I was recently listening to an episode of “The Hidden Brain” podcast called “Creatures of Habit” and it reminded me of just how powerful of a role that habits play in our lives. Depending on the habit, their impact can be either positive or negative. Regardless of their intent, we engage in habits to achieve some type of realized (or unrealized) goal. Some studies show that 40 percent of the activities we perform each day are habits.[1] One study shows that habits can range from 18 to 254 days to form, with a median of 66 days.[2] Habits take repetition. They take time. They take patience. Since they take so long to form, they can take even longer to break.
As consumers, many of our purchases are habitual. In low-effort consumer behavior, these decisions are straightforward, involve little risk, are purchased often which is why many low-effort purchases become habitual. Think about some low-effort products you buy from the grocery store. What determines the brand of toothpaste you buy? What about bread, or milk? For many of these purchases, you are likely to buy whatever is cheapest. That’s a consumer behavior habit based on a price heuristic and you’ve likely been developing that habit for longer than you realize. You probably inherited many of your purchasing habits from shopping with your parents.
Habits can occur in both high-effort and low-effort behaviors. Although breaking a habit can be incredibly difficult, good marketers understand how to break your heuristics and introduce new products.
The Habit Loop
All habits happen in a loop which consists of three main components: the routine, the cue, and the reward.[3] The routine is self-explanatory. It’s the ritual that you are engaged in, which you likely see as the habit itself. This could be something like grabbing a drink with friends after work or eating something unhealthy at the same time every day. The routine, however, starts with a cue.
The cue of the habit is essentially the piece that triggers the routine. For instance, if you have a habit of eating a sugary snack every day is the cue your stomach rumbling? Is it going into a long meeting? Is it just because you engage in this behavior at the same time every day? When the cue is triggered, the habit begins.
The reward of a habit is the satisfaction that you get from engaging in the habitual behavior. For a sugary snack, it could be that you get more energy, or it is more likely that you are getting a dopamine hit from the sugar intake. For a healthy habit, like running, it could be the “runner’s high”, or the reduction in stress.
How a Marketer Hacks the Habit Loop
Purchasing and consumption habits can be decades-old rituals. Most companies want you to purchase their products out of habit. The key is to get you into the habit loop. Forget the typical products you might think of as habitual, like alcohol and cigarettes, how about something that doesn’t seem as harmful, at least on the surface. Let’s pretend that you need to get a few household items, you don’t want to go to the store, and you need them soon. Where do you go. I bet you go straight to Amazon and you probably didn’t even consider a different retailer. Why? They’ve figured out the habit loop. Whenever you need something (cue), you go to your ritual (go to Amazon and find your product), and get your reward (your stuff quickly). That two-day or next day shipping is tough to beat and they’ve got just about everything. Your reward, in this scenario, is probably the time that you save by not comparison shopping a bunch of different websites.
Okay, great, companies spend a lot of time trying to get someone hooked, how does a marketer intervene? Well, you’ve got to hack the habit loop. What consumers are you targeting? What are their habits? If you know this information, the easiest way to hack the habit is to focus on the reward section of the habit loop. The most obvious example is like-kind products since this is by far the easiest to replace. Although habits are incredibly hard to break, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the reward is always the same product, it is likely the same type of product. For instance, the habit loop could involve you eating ice cream every night after dinner. What we know about low-effort consumer behavior is that regardless of the habit, humans are typically variety seeking. That’s why there’s an entire aisle full of different ice cream flavors. You can easily swap out the flavors and receive the same reward for your daily ice cream habit. The way a marketer tries to hack the loop in this scenario is by trying to get the addicted consumer to switch brands to their brand of ice cream. Good marketers know this and will try to prevent switching by offering many flavors under their brand to keep loyal customers from trying other brands.
More sophisticated marketers have a better understanding of the reward cycle. Take for instance a really old campaign. In 1990, Wrigley’s partnered with ad agency BBDO to try and boost gum sales. They understood the power of habits and zeroed in on one habit that was starting to have many restrictions across the country, smoking. As legislation banned cigarettes from offices, restaurants, and airplanes (yep, you used to be able to smoke on airplanes), Wrigley’s saw an opening in the market. They realized that part of the routine of smoking was a habitual oral fixation, so they took a gamble that if consumers replaced smoking with chewing gum in places where they couldn’t smoke, the consumer would get a similar reward. Their campaign was so successful for their spearmint line that they extended it to all of their flavors.[4] Wrigley’s wasn’t successful in competing with other gum brands, they were successful by completely reimagining the habit loop and taking on a completely, seemingly unrelated product.
I’m Stuck in a Loop, What Can I Do to Break it?
Okay, that’s great. Marketers are manipulating my purchasing behaviors. How does that help me from stopping a habit I want to break? In “The Power of Habit”, Charles Duhigg explains that the biggest difficulty in changing habits is that every person is different, so there are infinite ways to actually change habits. An added challenge is that all habits are different. Quitting drinking is different than exercising, which is different than grabbing a mid-morning snack. He goes on to describe that each person will need to experiment with all of the components that make up a habit. All habits happen in a loop that includes a cue, a routine, and a reward. The framework to change a habit is to “identify the routine, experiment with rewards, isolate the cue, have a plan”.[5]
The easiest part of recognizing a habit is likely identifying the routine. It’s the compulsive behavior that you want to break. In the earlier example, its eating ice cream every day. The routine is really tough to break, and depending on your situation, the actual routine may be impossible for you to break. Never fear though, as stated earlier, a habit involves three parts, and you can experiment with the other two.
