Much of my focus is on creating strong brand foundations, and marketing strategies, that add value to a business. In my experience "brand" is seriously misunderstood by many, and the theory of how brands grow is hotly debated, but in truth there is no magic formula. Marketers must focus on develop a meaningful and memorable position that is built on customer and market truths.
Memorability serves as a beacon that guides potential clients and customers through the clutter of countless options, enabling a brand to standout and become the preferred choice. Building a memorable brand in these sectors not only requires a strategic approach to getting to their truths that are driving the sector, audience needs, and business strengths but also an understanding of key theoretical frameworks such as Kantar's Meaningful Difference Framework and Byron Sharp's theory on brand growth.
Understanding Brand Memorability
Brand memorability refers to the extent to which a brand is easily remembered and recalled by customers. In B2B and financial services, where decision-making processes are often complex and involve multiple stakeholders, a memorable brand can significantly influence purchasing decisions and loyalty. A memorable brand resonates with customers, creating a lasting impression that can lead to repeat business and referrals.
What is Memorability?
Memorability refers to the ability of something - be it an experience, a piece of information, or a brand - to be easily remembered or recalled. In the context of branding, memorability is a critical attribute that determines how well a brand can stick in the minds of its audience. A memorable brand is one that customers can easily recall when they are making purchasing decisions or thinking about a particular product or service category.
Key Aspects of Brand Memorability
1. Distinctiveness: Memorable brands often have unique characteristics that set them apart from competitors. This includes distinctive personality traits, differentiated position, unique product features, a standout logo, a catchy tagline, or distinctive proposition.
2. Consistency: Consistent use of brand elements across all touch points helps reinforce memorability of distinctive features. When customers see the same logo, colours, and messaging across different channels, it strengthens their ability to remember the brand.
3.Emotional Connection: Brands that evoke strong emotions tend to be more memorable. Emotional connections can be formed through storytelling, customer experiences, or the values and mission of the brand.
4. Repetition: Repeated exposure to brand elements through advertising, social media, and other marketing efforts increases the likelihood of the brand being remembered.
5. Relevance: Brands that are relevant to the needs and desires of their target audience are more likely to be remembered. This relevance can be functional (solving a problem) or emotional (resonating with personal values).
Importance of Memorability in Branding
In the crowded marketplace of today, standing out is more challenging than ever. Memorability can provide a competitive edge by ensuring that a brand remains top-of-mind for consumers. This is particularly important in sectors like B2B and financial services, where purchasing decisions are often complex and involve multiple stakeholders.
Practical B2B examples of building brand memorability:
Visual Identity: Monzo
Monzo, a prominent digital bank in the UK, is known for its distinctive visual identity. The brand uses a bright coral color for its debit cards, which sets them apart from traditional banking cards. Monzo's logo is simple yet memorable, featuring clean lines and a modern font. The app’s interface also follows a consistent visual theme with intuitive design and user-friendly navigation, enhancing the overall brand recognition and user experience.
Taglines: Slack
Slack, although not a UK-originated company, has a strong presence in the UK B2B market. Its tagline, "Where work happens," encapsulates the essence of what Slack offers – a digital workspace where teams can communicate and collaborate seamlessly. This tagline is succinct, clear, and directly conveys the core value proposition of the product, making it highly effective in marketing and branding efforts.
Consistent Emotive Messaging: Hiscox
Hiscox, a leading UK-based insurance provider, excels in maintaining consistent emotive messaging across all its platforms. Their messaging emphasises the problems its solves for its business clients and focues on reliability, expertise, and specialised insurance solutions tailored for businesses. Phrases like "As good as our word" reinforce the brand's commitment to trust and reliability. Hiscox’s marketing materials, website content, and customer communications consistently reflect these themes, ensuring a cohesive brand experience.
Emotional Engagement: Virgin Business
Virgin Business, part of the larger Virgin Group, leverages emotional engagement to build strong connections with its B2B clients. The brand's messaging often focuses on innovation, customer service, and a commitment to making a positive impact. Campaigns frequently highlight real customer stories and testimonials, which evoke emotions and create a sense of community and trust. Virgin Business’s approachable and friendly tone, combined with their reputation for challenging the status quo, fosters a deep emotional connection with their audience.
