The Secret to Getting People Interested in Your Niche Brand
What is ordinary to you is amazing to others.
Welcome, Extraordinary Strategists.
Before we dive in, let’s pause to consider my insecurity in putting this point of view into the world and reflect on this quote from Tom Schwab:
“What is ordinary to you is amazing to others.”
It’s simple. It’s profound. It calls us to think about everything through somebody else’s eyes. It reminds me of Derek Sivers’ insight from the book “Hell Yeah or No,” and this article, Obvious to you. Amazing to others.
So I reframe my insecurity and think, “Maybe what’s obvious to me is amazing to someone else?” That’s where we’re jumping off from.
In today’s brand-driven world, differentiation rules. Let’s remember that Extraordinary Strategists learn from hindsight, act with insight, and guide with the foresight to design a different future.
How does a company cut through the noise and hyperbole to design the relationship between your company, its niche (the category where your solution solves a problem and empowers people to achieve an outcome or transformation), and your ideal consumer? Don’t design a better product. Design a different future.
What is ordinary about your brand should unleash the extraordinary in others.
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But first, a story:
“Let’s move the ‘About Us’ navigation to be the first in order, along with our mission and vision.”
I groan silently and ask the same question I’ve asked of business leaders dozens of times:
“Why do you want to make it about you?”
I understand the client’s intent. As a startup in the financial sector, they are eager to validate their relevance to the consumers they want to attract. Positioning your brand as more important than the customer’s goals and motivations is a strategic mistake.
“Love is at its best when it longs for the good of the beloved.” — Charles Taliaferro
Stick with Your Guiding Principles
The way to demonstrate relevance isn’t to talk about why you think your brand is different; it’s to be in a dialog with your community — the buying tribe or consumers, if you prefer — and how you can help them achieve a goal, meet a need, or solve a problem.
Extraordinary Strategists place the buying tribe’s needs and goals first.
People care about what matters to them and what improves their lives and grows their businesses.
People care about their family, their health, the food they eat, and the house in which they live. These are niche subjects with specific tribes, identities, goals, and motivations.
Companies that focus on their buying tribe — their tribe’s identity, what they care about, their goals, and motivations — successfully attract the right people who want to do business with them.
You won’t attract the right consumers by talking about your business. You attract people and build community by being attractive, talking about what matters to them, and appealing to their desired transformation. Let’s call these people your ideal consumers.
How Home Depot Wins Attracts the Ideal Customer
Home Depot understands four things about its ideal consumer:
Who they are: Homeowners and construction small business owners.
What they care about: To repair, improve, and enhance homes.
Their goals: Help with tools and supplies for DIY improvement and repair projects.
Their desired transformation: A sense of accomplishment because they did it themselves.
Understanding what motivates people is the secret to successfully attracting your ideal consumers. As a brand missionary or evangelist, you must constantly ask what motivates people. Dig deep into how they will transform by buying your product or working with your company.
Making fast emotional connections with people will help your brand win trust and resonate with people’s hearts and minds. Listen to Brian Sooy’s conversation with author Will Leach.
When it comes to niche marketing, many people make the mistake of telling consumers what they do instead of talking about the problem the customer wants to solve. This self-centered approach to branding and marketing doesn’t consider the customer’s needs, wants, or desires.
When you understand an ideal consumer’s goals, what motivates them, and the triggers that compel them to buy, you can better connect with them, and they will be more interested in the product or service you offer.
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How Do You Know What Your Ideal Consumers Want?
From my experience, many companies are satisfied with consumer personas that give the impression that the business analytics team collected meaningful information.
Many companies ignore the high-relevance insights that can only be discovered through interviews and research and settle for low-relevance information, such as personal income, education, gender, and experience level.
The designers or agencies with which these companies work look for a template and fill in the gaps with low-relevance demographic information instead high-relevance data, such as the ideal consumers’
Self-identity,
Low-level, high-level, and aspirational goals,
Specific needs and challenges,
Buying habits and emotional buying state,
Motivations (There are nine primary human motivations),
Decision triggers, and more.
In short, the business analytics team projects its idea of an ideal consumer onto their perception of their actual consumer because the brand hasn’t built enough meaningful relationships with its most loyal customers.
Your Brand is Beautiful, but Love is Blind
During a design briefing, the Design Director of a global healthcare company that focused on families and children told our team, “We don’t have a brand; we have a line of well-known products. As a brand, we are irrelevant to consumers.”
From there, the briefing turned to a discussion of the tangible aspects of the product line. From their design-centric perspective, the brand had everything to do with the product: color, packaging, scent, and sustainability. Seeking clarity of the ideal consumer’s wants was secondary to the company’s sustainability goals and social activism agenda.