Although the routine is tough to break, you could try to determine the cue that drives the routine. If you are able to eliminate the cue, you could eliminate the routine. To figure out the cue portion of the habit loop, Charles Duhigg recommends that the moment the urge hits, write down the time, location, emotions, other people around, and the immediately preceding action.
The rewards portion of the habit loop could be really difficult to determine, and Duhigg recommends experimenting for several days, or possibly weeks to help identify the reward. In my ice cream example, is it the ice cream that is the reward? Is it the dopamine hit from the sugar? Is it the cold feeling after a hot meal? Duhigg recommends experimenting with other types of rewards. In this case, maybe you could try a cold seltzer water, or a bowl of popcorn. He recommends writing down what you are feeling as you experiment and waiting several minutes after the experiment is over to see if you still have your craving.
Final Thoughts
As humans, we run our lives on habits. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Our lives would actually be pretty terrible if we had to make conscious decisions about each item we put in our cart every time we went to the grocery store. These shortcuts can save us time, and make our lives easier. However, they can also make our lives miserable. Marketers are always looking for ways to hack into a habit loop. While this can be done pretty easily by focusing on replacement products, truly remarkable marketers have a profound understanding of how the brain works. Marketing is not just an art, it’s also psychology. If you take the time to understand consumer behavior, you can gain a clearer understanding of how to stay in front of the competition.
Your brand is not your logo. It’s not your color palette and it’s not your fonts. Those are visual identities. They are part of your brand. These visual identities help communicate your brand and help distinguish your brand among all of the other logos and visual identities, but they’re not your brand. Obviously, you need to do the basic blocking and tackling of making sure your visual identity and name are consistent throughout your business and that people know who you are and what you do. However, there’s much more to it.
Your brand is your promise to your customers and your employees, and although your visual identity contributes to the recognition of that promise, it goes much deeper than that. I’m guessing that you already know this, but this post is dedicated to the things that make up your brand, the people.
You’re Not Completely in Control
Yep, unfortunately, this is a sad reality. When you are in business, you’re not totally in control of your brand. You can take steps to manage the direction and perception of your brand, but you are not completely in control because your brand is only as strong as how your customers and potential customers perceive your brand. You can obviously cover some of the basics, like making sure your products don’t break and your service doesn’t suck, but depending on the size of your company and the steps you need to take to evolve a negative brand perception, this could be easier said than done. So, what can you do? Although you probably dread the subject, the next part of this post is partially about the good old mission, vision, and values. Okay, I know I probably made you groan and maybe I totally lost you, but don’t stop now, you already sunk a few minutes to get to this point. I hope to bring a real-world approach on how to integrate these items to help drive your brand and not just be something that gets created behind closed doors and hangs on the wall somewhere in the office.
Your Internal Customers
Your brand begins and ends with your employees (more on this later). They are the number one asset to your organization. A great organization has Rockstar employees that feel empowered. They feel proud to be part of a company that is treating them right and letting them make decisions. When reviewing your brand, make sure that your employees understand your company mission, vision, and values. Also, it is critical that your employees share your corporate values. If not, your employees are not aligned with your company’s foundation.
Developing Your Values
Whether you are a startup or a well-established company, developing or refreshing your company values is essential to maintaining your current employees and making the right hires. Values are an excellent way to communicate the fundamental ideas to empower your employees to make decisions. Without an empowered workforce, there are always people that serve as bottlenecks to making decisions. This typically leads to overall employee frustration, lost opportunity cost, and a decrease in productivity. Instead, an empowered workforce that is encouraged to make decisions based on your corporate values can exponentially increase your productivity and innovation.
For instance, if your values include a relentless pursuit of the best customer service, given the right structure and autonomy, an empowered employee can take several steps to handle customer issues when they arise before taking the issue to the manager. A value like this can also help define the direction of your company by placing a higher emphasis on employee training for items like how to deal with difficult customers, how to manage tough situations, and how to create customer-centric solutions.
What’s Your Vision?
Do you really know where you want your company to go? Who you want to be? What you strive to achieve in the future? If not, your brand value can and will continue to erode. In business, you evolve or die, and having a well-defined vision is critical to driving your company forward. Do you strive to be innovative? Want to diversify? Deep down, do you really want to completely change the way that your company operates? Having a vision for your brand is kind of like setting a stretch goal for your business. The same thought process that applies to personal goal setting applies to your business. However, think of this as a stretch goal.
While a normal goal will be slightly unattainable and may only require you to stretch yourself only a little, a stretch goal makes you push for amazing things. Oftentimes, stretch goals will require you to completely reimagine what you are doing. If running a 5K is a goal, running a marathon is a stretch goal. If taking an online course is a goal, getting an MBA is a stretch goal. So how could you apply it to your business?
Let’s say for instance your goal is to launch a new product in the next year. Your stretch goal could be to become the leading product in the category. These are two completely different goals. One requires you to check all of your normal boxes for a product launch. The other requires you to completely take over the category. You’ve got to lead in features, pricing, packaging, promotion, industry relationships, advertising, well…everything. A stretch goal can make you a little crazy, but it typically takes this type of thinking to do anything amazing.
From an overall business standpoint, where does this put your vision? Well, does it make you a little uncomfortable? Is it something that everyone can believe in? Is it measurable? If so, you’re on the path to setting a stretch goal.
