Everyone should know that your brand is of real value. Its value to your business can be measured and tracked. But did you know that your brand meaning is the root of all of your brand’s persuasive ability? It is, and if you don’t manage that ability, you are leaving money on the table no matter if you’re selling cupcakes or trust funds.
For just a moment, put the things you associate with your brand on the table. So take your logo, color palette, look and feel…and leave them all out of reach for this exercise. We will come back to them later. But for now, they are totally unimportant in our quest for clarity in persuasion.
The unpredictable nature of behavior
Have you ever walked down a road and noticed someone whose behavior seems just a little bit off? I’m not talking about bizarre behavior here, just some action or gate that seems a little out of place. Most of us stay clear of this individual. Our antenna is up, and we avoid contact with them.
You see, it is a normal human action to retreat ever so slightly from individuals whose behavior is hard for us to predict. That behavior, the one that seems a just a little bit off, is enough to initiate our innate flight response. It is not necessarily fear generating, although it can be. It is more a sense of being uncomfortable with the sum of the parts that you see.
The inability to fully predict future behaviors is uncomfortable and we avoid those encounters. This is certainly not a politically correct thing to say. But as a business decision maker, your world is all about dealing with what is as opposed to judging what should be. Great business owners are the ultimate pragmatists. We can leave moralistic judgments to the mediocre owners with whom you compete.
Your business as a personality. So what does this have to do with persuading new customers? Just about everything. Think about your brand as a personality. Your brand really does have personhood. It has attributes, emotions, values, preconceptions, and personality. I guest lecture at one of the universities here in North Carolina, and I encourage the Marketing and Design Department to cross-pollinate between curriculums. I encourage the Drama Department to share some of the tools used in method acting to help designers and marketers get under the skin of their target audience and develop a deep and real affinity for them.
Method acting seeks to understand not only the written words of a script, but also to understand and execute that dialogue as being true (and therefore predictable) to the motivations of the character. Only when these motivations are embraced can a performance by an actor be seen as truthful and believable to the audience. Only through a full appreciation of the character’s motivations and backstory is the actor is seen as real. Without these skills, the performer is seen as just acting. We don’t believe the character, and it diminishes our appreciation and identification with the play, performance, or film.
I’m sure you can see where I am going with this. Your brand is a character, and it needs to be both predictable and believable.
A different way to use your brand
Here is the rub and where most brands have gone astray. Your brand is not about your company, product, service, or corporate culture. While it is how you want the customer and prospect to identify you, you should ask it to be truly persuasive. It needs to be a highly polished reflection of your prospective customer. Customers don’t buy you. They buy a reinforcement of their own conception of self. If you want your brand to be persuasive, you must completely understand your target market in the same way method actors immerse themselves in the character.
You need to get out of your own way and believably represent the aspirations and motivations of your target audience. Is this the normal way businesses look at brand? Not at all. Look around you and think about how many of your competitors simply talk about themselves.
Look at your own brand. Can you honestly describe it as the personification of your prospect/customer, or is it simply a self-consumed and self-important exercise masquerading as your own identity? If this rings true, you must rethink your brand and make it important in stealing market share from your competitors.
The key to a share-stealing brand is found in permissions. Like the method actor in our example, based upon the motivational/emotional underpinnings, do your messages match up with the character of those you trying to reach? Are you claiming something that just does not seem completely believable? Would the character that your brand represents be comfortable uttering those words? Will the audience believe the story or see it as inauthentic and just acting?
You can claim all sorts of product or service benefits today. But I promise you, your competitors can claim the same benefits. In the eyes of the target audience, your competitors currently satisfy the need for your product/service in some way.
Getting it right
The common approaches just insult prospects by telling them that they are wrong. (“You’ve made the wrong choice. Choose better.”) This is a self-destructive way to affect and influence strangers. Your potential customers are strangers. You have no relationship with them; and if they covet a relationship, would you start by assaulting their current behaviors? People take things personally. Attack their actions and beliefs, and they think you are attacking them.
To make your brand important, you need to look at its development as akin to brand anthropology. It is a study of human behavior. It’s not enough to understand the needs and wants of your brand’s target. You need to understand the motivations for those needs. You need your brand to be predictable and real to those you must influence.
The solution to the task at hand is found in market research, not in your traditional usage and attitudinal study, focus group, or customer satisfaction survey. The right methodology lies in projectable, randomized, and double-blinded research. You need to ascertain the highest emotional intensity available to you. You need to ask the questions that the method actor asks of his character. Unless you do, your brand is not as persuasive as it should be, and your business is just acting.
