Cameron Sterling

Brand Messages In Uncertain Times, by Cameron Sterling

Marketing your brand’s identity and customer experience during a time of quickly changing visual, verbal, and production trends can be daunting.

The good news is that brand marketing in uncertain times follows similar macro tenets as in boom times. The bad news is that the stakes seem greater.

The analogy of a brand to a fingerprint is a fitting one. Fingerprints all have a familiar oval shape made of unique lines that make a fingerprint easily recognizable for what it is.

Like a fingerprint, a brand has a unique identity and selling point (USP) that help people understand if it is the best solution for their problem. A brand‘s USP can also be thought of as its specialization plus its brand story.

A brand also has the familiar oval shape aspect of this analogy. This represents the more common traits a brand shares with its competition. This is the part that a brand’s ideal audience needs to see to balance the USP with the safer ground it stands on.

A brand’s unique attributes can produce both intrigue (attraction and tribal alignment) and anxiety (avoidance and risk aversion). The desire for safer familiar choices often wins among the risk averse and mid to late adopters, especially in uncertain times, because safer choices are tribally approved, lower risk, and efficient. In a time of uncertainty the oval shape part of the brand becomes increasingly important to its audience.

People want products and services that are proven to work, to align with their values, line up with their tolerance for risk, or to confirm their membership in a tribe. However, business without a clear USP can be easily overlooked, forgotten, or become a commodity competing on price and scale.

It is important a brand’s novelty factor lives in a “shape” that is familiar to its intended audience - just like the other similar brands, but better because your audience sees in your brand story that you intimately understand them, or it shows the buyer why your USP is an advantage - or the next new standard. This is what makes a brand resonate with its ideal audience.

Every type of buyer has a different tolerance for risk. Go past this point and avoidance takes over. People add up risks, not just how big they are. In any market consider how your brand’s ideal audience will balance both the USP and the familiar traits that support it.