Mission Statement
Aah yes, the dreaded mission statement. You’ve probably agonized over this in school. Maybe you’ve messed with it in a meeting. Maybe you’ve never been part of this conversation and you’ve just been told what it is or sat in a meeting where it was explained. Maybe you don’t know it at all. Regardless, your mission should actually mean something and not be something that you dread. Think of your own personal mission in life. What do you want to do in this life? Is it to leave the world a better place? Is it to teach your children your values? Is it to be a Rockstar? Maybe to be a doctor? Regardless, you should have something inside of you that drives you to achieve these goals; something that pushes you to be better every day. This is what your mission statement should convey.
Customer Service
For nearly a decade, I’ve been an advocate for the idea that your customer service personnel should be run by your sales and marketing departments. Regardless of what your business does, there will likely be a person, departments of people, or entire buildings full of people whose job is to attend to customer issues. This is the perfect time to perfect your brand.
Without fail, high-effort consumer behavior follows a five-step process. If you haven’t read anything I’ve written on high-effort consumer behavior, the way consumers process high-effort behavior is through what’s called central-route processing. This is just a fancy way of saying that you have to really think deeply about a decision. This is opposed to low-effort consumer behavior, which uses peripheral route processing; this basically means a consumer doesn’t think much about their purchase. The five steps involved in high-effort consumer behavior are:
Problem recognition
Information search
Consideration set
Purchase
Post-purchase
This last and final step of post-purchase is where so many organizations don’t focus enough energy on improving their brand. This is not just an opportunity to make customers happy, but it’s an opportunity to make longer-term incremental sales. For high-effort behavior, many companies have the opportunity to solidify their brand when there is something wrong. As a company, you are always going to have things go wrong. Something is going to break. As humans, we get it, not all products are perfect. However, with high-effort behavior, each step is as important as every other step. If a company exceeds expectations after a product is purchased, it is likely going to lead to more purchases in the future. This can also lead to the most powerful marketing available, positive word-of-mouth marketing, or personal recommendations.
However, forget the furthering the brand conversation for a minute, this is also an opportunity to sell. You have customers calling you, and regardless of if they are having a good experience or a bad experience, they are calling you and no outreach is really necessary. Are you using this opportunity to let them know about something new that you are launching? Obviously, you have to be tactful about this and train your customer service people on how to read the room. You can’t have somebody try to sell anything to someone that is pissed off about something that impacts your brand. However, if you solved their problem, what better way to make a sale than to simply mention something that could turn into another sale? Credit card companies have this figured out. If you ever have an issue where you need to talk to someone, they will almost always try to sell you on their rewards card. However, you don’t have to take it to that annoying level. You could simply just ask for permission to email them some information on a new product that you are launching.
Let’s take this customer service reps as salespeople thing to a whole new level. How about keeping logs in your CRM for customers that you’ve helped? You can use this CRM to track outbound communication from the customer service team to proactively pitch new products. You could simply filter your customers by satisfied or unsatisfied. For the satisfied customers, your customer service team could send an email saying something like Hey (customer’s name), my name is (customer service rep name) and I helped you with (insert issue-from a category list) back in (insert month). We’re launching a new product that solves (insert problem here) and we have special introductory pricing through the end of the month. Would you like to find out more? With variable data and smart content, you could easily do this pretty much exactly like I just listed. Smart content would fill everything you had from a spreadsheet and voila, you’ve got a marketing and sales email sent directly from the customer service team.
However, in many companies, it doesn’t work this way. This primarily happens because most companies operate in silos. The marketing group is focused on data and advertising. The sales group is focused on net new conversions or increasing market share. The customer service team is focused on retention. The operations staff is focused on efficiencies. Instead, by removing the silos and thinking through the entire high-effort consumer behavior process, you can create a better and more efficient way of making sure you’ve covered every part of the process.
Your Brand is Your Attitude
Let’s put your company aside and talk about your personal brand. You will, more than likely, have a career and a personal brand that lasts much longer than your relationship with your current company. Your personal brand is made up of mostly your attitude. Sure, it’s other things like your talent, your education, and how your brain works. However, all of these things can come crumbling down if you are steered by the wrong attitude. Your attitude is what drives your success. If you are always looking for ways that something is going to fail or isn’t possible, you are going to stifle yourself and your career. You’re going to be a person that is miserable to be around, and this is going to likely translate to your personal life. Having an attitude that holds other people back is also holding you back. It’s making you depressed and it doesn’t have to be this way.
However, if you have a welcoming attitude that is open to new ideas, inclusion, and always striving to be the best, you will achieve greater success and probably have some fun along the way. People don’t just want to work with smart people. People want to work with and work for, others that are fun to be around. We want to work with people that can cheer us up when we are having a bad day. We want to work with someone who loves jumping in and solving problems. We want to align ourselves with someone that presents ideas that are just crazy enough to work.
In some cases, you likely spend more time with some of the people that you work with than you do with your family. I agree, this seems a little crazy, but it’s just kind of how the world works. Just like a spouse would rather be around someone that has a good attitude, so do your coworkers and you should want this out of the people that you work with too. You are a team and the team is greater than the individual team members. Every day, you have the opportunity to choose your attitude, and every day, you are building your personal brand with your colleagues, customers, and vendors.
