By: Amy Stokes, Ph.D.
The communication process is complex and often unsuccessful; but when your company’s sales depend on using advertising to connect with potential consumers, it is critically important to get it right. While advertising is somewhat notorious for its failed attempts, there are a few tried-and-true creative strategies to help guide the process. In the next few paragraphs I will provide an overview of six techniques and explain how to implement them.
Unique selling proposition: This strategy highlights an important distinguishing characteristic that sets your brand apart from competitors. While it may seem self-explanatory, I’m going to say it anyway: In order for this strategy to be appropriate and successful, your brand must actually have a distinguishing characteristic. There is a difference between distinguishing characteristics based on sustainable competitive advantages versus those that can be easily replicated by competitors. For example, price-based sales or promotions are usually not sustainable because they can be easily matched by competitors. Marketable, sustainable competitive advantages include exclusive distribution or licensing agreements, trademarks or patents, customer service or warranties, and employee experience or knowledge.
Brand image: In the absence of an actual or functional difference between your product or service and your competitors’, you can use creative messaging to create a perceived difference. By adopting cultural signs and symbols in order to create a particular image, consumers will believe your product is different based on its positioning and associations. Looking at fitness centers in Springfield, the functionality of Genesis Health Clubs and the Pat Jones YMCA are very similar; however, they have created starkly different brand images with equal success by associating themselves with different workout motivations and life stages.
Emotional: Reaching consumers on an emotional level often leads to higher levels of message retention and brand recall. The great thing about emotional appeals is the variety of emotions that are available to work with. Common emotions evoked in advertising messaging include fear, guilt, humor and accomplishment. To illustrate, retailers and car dealerships frequently use fear appeals when stressing the limited-time nature of their sales. They lead consumers to fear missing out on a great deal or not being able to get the same product at the same price if they don’t buy right then.
Resonance: This strategy involves finding patterns in your target audience’s experiences and matching your communications to those experiences. In other words, telling a story that resonates with your consumers based on previous experiences they have had. Continuing with car dealerships to illustrate this approach, because so many consumers have experienced pushy salespersons and strongly dislike the negotiation process, some dealerships use that experience to communicate their difference in approach by highlighting practices like non-commissioned employees and offering upfront pricing.
Generic: When using a generic approach, you attempt to do the exact opposite of a unique selling proposition and instead attempt to communicate that there is no distinguishable difference between your brand and others in the product category. If this seems nonsensical, it is actually used extensively, but is only appropriate for brands that are not the market leader and want to close the perception gap between them and the dominant brand. When leading brands have created their dominance based on brand image, a generic approach helps to weaken the strength of the market leader. While not a local business, the best example of this is done by 21st Century Insurance comparing themselves to the market leaders Geico and Progressive.
Pre-emptive: A pre-emptive statement is a generic claim that any brand could use, but one brand makes it with superiority, effectively making it seem like a unique selling proposition. It only really works if you are the first one to make the claim so that others attempting to make comparable appeals appear like unoriginal copycats. Chesterfield Eye Works is a good example of a local company using this strategy. While any optometrist can perform exams and write prescriptions in order to enhance student athlete performance, Dr. “Coach” Holmes is the first to really make that claim in his advertising messaging. As a result, he created a perceived differentiation out of functional similarity.
Hopefully these strategies will help guide your creative messaging and support your other branding initiatives.
Amy Watson, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of marketing at Missouri State University and has experience as a media coordinator in private industry. Stokes has a specialty in advertising and media issues and writes about those areas as well as general consumer behavior.
This article appeared in the November 14th edition of the Springfield News-Leader and can be accessed online here.