These examples illustrate how effective different branding elements, and a brand strategy that puts memorability at the heart can significantly impact a brand's recognition, customer loyalty, and overall success in the B2B market. By focusing on visual identity, taglines, consistent messaging, and emotional engagement, these companies create memorable and impactful brand experiences.
Assessing brand frameworks to help you develop the right memorability built on the right brand strategy:
Kantar's Meaningful Difference Framework:
Kantar’s Meaningful Difference Framework provides a robust model for understanding how brands can create lasting impressions. I use this framework often to get to the heart of a brand, its offering, point of difference , market relevance and importance to customers.
This framework is built on three core principles:
1.Meaningfulness: The brand must meet the functional and emotional needs of its customers. For B2B and financial services, this means offering solutions that not only address business challenges but also connect on a personal level with decision-makers.
2. Difference: The brand should stand out from competitors. This involves highlighting unique selling propositions (USPs) that are relevant and compelling to the target audience.
3. Salience: The brand must be easily recognisable and come to mind quickly when customers are making purchasing decisions. This is where memorability plays a critical role.
We know that if these three areas are develop in a brand in the right proportions and nurtured over time, brands that follow this model are more profitable and experience better growth than like-for-like category brands. Kantar have classified 3 areas that great brand must strive to develop, Power, Premium and Potential, they have research thousands of brands globally, reviewing statistics across brand, marketing and advertising .
Brand that are meaningful, different and salient have more power, more premium, and more potential, The image below capture the impressive headline stats that relate to this statement.
This data has not been captured on a whim, it is monitored on going and informs some of the biggest brands, data has been tracked globally via a 20 year study that have tracked and monitored the top most valuable 100 brands - you can download the latest report here.
Source: MillwardBrown/Kantar
So how can all brand use these insights, and principles to set their strategy and power business growth?
Firstly, brands must do the research and really look at their market, customers and internal business, they must consider what makes them, meaningful, different and salient and which leavers they need to pull to access the biggest wins in the market and if these align with the business capabilities and goals.
This audit dictates where the focus needs to be and considers that each area ( Meaning, Difference and Salience) is of varying importance depending on the specific niche a business is playing in, the market, maturity, innovation and customer demands. A brand strategists job is to consider each of these individually and then focus the strategy for the brand on where the most work needs to be done, and where opportunity to develop memorability lies. For example the business might be a bank, where true differentiation is not an option, nor is it truly desirable.... but where cultural salience is a key opportunity to build upon. Therefore the difference opportunity is low but the salience opportunity for the brand is high, this leads to a brand strategy that focuses on building salience and uses difference and meaning as supporting players in the brand focus, or take a B2B clothing manufacturer where the makret is saturated in a sea of sameness and every brand is on a race to the lowest price unless they build a point of difference... therefore the core opportunity is to present the brand as a totally different offering in the market, and to support this with points of meaning and salience that build greater difference and support a differentiated challenger brand strategy. By applying these principles, brands can create a strong, distinctive presence in the minds of their customers, fostering both recognition and preference.
Byron Sharp's Theory on Brand Growth:
Byron Sharp, in his influential work "How Brands Grow," emphasises the importance of mental and physical availability for brand growth.
The focus is not on building difference - in fact Sharp advocates that this is not useful - his focus in his books and body of work is to develop distinctive assets.
A key insight from Sharp's work is that; the secret to growing your brand is to maximised distribution (physical availability) – and develop distinctive branding using sensory cues (colours, logo, design…) that are easy to remember (“distinctive memory structures”)
Seven Rules for Brand Growth - according to Byron Sharp
Maximise Reach....Continuously reach all possible buyers of the category to grow fame. (Adopt a broad always on approach)
Ensure your brand is easy to buy - make it frictionless and relevant ( Make it meaningful)
Disrupt and get noticed ( build brand salience and memorability)
Eat - Sleep - Repeat - Refresh and build memory structures (remind constantly and consistently)
Be distinctive - Create and use distinctive brand assets (use emotive cues to get noticed and stay top of mind - here I would say this is the same as differentiate in the MDS framework.)