How Your Personal Brand Coincides with Your Company’s Brand
So what is your company’s brand? Well…it’s you. It’s your friend that works in sales. It’s your neighbor that works in the shipping department. It’s your cousin’s wife that works in the accounting department. It’s people. Your company’s brand is the collection of all of these people choosing their attitude and representing the company. Your company relies on you and every one of the people that it employs to represent them in a certain way. This is where brand and culture training is critical. You should know your company values. As stated earlier, these are the basic fundamental building blocks of how your company expects you to represent them. If you are working for the right company, your values should be aligned. If not, well…you should probably be working somewhere else.
If your values are in alignment, any growth to your personal brand will likely benefit your company as well. Whether it be getting an education, volunteering, or posting educational articles on LinkedIn called “Your Brand is Not Your Logo” to try and help other people, the growth of your personal brand will have incremental growth on your company’s brand. Just imagine if everyone in the company had the drive to grow their personal brand. What if everyone in the company tried to better themselves? What if everyone tried to have fun? What if everyone had a positive attitude? Well…then you’d have one amazing brand.
Wrapping Up
So your brand is not your logo. It’s not any component of what makes your company’s visual identity. It’s something that you can’t completely control. Your brand is your product or service, but it’s not your product or service. It is your product or service because the thing you have to sell is a major customer touchpoint. However, it isn’t your product or service because, in some respects, those are just representations of what your company represents. They’re just a part of what your brand was, is, and will be.
What’s behind all of this and what makes your brand possible is the people. Your brand is the people that work for the company, regardless if it involves tens of thousands of people or a sole proprietor. These companies aren’t run by robots (yet), they’re run by people. These people have hopes and dreams. They have families. They have hobbies. They’re just like you. Some employees might not have the education that someone else does. They might not have the technical knowledge that others have. They might not have the title or salary that someone else has. What everyone does have, however, is the ability to be kind. We have the ability to tell a dad joke. We have the ability to help someone that is in need. If your brand is your people, make sure that you are attracting, retaining, and cultivating a workplace that is inclusive, open to new ideas, and just fun to be around. If you can do this, you’ve figured out the secret to how to create a strong brand.
This is an article about addiction. It’s a new kind of addiction. One that isn’t as taboo as substance abuse. It’s not one that you would go to a treatment center for. It’s not one that you’d see on Intervention, but make no mistake, advertisers want to make you addicted and keep you addicted. It’s also an article about economics. The currency is your time and attention. This is an article about something I am calling mind share, which is the amount of attention and time that you pay to something.
From an economic standpoint, the same principle applies to your attention that applies to your dollars. Economics is based on scarcity. Value is simply the equilibrium of the supply available and the quantity demanded. However, whereas you could always make more money, you will never be able to take back your time. Unfortunately, we already live in the Black Mirror future where advertisers know how much you are worth to them based on how much you engage with their brand and this attention can be quantified with a dollar amount.
The old-school way of quantifying attention is called CPM, which basically means cost per 1,000 impressions (using the Latin reference of M=1,000). While an advertiser is much better served with a CPC or cost-per-click type of model, a lot of advertising platforms still use the CPM metric as it takes less of the burden off of the advertising medium. However, there are so many other ways of measuring your attention. It’s not just impressions, those are cheap. Engagement is worth so much more than impressions. As an advertiser, I really don’t care too much about how many people see my ad, although that’s nice. I care if someone is actually doing something with what they see. While impressions are a passive medium, engagement is active and engagement=mind share. So why is engagement so valuable? Well, your engagement, your…addiction, is worth a ton of money.
They Call Your Addiction “Average Revenue Per User” (ARPU)
Facebook and other social media companies make money from your engagement. They do this by advertising to you. They make money off of your clicks and you only click if you are engaged. So they created the cute term “average revenue per user”, or ARPU. I’m guessing they made an acronym so they didn’t have to think about it as much. They didn’t have to think of the things that you’d have to do to increase that number. They didn’t think of how manipulating the platform would impact someone’s mental health, but I digress…
The more ways you can become engaged, the more likely you are to click. Interested in a robot vacuum? Maybe you join a social media group dedicated to different types of robot vacuums. This keeps you on the site. It keeps you engaged with the community. From an advertising perspective, it puts you into a potential target bucket of people likely to purchase a robot vacuum soon, and increases your likelihood to click on an ad that is targeted to you. The more you do this inside the platform, the more valuable you are to them. The more you do this outside of the platform, the less valuable you are.
In November, Facebook reported a $7.26 quarterly ARPU. To put this into perspective, Snapchat’s ARPU was $2.12, Pinterest was at $0.90, and Twitter was estimated at $5.68.[1] So Facebook makes about $30 per year off of you. Although it doesn’t seem like much, take that $30 multiplied by 2.7 billion monthly active users and you get one of the largest brands in the world built off of getting and keeping your attention. If this quarterly ARPU drops just by a dollar, that’s an annual loss of 10 billion dollars, which is far more than most companies make annually. That’s more than the GDP of 49 distinct countries.
In addition to the actual revenue produced per user, you also have to consider the opportunity cost. If you’re not familiar with the concept of opportunity cost, it’s basically the loss of potential gain from doing something else. One economist found that adult Americans engaged with ad-laden content 58% more than they worked in 2019. He also found the amount we consumed this content equaled $7 trillion in opportunity cost[2], or over $33,000 per American adult. So if you were making money instead of scrolling social media, you could be up $30K, but I get it. Part of being on social media is like bubble gum for your brain. For some people, it fulfills something missing like seeing photos of their grandkids or keeping up with their friends. For others, this race for mind share can lead to addiction.
