only in data and research implementation. Better prevention of inaccurate segmentation does not exist. As we have showed on several examples, statistics often go in an unexpected direction compared to what we read or hear.