The case for courage

Sorry. Good isn’t good enough anymore.

Once upon a time, it was good enough to be good. If you had a good product, excellent customer service, or you knew your stuff really well, then that was all you needed to be competitive. Not any more.

Consumer expectations have now risen to the point of unreasonable. In fact, today’s consumer is more literate, more informed, more aware of their rights, more spoilt for choice than at any time in history. They can shop for products anywhere in the world. They can bargain on price knowing that if you won’t do the job, there’s someone down the road working out of a garage who will. They are cynical, world-weary, cagey, difficult to convince and disloyal.

Doing business with them is hard … and they like it that way. They have the upper hand. They own the control. The late 20th century saw a major shift in consumer powerplays. Corporates may run the world in the early 21st century, but consumers for the most part now own it.

Nothing is unique – at least for long

Your opportunities to stand out in traditional ways are diminishing by the day. Commoditisation across most sectors means the chances of you offering your customers anything inherently different are nil.

You may think what you do is special. You may like to see your offerings as unique. They’re not … or at least, not for long. To the person looking to buy, what you say and what you offer sounds just like what everyone has and everyone else does. And if it doesn’t yet, it soon will. They can’t tell the differences – either because the differences don’t exist, or because they are so subtle as to mean squat.

As the technological time to market continues to shrink and pressure on margins forces profits down in your sector and others, convergence is huge. More and more companies and products look more and more the same every day. So you’re moving into other sectors to get away from the noise, the clutter and the competititon, and guess what! others are coming after you. Competition is everywhere – places you expect, places you don’t, and places you’ve probably never heard of.

Once you could shout in the media and get cut-through. Not any more. Consumers have remote controls. They’ll switch out faster than you can get them to tune in. You can’t grab their attention with volume anymore. Because they’re harder to impress, they don’t get excited, and apathy is epidemic.

3 options

That brings you down to some fairly stark business opportunities. You can attack on price, and become a margin bottom-feeder – sifting up the work others don’t want and depending on technologies and volumes to get by. You can play the luck game – hoping you get chosen over others for work. Or you can become a brand …

Brand is the f word of marketing

Everybody swears by it, few people understand its impact and everyone would like you to believe they do it more often than they do.

It is perhaps best defined initially by what it is not. It is not a logo. It is not a product as such. It is not television advertising. It is not the company with the biggest profile. It is not something that only multi-nationals have.

Audacity defines brand as “the idea you own: the strongest impression you have of yourselves as a company, and that others have of you.” Most companies today are brandless or negatively branded. They make no impression or only a negative one. That’s because far too many of them have no idea on which to base their understanding of themselves. They just get on with what they do, and leave the impressions to sort themselves out. That’s a little like asking your neighbours to find your personality because you’re too busy to look for it yourself!

Wake up call.

The key word for competitive success today is “fit”. If you want to create the most powerful impression possible, then you need to know what your idea is, you need to ensure your impression is significantly different from the impression others are trying to make, and you need to make it to people who will be most impressed by it. A powerful brand does that. Because when you have a strong brand, you own an idea in the minds of consumers and prospects that is simple, compelling, time-proof and irrefutable.

It doesn’t stop there

• A brand gives you personality – people like that. It defines you. It gives you an identity.
• A brand has a simple big idea. And that association is no accident. It is that idea that distinguishes your brand from its competitors, and that association that generates engagement.
• A brand has a story behind it – we all love stories. We want to hear what other people think about life. We want to know their point of view.
• A brand is something to base your communications on – not the other way around. A brand is the baseline, the benchmark, the yardstick… everything that makes an impression gets measured against it to ensure you are making the right impression.
• A brand is built on common values – ideas and attitudes you agree on and subscribe to as a group – and so do your customers.

  Difference – relevance - unity

  The key is difference. Powerful brands are built on difference, because only differences deliver compelling reasons to prefer. Only differences make people stop and take notice of you. Increasingly, those differences are emotionally based. They are driven by how people feel about you as a company. To be successful, to stand out from everyone else, you need to stand for ideas that are powerful, motivating and above all relevant to them. Customers need to gain ‘fit’ with you. And once they have that, it is the most powerful bond you can look to form with them.