Is Facebook addictive? Good question. Many social media sites use certain tactics that can keep users on the platform and keep them coming back. The most obvious and possibly the most infamous tactic is infinite scroll. The creator, Aza Raskin, now advocates for social media to change their practices has been cited as saying:
“It’s as if they’re taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface. And that’s the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back.”[3]
Many social media websites also use a “pull to refresh” feature, which has the ability to give reinforcements intermittently, much like a slot machine.[4] There are also opportunities for dopamine hits such as other users liking your content and continually engaging in a (probably angry political) ongoing conversation. Our brains crave dopamine. If your brain starts to think that you will get all the dopamine it needs from Facebook, maybe you’ll spend more time on Facebook. There are also push notifications and constant emails giving you updates to keep you from fear of missing out (FOMO). All of these items, again, are to increase your mind share. They’re there to keep you there and keep you coming back.
I can also point out that is there has been a psychological scale since April of 2012, called the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale. This helped to link psychological problems with the use of Facebook.[5] I can also point out a 2018 study of Portuguese emerging adults (adolescents) that found their most addicted participants used Facebook an average of over three hours per day. These participants showed an increase in depression, anxiety, and interpersonal sensitivity.[6]
Time Distortion
Social media distorts our perception of time. One study found that both low and at-risk social media addiction groups actually had an upward trend of perceived time after abstaining from Facebook for a week[7]. This basically means that they thought time was taking longer than it actually was.
Remember when Netflix made you actually click on something before it would play? That was nice. Well, there was a long period of time where autoplay was the only way that the platform worked. You couldn’t even browse the selection without everything that you pass by starting to autoplay. When you were done with a show, you didn’t have to do anything. The next show would come up and play, skipping the intro before you can even get a chance to decide if you want to continue watching. Why did they do this? Mind share, that’s why.
I personally think this feature sucks, and apparently, a ton of other people did too which is why you can now turn that feature off. Honestly, I stopped logging into Netflix because autoplay was really annoying and I didn’t even know you could turn off the feature until I started researching the Netflix section of this article, about…10 sentences ago. But yeah, they now made it an option[8] which is pretty amazing. However, you have to do this through a browser. Who watches Netflix on a browser? Weirdos, that’s who. Netflix knows you don’t watch on a browser (unless you’re a serial killer), so they allow you to turn off the feature, but they don’t make it easy.
But let’s get into the mind share for Netflix. Should they really care about mind share? Absolutely, but the reason they care about mind share is much different than the reasons social media sites care about mind share. Netflix needs you to keep coming back so you don’t drop their service. Once you are a customer, the purpose of Netflix’s mind share strategy is to keep you a customer. As customers evaluate their monthly expenses, Netflix has a goal of moving toward a need, rather than a want. How can they get customers to feel an urge so strong that they don’t even consider dropping their service? Creating a greater market share of the customer’s mind, that’s how. They do a great job of creating content that customers cannot live without. Shows like “Orange Is the New Black”, “Stranger Things”, and “Mindhunter” are shows that you cannot get ANYWHERE else so customers feel the need to keep their subscription active.
In addition to current customers, Netflix has had an amazing ability to attract new customers with this same strategy. With the publicity they receive from their regular shows, they’ve been able to continually pique curiosity to attract new subscribers. With their limited run documentaries, however, they’ve found a way to dominate the mind share of both traditional and social media. Shows like “Tiger King” and “Making a Murderer” have been limited-run smash hits. If they can get someone to try to log on to see one of those shows, their goal should be how they could create mind share with a subscriber while they are there. That’s why their algorithms are targeted to feed you content they think you will like. They even show different preview images for the same show to different audiences, based on your customer profile. You’ve got to admit, this is slightly creepy.
One term that is commonly associated with Netflix and other streaming services is binge-watching. Binge-watching could impact your mental health. Seriously, have you ever heard the word “binge” referred to as anything that would have a positive impact on your mental health? One study from the University of Toledo showed that binge-watching increased anxiety, depression, and stress.[9] So what does your brain get out of binge-watching? Well, it’s back to good old dopamine. When you get sucked into a story for a show you are watching, your brain gets a dopamine hit. Since your brain likes dopamine, it will typically crave any source that is known and available.
Your data, everything electronic that can be scraped and known about you, every website you visit, every button you click in an email, every time you swipe on an app that is “swipe tracing”, all of this is being collected and categorized. You probably have a Gmail account. You probably use Google Chrome. Guess why Google is so powerful. Data. You willingly tell them what websites you visit. You trust them with your email. That’s fine, I do too. What do you think they do with that data? Well, create more mind share, that’s what. They try to sell your data to advertisers and keep you on the platform so they can keep selling even more of your mind share back to advertisers. It’s really an endless loop.
You are being targeted not only by your demographics but from your psychographics as well. This includes your attitudes, opinions, values, and your interests. Why? Well, combined with your past behavior, psychographics can be great predictors of future purchasing behavior. They can also give some insight to an advertiser where you might be in the buyer’s journey so they can target you effectively. Ironically, the retail store Target is great at this. You may recall the story from the New York Times in 2012 of a father complaining to a manager at a Target store that his high-school-aged daughter was receiving coupons for maternity clothes from Target. Well, turns out she was pregnant, and Target was able to predict this before her father knew. This was done with a combination of buyer behaviors including unscented lotions, cotton balls, and other supplements which constructed Target’s “pregnancy prediction score”.[10] While I question the validity of the anecdote given in the story, the data analysis is likely pretty accurate.
