2. Differentiating Your Brand in New & Existing Categories
- Harish Narayanan Ex-Chief Marketing Officer, Myntra
Step one to brand building is you have to establish salience. The question of brand salience is who am I? I am Cred. I’m a credit card bill payment app. Until this is established, do not talk about anything else.
First step is establishing who I am and how do you fit in your category.
There are two things you can do here. Either you can create a category or you can create a new brand in the existing category.
I like to think of it as that there are folders in all our mind. When we hear or see a new piece of communication, we search for a folder to put that information in. If there is no folder, we create a new one.
With Cred, you can try to create a new folder for credit card bill payment category and put Cred as a page. Or you can find an existing folder for payment apps and put Cred there.
In new brand building, you are basically trying to replace the first page in that folder with your page. If the folder doesn’t exist, it’s a category page.
Category creation is excellent because you get to occupy a larger space in the consumer's mind because it's new. But it is so much tougher.
I will tell you the story of when Pampers launched in India.
For the longest time people did not accept them because everyone used cloth diapers. Pampers was expensive and for the longest time, nobody wanted to buy single-use diapers for as high as Rs.30.
Category creation happened very very slowly. Pampers tried, Huggies tried, Mamy Poko pants tried. All of them came and went away. Nothing changed. After all that happened, Pamper sat on an idea and went back to the conception of Who and What.
Who is obviously the mother who’s worried about her child’s health. She buys it for the child’s health because of rashes and wetness.
The insight there was that the mother cares a lot about the child’s brain development. The second insight was that brains develop the most when the child is asleep.
The who and what of insight came crystallized to us. If you have a diaper that keeps your baby dry through the mind, your child's brain will develop better. When the category started talking about sleep and brain development, it suddenly became the category to watch out for. Every mother now wanted to buy Pampers.
The insight here creates a new folder. You put the information in the folder that pampers are equal to diapers, and diapers are equal to brain development.
For this to happen, they had to understand the who and the insight. No change happened till then.
The first stage of this brand building is saying who you are and how you fit into a category. Second stage is talking about your brand promise. This is how you differentiate against your competitors.
Don’t use emotion in early-stages of brand building. Use them only as a hook. It should not be the main thing that you’re known for.
Then later when your customers understand and remember who you are and remember your distinctive brand assets like your logo, your color and your jingle then you can think about build advanced stories and advertising.