3. Differentiating with Authenticity and Founder Vision
- Raja Ganapathy Founding Partner, Spring Marketing Capital
I feel that for today’s B2C brands, if there is no product differentiation possible because of the nature of the category, maybe the purpose of the company can be a differentiator.
There must be a story behind the brand - an ethos, a brand purpose, why do the founders do what they have done. If you can integrate that into the brand thinking, then you have a differentiator.
It’s impossible to build a consistent brand unless there is something that’s driving your action.
To give you an example — if your purpose is to make India healthier, that’s your whole purpose. Can your actions reflect that? Can your social goals reflect that? Can your hiring principles reflect that?
Can that be a starting point to say, that the pleasure of working with your company is that apart from the compensation, employees will also get better health. When a person leaves your company, they will leave healthier.
This is a random idea, but if you create a program like that, it can be a talking point.
Your employees will talk about it. They will put it up.
If you can find that purpose, if you can articulate it, then you can build it into your advertising. You can build it into your content. You can build it in your internal communications. You can build it into social media.
Founder’s vision is always unique.
While it’s easy to copy products, it’s very difficult to copy an ethos and vision. It's very difficult to copy your brand purpose. If you start from your unique founder story, then all initiatives become differentiated.
Consumer start drawing patterns and start connecting the dots. They begin to realise why you’re doing what you’re doing, what your thinking about the product is, what drives your actions and communication.
You can find many, many US examples for this. They’re very good at this. They recognize that you can only differentiate products so much. So they’ve started differentiating on purpose — especially D2C brands.
AirBnb is a great example of this. They have a strong belief that the world is one family behind their brand. The world is one family. All of us can host each other. That’s phenomenal thinking.
But sticking it to it is hard and AirBnb does it. It shows up in all their actions.
When Trump passed the immigration bill, Brian tweeted about it and announced that Airbnb housing will be open to anybody who gets kicked out because of the change in law.
This is not just a gesture. He said it publicly. It’s coming from that strong belief that the world is one family. Discovering a brand purpose like this is important.