Be consistent - it takes time for a message and marketing to hit home... (avoid changes, stick to the same points to reinforce the brand - whilst doing so in new ways to keep the brands fresh and interesting)
Stay relevant and competitive - (keep reviewing your competitors and ensure your offering and message is targeted, appealing and relevant.)
Implications on brand strategy creation of Sharps thinking
The implications of Sharps thinking is that once you’ve spotted a market opportunity, and a product solution, brand strategy must be built on insight but be flexible and constantly assesses and reassessed. To start you must focus on building a set of distinctive brand assets; emotive and semantic cues such as colours, logo, design, and endorsements that will make the brand easy to memorise and recall. However if these are not presented in relevant ways that prime your audience and surround their worlds that you will have little chance of being recalled or growing as a brand. Sharp focuses on distinctiveness as a concepts and rejects differentiation - however I do feel tat this is simply semantics.
“Rather than striving for meaningful, perceived differentiation, marketers should seek meaningless distinctiveness” Sharp
According to Sharp, "meaningless distinctiveness" grows mental availability, by this he means that disruption and broadwareness trups being seen as different. Its an interesting concept as awareness does build metal avaliablity and metal availability is about how easily a brand comes to mind in buying situations. This aligns closely with the concept of brand memorability.
In summary. - Sharp argues that to grow, brands need to:
1. Reach as many buyers as possible: This involves extensive and continuous marketing efforts to ensure the brand is visible to potential customers across various touch points.
2. Be easy to buy: This means making the brand accessible and ensuring that the buying process is straightforward and convenient.
3. Create and refresh memory structures: This involves consistently reinforcing brand elements such as logos, colours, slogans, and other distinctive assets to make the brand easily recognisable and memorable.
The Intersection of Theories in B2B and Financial Services
Despite their different approaches and notable different perspectives and the importance of difference when applying these theories to B2B and financial services, several key strategies emerge:
1. Consistent Branding: Consistency in branding elements across all touchpoints helps reinforce memory structures. For example, using the same logo, colour scheme, and messaging across advertisements, websites, and customer communications helps to build and maintain a strong brand identity.
2. Emotional and Functional Messaging: Crafting messages that address both the emotional and functional needs of customers can enhance brand meaning. In B2B, this might involve showcasing case studies and testimonials that highlight the emotional benefits of a solution, such as reduced stress or increased confidence in decision-making.
3. Distinctiveness: Highlighting unique aspects of the brand that differentiate it from competitors can enhance brand difference. This could involve emphasising unique features of financial products or exceptional customer service in B2B offerings.
4. Broad Reach and Visibility: Ensuring that the brand is visible across various channels is crucial. This means investing in marketing efforts that span digital, print, and in-person interactions to reach a wide audience and stay top-of-mind. Plan your focused efferts depending on the life stage of your business and the critical need - start ups need to focus on sales engagement where as established businesses must focus on retaining brand preference - this means constantly monitoring reach and visibility across response and brand metrics.
5. Repetition and Engagement: Repeated exposure to the brand through various marketing campaigns and customer engagement activities can reinforce brand memorability. This includes regular content updates, social media interactions, and events that keep the brand active and engaging in the minds of customers.
What next.....
In the realms of B2B and financial services, where decision-making is often complex and multifaceted, brand memorability plays a vital role. By looking for truths in the market place and your customers, considering what makes a brand memorable and then leveraging the insights from Kantar’s Meaningful Difference Framework and Byron Sharp’s theory on brand growth, companies can develop strategies that ensure their brands are not only memorable but also meaningful and distinct. If you get the combination right and you can not only aids in customer acquisition but also builds long-term loyalty, recall and preference - ultimately driving sustained business success.
If you want to create brand growth in your b2b business, get in touch to find out how
Think Collectiv can help.
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