So why is this important? What should Target try to do with this data? Well, it is obviously great information in trying to make an immediate sale, but from a long-term perspective, it’s better to create mind share. Being relevant to a customer helps increase build a relationship with that customer for the future. In this instance, a woman who is shopping at Target throughout her pregnancy is likely to continue that customer journey well into the early years of the child’s life and beyond. In this case, mind share=wallet share.
I can tell you from first-hand experience, the mind share Target creates around maternity and the early childhood years is strong. Their store brand of essentials for babies like wipes and diapers are much cheaper and in my opinion, much higher quality than national brands. Their baby section is easy to navigate. They have just enough choices to give you options, but few enough that you don’t feel too overwhelmed, especially as a new parent. The prices on their higher-end items like baby furniture and strollers are right in line with what you would find if you shopped for competitive products online. I’m not sure if Target has their baby items priced as loss-leaders, but their strategy of focusing on maternity and baby items certainly has led to a greater mind share for me, which has translated into a sickeningly high level of wallet share.
The thing that is interesting to me is I know they are doing this. I know that they are trying to create a relationship with me (and my family) as a customer. I know they are trying to establish long-term brand loyalty by creating mind share. I know they’re probably manipulating me and walking me through a buyer’s journey that they have defined, but I still fall into the trap. Why? Well, probably because it’s easier. Like just about everyone on the planet, my brain is a cognitive miser, which essentially means it likes to take the path of least resistance. In a situation where I have a lot of baby stuff to buy, or even just grab something and go, am I looking for a perfect solution? Probably not. I’m looking for a solution that is good enough. If it means that the pricing is similar to what I can find somewhere else and I don’t have to go to Walmart, I’m in.
A micro-influencer is someone that has a niche following. They don’t have a mass following like Taylor Swift, but they have a very dedicated and loyal following for some particular type of follower. For instance, I listen to a podcast called “The Ultra Runner Podcast”. It has a really niche following for crazy people that like to run distances longer than a marathon. This could be 50K, 50 miles, 100 miles, all sorts of insane distances. There aren’t many people that are interested in this type of behavior, let alone, people that like to do this and listen to the show. I would guess they have somewhere around 10,000 active listeners.
The show has been around for around a decade and has had the best athletes in the niche appear to tell their stories. The loyal following of this podcast would be an excellent opportunity to try and advertise something that people that run that much would need, namely shoes. Who is going to go through shoes faster than someone that puts 100+ miles every week on a pair of shoes? Micro-influencers have already created the mind share. They already have an audience. Their fans are loyal. A brand will pay more per potential customer for that level of loyalty than for a much less engaged and targeted audience. Someone with a wider appeal doesn’t have nearly the mind share as a micro influencer’s audience. The reason you’ve heard the term micro-influencer gaining so much popularity in the past few years? They know how to create mind share, and advertisers want to harvest that connection.
Account-Based Marketing ABM
Possibly the biggest trend in marketing right now is called Account-Based Marketing (ABM). ABM is essentially a diversion from mass-marketing techniques to a more strategic, segmented approach. The basic idea is that your company identifies key accounts within your organization to try to enhance your relationship. This is done with a behavioral-based approach. Generally speaking, it is a fancy lead nurturing system that is based on content. This content could be articles or white papers, videos, or even an audio podcast. Once a potential customer enters the marketing ecosystem (generally your website), AI and some other fancy tools track the person’s engagement with different content on your website. Based on their behavior, they receive the next piece of content, which is a little more relevant, and possibly a little more value for the customer. Based on their behavior, the AI tries to predict someone’s next action. This funnel continues to narrow until there is some type of action, whether it be a lead form filled out, a call to a sales rep, or some other deemed action by the sales team. Some of these software packages are around $25,000 per year or more. What are all of these software platforms trying to do? You guessed it, create mind share. The longer and more items you interact with, the more likely you will be to become a customer.
Wrapping Up
I opened this by saying that mind share is the currency of the future, but the more I wrote, the more I realized that the future is now. And it’s not even the future. This has been happening for hundreds, if not thousands of years. If your customers are not thinking about you, regardless of how fancy your marketing tech stack might be, or how smart your analytics team members are, if you don’t occupy a space in your customer’s brain, you’re sunk. Amazing brands know this and are continually evolving their brand for the ever-changing needs of their customers. Customer needs are not static. There are likely many brands in your niche vying for your customers. They’re trying to figure out how to convert your customer into being their customer. Many companies will stop here. They’ll try to get a customer in the door and make the sale. When you design your strategy, however, realize that the secret to keeping and maintaining your customer relationships is a longer-term approach. The secret that the world’s greatest brands truly understand comes down to two words: mind share.
[6] da Veiga, G.F., Sotero, L., Pontes, H.M. et al. Emerging Adults and Facebook Use: the Validation of the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale (BFAS). Int J Ment Health Addiction17, 279–294 (2019). https://doi-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1007/s11469-018-0018-2
[7] Turel, O., R. Cavagnaro, D. Effect of Abstinence from Social Media on Time Perception: Differences between Low- and At-Risk for Social Media “Addiction” Groups. Psychiatr Q90, 217–227 (2019). https://doi-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1007/s11126-018-9614-3
[8] Mishra, M. (2020). Netflix finally turns off autoplay. B & T Weekly, Retrieved from
Think of a brand that you hate. A brand that every time you think about it, you have a visceral reaction. You wish you could exist in a world where that brand does not exist. The Real Housewives perhaps? Maybe the Kardashians? Maybe you hate the entire Bravo TV or E networks? How about Microsoft, or Apple? Ford or Chevy? Peloton? How about the New England Patriots? If you really start to think about brands, I’m guessing that you could come up with more brands that you really hate than brands that you love.
