Posted on : 2024-03-31 21:15:47
Article : Good morning Monday management Solution for TASK 287- How to be a big brand -better?
For a start-up to succeed, there are generally three core components making up that success: a strong product, a well-researched go-to-market strategy, and a strong organizational culture. Each of these components can be a struggle to get right individually and ensuring each of them works together can be even bigger. So, rather than the artifice of persuading well-resourced teams to pretend that they are not, or to invoke a culture of risk-taking that doesn’t exist, better to encourage them to ‘think like a mass marketer’- Only do it better. How might they achieve that? Now let us look into these three seminal steps to reawaken the true spirit of big brand marketing.
1. Love your customer
Well, that’s easy to say. It’s one thing to show love to a customer when you’re a niche brand, where you can get to know them, where there is some specificity to work with. Much harder to put your arms around a big, heterogeneous mass that includes diverse backgrounds, beliefs, habits, lifestyles, hopes and fears.
Yes, it is harder but the rewards for success are orders of magnitude greater. The skill is to seek ways to bring a sense of unity to your engagement with your mainstream consumer without falling prey to a one-size-fits-all approximation.
At the substantive level, McDonald’s has always been adept at extending its appeal across a wide societal sweep. It backs this up with sassy, sometimes edgy, communications that show affection for its mass consumer without patronising them or straying into bland generalities.
The 2023 ‘eyebrows’ spot, where office workers abandon workstations in their hordes to head for a McDonald’s, smartly observes the quiet subversives that lurks in every big employee pool. It achieves human connection at scale. You can’t not buy in.
2. Wear your purpose lightly
Leading with purpose can help with standout but is polarising. For niche brands, willing to turn off as many as they attract that may not matter but the stakes are higher when your share is 50 times bigger.
Who’s got time for this stuff, anyway? The mainstream will include vast pools of consumers who have other demands on their attention: putting dinner on the table, navigating the kids’ drop-offs, managing a job, dealing with councils, schools, tax. Yes, they want to feel they’re doing the right thing in their purchase decisions, but they really do not need another cognitive or guilt-filled burden in their lives.
Unilever’s enthusiasm for purpose at the product brand level may be at the heart of its sluggish performance over recent years. It certainly provoked the ire of its activist investor Terry Smith, and rightly so Hellmann’s mayonnaise became about food waste, Lux became about rising above sexist judgements, and consumers became perplexed.
New chief executive Hein Schumacher has opened the door for Unilever’s marketers to stop force-fitting social and environmental themes to all its individual brands and get back to classic marketing, leaving the corporate brand to do the heavy ESG lift. It’s a good call.
3. Innovate
It’s easy for niche brands to bring excitement and fizz to the marketplace, and easy for mass brands to rest on their laurels. Cadbury is about as mainstream as it gets but is using its 200-year anniversary to introduce a whole suite of ‘new creations’ to the confectionary aisle, from an orange trail mix to a hazelnut and caramel chocolate nougat bar that manages to weigh in at under 100 calories.
Where big brands really have the edge, though is in the financial ordnance they can deploy to completely change the dynamics of the category. For years, Microsoft played the game of upgrading existing products. Now it has stepped up a gear to pioneer the fusion of AI technology into search, through its partnership with Chat GPT. It could challenge the hegemony of Google, and bring a revolutionarily improved experience to users.
None of this is the work of a moment and to be fair any single element is beyond the scope of just the average marketer. But get it right and you reap the extraordinary rewards that cascade when capability collides with scale. Share gains where a single percentage point can be worth tens of millions with innovations that enhance the lives of the many, not just the few, and employees just that little bit prouder to show up for work in their thousands.
End point-Big is beautiful. So, when a marketer of a sexy, niche brand lets you know that they envy your resources, influence and heft, you can quietly say to them: “Yeah, you’re right to.” To be so Think like a mass marketer not as Start-up.
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