I Want to Be Different - Just like My Friends

“I want to be different - just like my friends.”

Marketers have to tread a fine line, balancing pursuit of competitive points of difference, with adherence to consistent tenets of best practice.

That unintended wisdom in the title, a quote from a teenager in a focus group, is used in “How Not To Plan” to illustrate that very search for balance that marketers face.

In the chapter 'Your Brand Is Not Like Other Brands' Les Binet and Sarah Carter refer to 'mine's different' syndrome. The belief that a brand’s market, audience, or circumstances are so distinct that the usual rules of advertising don’t apply.

Every marketing team wants to believe their brand is different. Their audience behaves in a unique way. Their market is an outlier. Their challenges are unlike anything seen before.

🟠 "Our audience is different."

🟠 "Our region is different."

🟠 "Our product is different."

While many brands aren’t markedly differentiated from their competitors, they have a great deal of opportunity to leverage their points of difference and communicate in distinctive ways.

You see it in the way a brand manifests. In the distinctive brand assets.

Tone of voice - Oatly. Rebellious, irreverent, humorous

Logo - Nike. The Swoosh.

Tagline - McDonalds. I’m lovin’ it

Colours - Tiffany blue

Packaging - The Coca-Cola bottle

Sounds - Netflix mnemonic

Brand characters - Kelloggs Frosties. Tony the Tiger

It also manifests in creative work. Campaigns that are artfully created to maintain a distinctive presence in their audience’s mind.

And yet, when it comes to how they behave in paid media, the pursuit of competitive advantage through positive difference is less actively pursued.

Rather than choosing distinctive, high-impact media strategies that amplify their creative work, there’s a pervasive pressure to pursue the familiar, the hyped, and the easy-to-measure.

To paraphrase Rory Sutherland, in media a large number of decisions are based on the fact that you feel safer doing something measurably mediocre than doing something immeasurably brilliant.

For example, there’s strong evidence that brands are over investing in social media and in generic digital display, and under investing in TV and video distribution.

These behaviours come from an understandable need to demonstrate judicious use of budget, to report results within time frames that fit quarterly reporting, to use partners that folks in adjacent departments have heard of.

And, much like that teenager in the focus group, brands that are seeking distinctiveness end up behaving in a way that makes them blend in.