A strong brand attracts a lot of haters. Why? Because it stands for something. Many brands get so concerned catering to everyone’s thoughts, emotions, and concerns that their brand becomes a boring, watered-down brand that doesn’t really mean anything to anyone. Kmart is a great example. While other department stores seemed to find a niche (Walmart for low prices, Target for trendy retail), Kmart has been in a tailspin for years. At the time of this writing, there are only 34 stores left in the US. Kmart was never really a leader, they were a follower.
Kmart never really found an identity. They had some stores that were named Kmart, some that were named Super Kmart Center, some that were named Big K, some that were named Super K, and that was all just in the early 2000s. They’ve been in a decline for over 20 years and it’s partially because they could never find their identity. Do you hate Kmart? Did you ever hate Kmart? The only thing I ever remember about it is that it kind of smelled like mothballs. Other than that, I never really cared much about Kmart. I’m guessing that most people never really cared either.
In my opinion, a similar thing happened to GM’s portfolio 30+ years ago. GM has what’s called a “house of brands” strategy. This basically means that the parent company has many different brand names under the umbrella brand. GM has Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC. Among others, they also used to have Pontiac and Oldsmobile. The original plan that existed in the ’60s for this house of brands included a really smart segmentation strategy that positioned their brands perfectly for their target audience. The Pontiac brand was exciting they had the slogan “We Build Excitement”. They built the GTO and the Trans Am. The Cadillac brand was strictly top-of-the-line luxury vehicles.
The bigger GM grew, the more they tried to create economies of scale. Basically, how could they do things more efficiently? GM started platforming their vehicles. They took the same chassis, and even the same or very similar body styles and tried to market them to different audiences. One common combination they introduced is what is known as the G-body. G-body cars included the Buick Regal, Chevy Monte Carlo, Pontiac Grand Prix, Chevy Malibu, Pontiac Bonneville, and a few others.
While this line of cars was incredibly successful, and in my opinion, created some of the most memorable American cars ever built, the prevailing idea of platforming started to create brand dilution for the GM brand. As the ’90s came around and SUV’s and minivans changed the vehicle landscape, GM didn’t properly maintain a strong segmentation strategy. Most of their brands had a minivan. Every brand had an SUV. Every brand had a luxury vehicle, a sports car, a cheap compact. Their brands had had something for everybody, and they didn’t really stand for anything.
So you probably didn’t hate Kmart or GM, but how about something like “The Real Housewives”? I’m guessing if you don’t hate this franchise, you know someone who does. If you’re not familiar with the show, first off, congratulations, and second, even eight years ago, it was a half a billion-dollar franchise.[1] It’s a show that, well, let’s just say that it’s pretty much about rich women getting drunk and fighting. This is why people hate the brand. This is also a big reason why people love the brand. There’s a percentage of viewers that tune in just to hate-watch, which is this weird phenomenon where people watch shows just to talk about how much they hate it. This term is so prevalent in society that it’s on dictionary.com. This brand is so powerful that people watch it just to hate it and by doing this, it increases ratings and ad revenue. This only fuels the brand’s success. If people didn’t care so much, it wouldn’t be such a strong brand. If people didn’t hate the brand as much as they do, it wouldn’t be worth a Billion dollars.
It’s Not For You
For this discussion, I want to make clear that I’m suggesting building a brand that people hate which is different than a brand that fails, like a product that breaks easily or a brand that has poor customer service. It’s easy to hate a brand that doesn’t perform to expectations, and a brand that is hated for this reason will ultimately fail. The type of “brand hate” I’m describing is essentially hating a brand that is not for you. The reason you don’t like it is that it’s aimed at a different target audience. Their message is intended for someone else. If you find yourself hating a brand, chances are that a ton of people love that brand. You don’t have to like it. The creators of the brand were able to build something that really connected with a particular group of people. These brands probably don’t impact your daily life, so if you really want to show your dislike for a brand, just forget about it. It’s really no big deal, some people love a brand you hate, and our strange differences are what makes us amazing.
Building a brand so strong that people hate it involves “niching down” to a point where it connects so well with one or two target audiences that anyone outside of those groups doesn’t get it. In these instances, you build a connection so strong that the in-group becomes so rabid about the brand that the out-group is upset that they don’t understand. Slogans like “It’s a Jeep Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand”, and “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas” come to mind. The creators of Billy Bass seemed to have nailed this concept when they identified the novelty Christmas gift segment, likely for males that were even loosely into fishing when they created a product that seemed to have the fastest trajectory from funny to annoying of any product that has ever been created.
People Hates Crocs
Crocs is a brand that people seem to love to hate. There are videos of people burning Crocs, people cutting up Crocs with Scissors, at one point, there was an IHateCrocs.com. Yep, people hate the brand so much that they buy the product just to destroy it. They spend money and time buying domains and producing content just to protest the brand. Just Google “people hate crocs” and you’ll see how people spend their time hating a brand. As I described earlier, this likely only fuels the brand’s success.
Do you know who loves everyone’s hate for Crocs? Crocs, that’s who. After selling 700 million shoes, they’ve built a brand off of being one of the most distinctive shoes of a generation. At the height of their popularity, they had tons of standalone retail stores, a massive distribution network and so many products that veered out of what they were known for: those weird-looking clogs. They started trying to be everything to everyone and like just about every company that tries to do this, they failed. But they didn’t let a little brand dilution get in their way, the refocused and made a comeback.