When we pointed out that the buying tribe is more concerned with the intangibles, such as the consumer’s desire for natural ingredients and assurance that the product isn’t harmful, it was as if we were speaking a foreign language.
The design team’s passion for their brand was evident, but it clouded their judgment. They were too concerned with ensuring executive-level decisions for ESG goals were baked into the product line in the hope it would grow revenue than they were with understanding what their ideal consumers wanted their product to do for them.
As business owners, we are all inclined to think our brands are beautiful and that our strategy is sound. We love our brand because we believe our company, products, and services are different and unique.
We hold up a Magic Mirror to our company and ask, “Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest brand of all?”
Ever eager to please, the Magic Mirror responds, “You are.”
Until that day when a competitor appears, and what you see in the mirror is a tired, aged reflection of what your brand used to be.
When a brand becomes obsessed with its beauty, it risks becoming irrelevant, just like Narcissus, who fell in love with his reflection and wasted away. A brand that fixates on its reflection can lose sight of what matters most.
The marketplace decides if your brand matters and rewards relevance with revenue. What matters most for a brand is not how it looks to itself but how consumers perceive it. We can influence that significance, but ultimately, consumers believe we are different enough to deserve their attention. If a brand is no longer seen as beautiful or desirable by consumers, it will quickly fade into irrelevance.
To avoid this fate, brands need to focus on where consumers are active in the marketplace, not their brand. They must constantly be aware of how their company is perceived and adjust their category strategy accordingly. Only then can a brand hope to maintain its place in the hearts and minds of consumers.
How Do You Overcome Consumer Skepticism?
Do we have to state what everybody knows? We used to spend more time shopping in retail stores to see, feel, touch, smell, and interact with the limited options for products we wanted to buy. The internet changed our experience and expectations and expanded our options.
Even business buyers have more options. Companies don’t have to settle for a local solution; they can research and work with the company that best fits their needs and solves their problem. That’s why an Australian skydiving center and a Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer can work with an Ohio- based agency like Aespire Branding.
Consumers ask three questions every time they interact with your company:
What problem am I trying to solve?
What can your company do for me?
Why should I trust your company?
How can you position your niche company and expertise as trustworthy and relevant?
Claiming your position as the only relevant option in a category begins with designing the relationship between your ideal consumers, a niche (within a category), and your company:
Your perfect consumer has a specific problem.
Your company creates a product, service, or experience to solve the problem.
You focus your marketing on the category to attract your ideal consumers.
People seek solutions to functional problems and want to experience transformational goals. To trust that your brand exists to help consumers, your messaging needs to express empathy. For people to be confident that your brand can help them, it must demonstrate authority. Any company expressing genuine empathy and consistently showing authority becomes a brand with credibility.
Credibility leads to brand relevance. Relevance is why people put their belief in specific brands and not others. At the same time, every company battles the specter of indifference, the mortal enemy of relevance.
You can’t take shortcuts with empathy. Empathy is more than words; it’s in how you show people that you understand their pain, goals, and motivations.
Empathy is one of the essential qualities a person — or a brand — can possess. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings and perspectives of another person. Without empathy, we cannot build relationships or connect with others deeply.
Without authority, your buying tribe may not be assured that your company can help them. People want help from experts who have successfully solved the problem that causes them pain.
You demonstrate authority by letting outside sources do the talking for you. Which of these statements is most compelling?
“I’m the best at at solving the problem you have.”
“I hear you’re the best at solving the problem I have.”
“My colleague told me you’re the best at solving the problem I have.”
Don’t sing your praises. Word-of-mouth references and testimonials are the most effective form of authority.
There are always two additional questions that your prospective customers ask themselves: “Does this brand understand me?” and “Can this brand solve my problem?”
Review your website and other marketing touchpoints with those two questions in mind, and ask yourself whether you’ve expressed empathy and demonstrated authority. These brand characteristics are essential to how your ideal customer remembers, understands, and chooses your product or service.
Remember, it’s your goal to position the customer as the ideal buyer for your brand. When your brand strategy focuses on the customer with empathy and authority, they are more likely to think of your brand because they associate it with the category.
Ordinary people look for brands that help them transform from ordinary to extraordinary. Perhaps we should focus less on designing brands that stand out and more on guiding people to become better versions of themselves because they choose our brand.
The secret to getting people interested in your niche brand isn’t to out-market your competition. It’s in understanding what other people find extraordinary in what you find ordinary.
What is ordinary about your brand should unleash the extraordinary in others.
We have some practical examples, insights, and ideas about unleashing the extraordinary in others. Become a paid subscriber to get the complete mini-book and access to the Extraordinary Strategist Principle “Create Followers, Not Brands.”