  To gain fit you need relevance. You need to offer your customers a single compelling reason to prefer. You need to focus on exactly what they’re looking for. Chances are it’s not what you think. Chances are it’s different from what you’re doing. Or if it’s not yet, it certainly should be.

  To deliver focus, you need unity. Because you don’t just get one chance to make the right impression. Every opportunity must make the right impression. Everything you say and do as a company must hit the sweet spot for your customers. It must fit with their wants and expectations. And it must be different from what everyone else is doing in order to be memorable, appealing and engaging.

  Hard wired to the business drivers

  Contrary to popular belief, brand never acts alone and it should never be read in isolation. Brand never takes its eye off your business drivers. Why? Because the impression you have and give of your company needs to be inextricably linked with where you are going as a business. Each reinforces the other. Each also checks the other, keeping your corporate goals and your corporate personality fully aligned, synchronised and working to maximum capacity.

  The irony of globalisation

  You need to fit into the system to compete. But you also need to stand out in order to be competitive.

  There’s nothing easy about finding difference – for two reasons. Firstly, globalisation has powerful homogenising drivers. In the fever-pitch, relentless marketplace that is today’s reality, most companies don’t feel they have the time to consciously create a state of difference within their business. They’re too busy just trying to do business. Head down, bum up, next project please …

  Secondly, being different is hard. It requires courage that is distinctly yours. Branded bravery. It needs powerful self confidence and self belief from every person and from the whole team.

  Difference brings advantages

  It may be hard to unearth difference, but there are advantages, and those advantages are breathtaking.

  If you have the courage to believe in yourselves as a company, you will own your destiny. Your decisions will be re-oriented around what works for your customers, not what everyone else is doing.

  When you become a company with a branded point of view, decisions also become easier because new ideas, directions and opportunities either fit with who you are and what you’re about … or they don’t.

  When you stop being a company that just does and start behaving as a company that believes – a company with attitudes and values - then people find a fit with you much more easily, and the people you don’t want to do business with choose not to approach you in the first place.

  See, notice, buy

  Audacity helps companies find the personality they must have to be profitable, and the impression they must make to be drop-dead competitive.

  By finding and defining those qualities, we redefine your view of you to the point where you are irrevocably and spellbindingly different, we align that understanding with your business goals and we look to express the ‘new you’ in ways that the market sees, notices and buys.

  For us, attitude is integral to the formation of an attention-gaining promise and the subsequent delivery of difference. Once we’ve found that attitude, we help you foster and express it within your internal culture, the ways you think and go about your processes, your front of shop and of course your customer service.

  Then we work with you and your communication companies to take that promise to market in ways that really, really get you noticed. We call it the pointy trousers test. Because that’s how exciting we believe your communications need to be. A great promise, badly communicated … is a blunt tool.

  Howdareyou? at work …

  Stand up. Represent an idea that bewitches your audience. Grab them by the heart with an emotionally based attitude that makes their soul soar. Something that is simple, compelling and irrefutable.

  Stand fast. Support your unique idea with values that are crafted for difference. Values that push, stretch, demand, make people uncomfortable. Why uncomfortable? Because nothing good happens in branding without adrenalin. If you’re not sweating, you’re comfortable. Adrenalin is the chemical of change. If you’re comfortable, you’re already passe. Or as we like to put it, “If you’re not screaming, you’re wilting.”

  Stand out. We work with you to fashion that idea into a stunning promise that has customers locking you into their lives because you stand for the very ideas, principles, beliefs, attitudes that they treasure.

  Go to market. Bring your brand to life with an external promise that cuts through the clutter and gets you noticed. Promise your customers not just a product or service, but an experience that puts ping in their lives. Saturate them in the attitude.

  Deliver, deliver, deliver. Live the promise you’ve made. Think that’s the easy bit? You couldn’t be more wrong! This is the part that sorts the lip service from the branded service. This is where you make the commitment to move every corporate corpuscle in synch with the rhythm of the brand. You can’t get your people to do that. You can only inspire them to do that. Courage isn't easy. It requires that leap of faith from rational to intuitive - It asks you to be something more than the numbers and the sequential logic can generate. But when it's done well, it's distinctive and endearing to those you are looking to engage with.

  One final thought: on any given piece of work, chances are if the company is comfortable, then the customer is bored. So while you're saying "great", they're mentally yelling "next!"

  
  

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