Crocs had a resurgence with a fashion trend called “ugly fashion”. Ugly fashion is not just a clever name, it’s, well…it kind of reminds me of “Saved by the Bell”. Mismatched clothes, plaid suit jackets, loud colors, oversized shirts, ugly fashion, and Crocs were a perfect match. The company saw this trend, realized their failure of trying to go mainstream and doubled down on their clogs. Now you can get all sorts of crazy Crocs. You can get Goth Crocs, KFC Crocs, bacon and egg Crocs, donut Crocs, you can even get Grateful Dead Crocs.
About Nickelback
I’d be remiss if I spent the time to write an article about brands that people hate without touching on Nickelback. Nickelback hate is real. They’re possibly the most hated band on the planet. Why? Well, I don’t really know. Let me be clear, I don’t like Nickelback. I think they suck, but I think there are objectively worse bands on this planet. I’ve also heard first-hand accounts from people that say they were really good to their fans when they met them in person. So why all of the hate? I’d like to think that I know, but there are people waaaaaaaayyyyy smarter than me that have tried to figure this out. Some explanations include that they lack any type of authenticity, they don’t really stand for anything, they are only trying for commercial appeal, etc.
These explanations sound to me like a band that is trying to be everything to everyone. As I explained, this is typically a bad strategy as it lacks brand direction. But as I also explained, a strong brand is a brand that some people hate. What if a TON of people hate the brand? Well, maybe that’s what we’re seeing with Nickelback. Are people “hate listening” to Nickelback? Is there a Nickelback “silent majority”? I’m guessing that 50 million record sales into their career, Nickelback is okay with people hating their band. If you build a strong brand, you should be okay with all of your haters too. If you hate Nickelback, it’s okay, they’re not for you. Your hate is just fueling their success. You could just forget about them.
So, How Does This Work?
To build a brand so strong that you have haters outside of your target audience, you need to build an amazing brand. So how do you do this? Well, unfortunately, there’s no one formula or process that you can follow that will immediately create a strong brand. Anyone that tells you any different is either lying to you, trying to sell you a book, or more commonly, both. Anymore, they’re more likely to be trying to sell you an online course on how you can create a strong brand for the low, low price of only $199 and if you act today, they’ll throw in a side of snake oil. There are so many shifting factors to consider like economics, changes in consumer behavior, other entrants to the market, and competitive pricing pressures.
Good brands don’t exist in a lab. They’re living and constantly evolving in the real world. There are, however, a few best practices that we know help.
Know Thyself
Although it sounds really basic, many brands struggle with an identity crisis (see GM or Kmart examples referenced earlier).
Some of the most common traps that I typically see are:
Trying to be who they want to be instead of who they are
Trying to be their competitors
Knowing what you do well is critical and positing those brand differentiators is key. If you’re not doing that, your message is NEVER going to connect. Think of this extreme example. If a brand like KFC discovered that all of their competitors were becoming really successful with selling salads they might want to get into the salad game. Even starting to sell salads seems a little strange for a brand that is known for fried chicken, biscuits, and mashed potatoes. However, if they REALLY wanted salad market share and started neglecting their core business to focus on salads, they would struggle. They’d be facing an identity crisis, which many brands struggle with daily.
Most brands just don’t completely change direction like in the KFC example, it happens more gradually. This often happens when a company continually introduces new product lines without the proper support. With economies of scale approach, most administrative staff would typically handle both new and existing initiatives. When this is done without bringing in the proper additional support personnel, existing product lines can get diluted, new product launches don’t get the proper attention, and a company can lose sight of its foundation. In many cases, this takes years and the support erodes so slowly that the team that is managing the product or products don’t even realize the impact until it is too late. As I pointed out earlier, it happened to GM, it happened to Kmart, it happens everywhere. Knowing your strengths and “niching down” to really connect with your target audience is key. Be different. When your competition zigs, you should zag, otherwise you’ll just be another Kmart.
Just as important at knowing yourself is knowing your customers. Have you built a customer profile? Do you know your customer demographics? Do your customer psychographics? Do you know what impacts their decision on whether or not to buy your products or buy your competitors’ products? Do you know their typical buying journey? How long is their sales cycle? What problems can you solve? How can you be of service? It’s likely that if you have more than one product, this is different for every distinct segment of your market.
Do your products fall under the category of low-effort consumer behavior or high-effort consumer behavior? Although brand awareness is critical to both types of behavior, knowing how the brain processes these decisions is key to help map out your buyer’s journey.
A customer’s needs are constantly changing and evolving. Their buying behaviors and preferences are always developing. Are you keeping up with their needs and wants? If not, you will quickly find yourself outside of the category of a brand people hate and into the category of a brand no one cares about.
Don’t Suck
Another thing to consider are the elements of your brand. Your name, logo, URL, packaging, taglines. Make sure these don’t suck. They don’t need to resonate with everyone but make sure they resonate with your target audience. Also, make sure your products and customer service don’t suck. If not, people will hate your brand for all of the wrong reasons. Make sure you attract haters for all of the right reasons.
Encourage Your Haters
The next time you think about your own brand, think about how many people hate your brand. It could help you discover and embrace the people that love your brand. To your brand, those are the people that matter. That audience is going to make your brand strong enough for people to hate.
